According to yesterday’s papers, the No10 Petitions website has been canned. I can understand that a lot of the people behind it saw it as a learning experience and it clarified a few things.

My problem with the whole project is that this is one area where politicians let themselves down. Civil Servants go on public management courses and would expect to do their political masters’ bidding on things like this more quickly than they would on areas where politicians can’t be expected to bring native expertise to bear. If they are asked to implement something that is plainly at odds with representative democracy in this way, it’s the politicians’ look-out.

I also understand that not every politician would be able to match the basic knowledge of someone with – say – a first degree in political science. But when a whole government can’t find two such geniuses to rub together (and I suspect that the last Labour government – which I supported – fits this description) you have to worry.

Now here’s the next question: Will local authorities have to continue to impersonate No10 in this folly? (I had a post up here that outlined the various options for local authorities a while ago)

In other news, I was in Belfast at the weekend organising an unconference on Political Innovation and one of the attendees was the policy officer from the Northern Ireland Local Government Association. She was inspired enough by the event to go and set up a new blog called ‘Local Is Beautiful’ - one to add to your RSS feed. Welcome Karen!

Liz Azyan picks up on some questions about e-petitions that were asked here by Paul a couple of months back. She doesn’t mention the fascinating word cloud that accompanies her article, called “E-petition verbs”.

The biggest words are, on a quick skim, “prevent, save, reimburse, make, oppose, charge and introduce”. With my local government head on, all of those words, except charge, are “spend” words. Save this thing the council want to close, introduce a new service, put more bobbies on the beat to prevent crime.

I don’t have a problem with people saying that they want the council to spend more money – people do that all the time. It’s just very likely that the appeals to spend more money will push for higher and higher spending at a time when there’s less money than ever for doing new things.

Easier petitioning means councils will need to get (even) better at saying no.

Sidebar: Interesting research project for someone: take the most recent 100 petitions on the Number 10 website, and work out the net cost of accepting them.

Peter Cruikshank has pulled together a really useful post here, complete with print-off-able pictures – a very useful resource for every local authority to use to find out about e-petitioning (and every local authority will have to know about petitioning shortly).

It’s been done as part of the Europetition project, but most of it is UK-applicable.

I won’t spoil the surprise. It’s over here.

Alan Turing

Last week, the a 10 Downing St petition resulted in Alan Turing receiving the apology and recognition that he has long deserved. And petitions are likely to become a much more prominent fixture of public life in the next year or so.

My sources in Westminster tell me that the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent at some point in the autumn and will come into force in May 2010 with guidance potentially in place as early as February 2010.

That’s not as far away as you think, and looking through the bill, the team here at LD (Anthony and I, at any rate) think that there are quite a few issues that councils need to deal with as a matter of some urgency.

In some cases, this will involve a tweak to the existing procedures that allow for the consideration of e-petitions. In others, it may almost be a start from scratch. Either way, I’ve been trying to look at the bill and turn it into a decision flow-chart, but there are still quite a few questions that will need to be answered before spring 2010.

I’m aware of projects being already live (so far) at Bristol, Birmingham, Kingston, Lambeth, Northants, Southwark, Wolverhampton, and I’m sure that I’ve missed a few more (do let me know in the comments!).

There are a number of commercial suppliers that have built technical tools that can be integrated into a council website in one way or another. These include….

• Limehouse
• MySociety
• Modern.gov
• Public-i

As far as I know (and I need to have a detailed look before I can confirm this) they all allow the council to put a tool on the website that would allow a local resident to attempt to initiate a petition. This attempt to initiate would, however, then be subject to a pre-moderation before it goes live on the council website (i.e. an officer would be notified that a petition had been set up and would have to verify that it met the council’s criteria before it was published on the council website).

This pre-moderation would have to be done, in each case, subject to an agreed formula, and an agreed procedure will decide whether they go live or receive a polite ‘we regret to inform you…’ note a short time afterwards.

So, for example, when your local council leader is petitioned, as Tony Blair was, to ’stand on his head and juggle ice-cream’, this is very likely to fall outside the scope of the act, and can therefore be politely ignored. But less obviously contentious cases will need more consideration.

Again, councils appear to have a certain amount of discretion as to what that formula is (though one that is too restrictive may backfire). In addition, that discretion will be tempered by the appropriate national body (I’m guessing that this means DCLG) which can determine what direct issues the local authority does / doesn’t deal with.

I have experience of deploying software that is intended to promote democracy – in my case, it was the obligation in 2005 that was placed upon every local authority to provide councillors with edit-able webpages. In many cases, this was not a welcome imposition (at least as far as some council officers were concerned) and a exceptionally minimal interpretation was placed upon it by councils with a very poor result.

I would be worried that councils would be able to look at the bill – as it stands – and simply understand from it that the public can email them and request that they set up a petition on the website – one that could just be delivered using a simple web-form. Unless the appropriate national body’s guidance is very carefully written, there is likely to be a problem with the usability, the prominence, the interoperability of the system that many local authorities may chose to adopt.

Remember, un-usable, hard-to-find and un-interoperable (is that a word?) systems are cheaper in the short-term. Choosing such a solution can be presented as saving the ratepayer money! (WordPress has a petitions plug-in! I installed this one in about five minutes!). It will also result in a lower take-up of petitions (Boo!/Yay! – delete as applicable). Certainly, data-standards will be needed to ensure that box-ticking isn’t done by local authorities in this respect.

However, let us – for now – assume that councils embrace this idea enthusiastically and establish a system that is well-promoted, usable and very efficient to deploy. Then we have another problem entirely.

Establishing a petitions process at each local authority is going to involve a great deal more than simply installing the system and then awaiting the results.

As I mentioned, the draft bill shovels off a lot of the key decisions to an ‘appropriate national authority’ which will make the key pragmatic decisions around what subjects exactly fall within the scope of the bill and which subject areas councils can largely wash their hands off. The bill is specific about broad issues – that the subject should be relevant to the work of the local authority, or to “the improvement in the economic, social or environmental well-being of the authority’s area to which any of its partner authorities could contribute.” (14.2.b.ii)

That last bit – italicised is likely be mean that most councils will have to change their existing democratic procedures on two fronts. Firstly, it is possible that the way it is interpreted could result in all sorts of environmental issues (for example, anti-nuclear petitions) to start flooding in. These are likely to be popular and beyond the council’s competence – it could result in national or even European issues being the subject of concerted local campaigns that councillors will find themselves embroiled in.

For me, the key issues are likely to be around the volume of petitions, and the consequences of there being more of them. How will councils handle a large number of petitions? If there are going to be a large number of them, are councils going to have to change their procedures to accommodate this?

Increasingly, councils have a lot of their business being dealt with by less formal sub-committees with fewer, brisker council meetings at which decisions are rubber-stamped.

How will these meetings cope with dozens of new petitions, all of which require a fixed amount of time to address them? While councils aren’t obliged to bring each petition to council meetings, councils may have concerns about not doing so.

If this will be the case from May onwards, perhaps your council needs to start revising its processes now? I would say that my personal view on this is that the volume won’t really reach the point where it will cause these kinds of problems, but it’s hard to know for certain.

I have a few other questions:

How are the authenticity of the signatures checked? The CLG say that the obligation should be the same as with paper petitions. But as the petitions are electronic, and therefore, processable, is there a heightened expectation that councils should run some kind of query? Or will a greater volume of petitions that have the same ‘authentication’ problems as paper-petitions create more work for local authorities?

My personal view on this is that it won’t be an issue, but I’ve been in enough presentations of similar ideas to local authorities to know that it is a fear that will probably expressed a great deal between now and May (and will be totally forgotten afterwards).

And what about this question of calling an officer to account? Again, I’m not exactly clear, currently, how far a member of the public can put a petition together in order to draw a full-time council official across the coals (and it will vary from council to council), but a statutory duty to do it, to make it easier, and to promote that option to the public will surely result in speculation that more members of staff will be subjected to a show-trial of some sort.

Again, I raise these questions because I’m sure they will be raised elsewhere. I’d suggest that the best attitude to this all is to recognise that this will provide a great opportunity to look at how civic conversations can be improved. Certainly, more active petitioners will challenge local authorities to find ways of ensuring that those hard-to-reach people who don’t sign petitions / participate in consultations etc, don’t get drowned out by the hard-to-avoids.

Any comments on all of the above gratefully received!

Yes – I’m new here – I think Paul asked me as we have been having a falling out about Petitions over on my blog and he likes an argument.

You can find out more about me there obviously but probably the most relevant fact is that I am currently researching for a PHD around the question of whether or not we can use informal social participation online to increase formal participation in the democratic process – specifically in local democracy as I think this is where the heart of the community should be.

To this end I have for some time now been struggling with the idea of Twitter. At first I was worried that this was a sign of aging and I had reached my personal limit in terms of new innovations but thankfully I am still filled with excitement about the idea of the new Palm Pre and the possibility of a Google OS netbook – I have also managed to form my Twitter objections into a coherent argument rather than a short grumble so all is not lost. Twitter had troubled me on two main fronts:

• Its yet more noise. I (like many people) spend a lot of energy trying to make my life quieter and simpler and the idea that everyone I know could be giving me constant updates on what they were up to fills me with horror – it just feels like noise. Now, obviously all the people I know would only tweet with great profundity but even so – that’s a lot of information I don’t think I actually need
• I am not sure that anything important can be said in only 140 characters.

That being said there have been some striking examples of Twitter being used – in particular around real time news and this move to real time web is perhaps the crux of what is interesting about Twitter. It speaks to the idea of pervasive technology and a confirmation of the underlying assumption of constant connectivity.  Have a read of this as its another take on this thought.

But as ever I wonder what the use is for Local Government – how can we use it – and I think Twitter should be thought about in terms of listening and not in terms of talking and this makes things make much more sense as I am not sure anyone really wants to here tweets from a council as its really a tool for individual voices.

The most accessible description of Twitter I had was in relation to the way in which flocks of birds communicate – one cheep at a time!! If we can develop ways to listen to these cheeps and tweets, and to select the right ones to listen to then we can can listen and learn to the public. Search companies are already trying this with big global topics like swine flu but if Twitter, or other real time web tools, continue to grow then it should start to be true on a local level as well.

Interesting…..so now onwards to research semantic search and analysis tools!!!

MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned.

Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent.

“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.

Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”

It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:

One possible fly in this ointment is that it’s quite hard to make the case for public spending on usability testing. If I were a minister, I like to thing that I’d sign it off, but I’d expect to be given a hard time for doing it. MySociety’s rejoinder to this would probably be to (correctly) point out that they’ve managed to get volunteer hackers to build gov-related sites that knock the spots of gov-financed ones at a fraction of the cost, and follow it up with the view that the best gov-info sites aren’t built on a .gov domain.

The rest of Tom’s peice outlines how every stage in the deliberation process can be made more transparent.

I’ve always had some concerns about MySociety’s approach to this – and this line in Tom’s article…

One can imagine in future that the moment such a vote is tabled, all around the country activists would be immediately informed and able to mobilise even if they don’t know each other…

… foresees a scenario that may chill many advocates of representative democracy to the bone. Imagine the way that the Daily Mail was able to deep-six the very idea of road-pricing, and then think about it happening every day… it has capital P-political implications, promoting a right-wing populism over a more reflective and rational deliberative process.

However, I find myself in the rare situation of suggesting that there is a form of transparency and openness that Tom hasn’t suggested first, and one that could transform parliament. Regular readers here can change channel now……

The Virtual Researcher

One of the features of political centralisation is the accumulation of resources to a handful of nodes. For thirty years now, the British PM has been able to call upon a personal Think Tank stocked with paid political posts and a cluster of elite civil servants.

With an independent civil service, a cabinet that is picked by the PM (rather than the other way around) and a team of Special Advisers who owe at least half of their loyalty to the PM rather than the minister who hired them, the top of the political ladder is very well resourced.

Think Tanks are paid to service the needs of this office, journalists write with at least one eye on the reaction from that one office … if you could put a price on the amount of money that is spent upon supporting the thought processes of that one office, I’d guess that it runs into seven figures – and possibly eight.

Contrast this with the description of the average MP that Jenni Russell provided the other day – social workers for constituents – and you have a parliament that is almost entirely supine. If Russell’s article has one failing, it doesn’t recognise the near-futility of MPs behaving in any other way than the way they do.

When they’re not carefully indexing their paperclip receipts and providing a paralegal service for their constituents, MPs need to be able to, in Burke’s words, be in “the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents.”

If constituents were prepared to collaborate with each other to provide detailed briefings to MPs, giving them the answers they need to rebuff the party whips, that would be a distinct improvement upon representative democracy.

I mentioned this idea to a few friends with a social-media orientation and their minds immediately raced off on the various clever possibilities that this idea suggested. Life’s too short to mention the tangled web of bootstrapped XML and existing applications that was proposed, but the bottom line is this:

So far, social media has been added to the armoury of sticks that are used to beat local elected representatives. I can’t think of a single social media / democracy project that hasn’t objectively bulwarked political centralisation.

But if MPs and councillors could be the beneficiary, this table could be turned dramatically.

It’s about time they were armed against their political leadership elites, pressure groups, newspaper proprietors and civil servants.

That could go further than making our slightly broken system chugg along in a more transparent way – it could actually fix it.

Subjecting politicians to excessive regulation discourages interactivity.

I’d been planning to do this blog for years, but the thing that finally nudged me to get on with it was this story (my first post) about how an MP’s online allowance was docked by the Parliamentary authorities because he used it in the way that you would expect politicians to use such an allowance.

Meanwhile, the incorporation of social media into bureaucratic priorities gathers apace. A while ago, the Local Government Engagement Online blog has helpfully pulled together a set of guidelines from around the world, ones that can be added to the UK Civil Service Partipation Online guidelines.

Now, I’ve not read these all exhaustively, but I have put a fair bit of time in to scan them.

Given the size of the task, I may have not noticed something that I would suggest should be right at the top of each document – certainly each one that has been drafted by any governmental body.

Here is my suggestion.

• We are a representative democracy. New interactive tools provide our elected representatives with the tools they need to improve the quality of their work as representatives.
• In the past, inflexibilities in communications and knowledge management have meant that these elected representatives have been forced to delegate much of the research and communication that should precede policy-formation to civil servants, political parties and other interest-groups.
• New interactive tools now make it possible for elected representatives to take on more of this work themselves – and this is clearly an opportunity to improve the quality of representative democracy
• It is, therefore, a key priority that elected representatives should receive all possible co-operation, encouragement and – where appropriate – training from every other section of civil society to support their adoption of new interactive tools.
• All regulations and guidelines on the use of social media should acknowledge the primacy of elected representatives, and should do nothing to restrict any expressions by members of our sovereign Parliament or elected local assemblies and do nothing to discourage them from using these tools to improve their capacity to represent.
• Elected representatives have rivals. These rivals – pressure groups, commercial lobbies, bureaucratic interests, media owners and practitioners – are subject to fewer guidelines and demands for transparency than elected representatives. We will strive to change this to ensure that elected representatives (who represent everyone) are not hamstrung by unrepresentative minorities.

In a similar exercise, Tom Steinberg has done a much more wide-ranging set of recommendations. I agree with it all apart from a few reservations about the most interesting bit (to me) – item 4 (which I’ve added to the comments there).

All suggestions and amendments gratefully received!

Firstly, this is a lovely idea about how design can be used to improve the quality of communication at a local level. Here’s the original site, and here’s an image to whet your whistle:

And secondly, totally unrelated, here’s a list of the petitions that have gone before the EU petittions committee.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, visitors to this blog will routinely get ‘ignore petitions / discrourage petitions’ posts on a fairly regular basis.

Well, we knew it was coming – here:

“New proposals to make it easier to get local leaders to hold a referendum on their leadership structure, putting communities firmly in control of their town and council, has been published for consultation by Communities Secretary Hazel Blears.”

It is particularly interesting that these votes will be on the chosen structure of local government. It appears to be an extension of the idea that ‘constitutional change’ is a suitable subject for referendums.

(Oh, one other thing: I know I should know this, but can someone give me a final ruling? I’ve never been certain – is the plural of ‘referendum’ really ‘referenda’?)