There is nothing that annoys politicians more than people who just don’t get around to voting. For months, the parties are knocking doors and getting pledges. In a tight fight, every vote will be counted on, and a well-resourced team will manage to knock on doors a half-dozen times until the name is ticked off the Reading Pads [remember them?].

Click for picture credit

By 10pm on election day, politicians and their agents are often fuming at the bastards who had promised to turn out but arrived home a few minutes before the polls closed saying they can’t be bovvered to go out again. If MPs could enact one snap piece of legislation the day after a general election, it would undoubtedly be compulsory voting.

Listening to James Crabtree on last Monday’s Start the Week (Radio 4 – 35 mins in) I’m reminded of the speculation about how the election is really decided by a tiny number of votes in a tiny number of seats that are almost exclusively targeted by the parties. As James puts it …

“they ignore almost everyone in the country and spend a gigantic amount of time trying to find that small number of people who might change their minds…”

Now this can only surely be a bad thing? A phenomenon that cries out for a change in our electoral system? I’m inclined to agree, but I’ve got one major doubt:

Leaving aside the impact that this narrowcasting has on our national conversation, should we be worried by the fact that the most undecided, irresolute, shilly-shallying ideologically footloose, unprincipled, impulsive flibbertigibbets get to decide who our government is?

Surely those who spend hours discussing, arguing, campaigning, knocking on doors, and – dammit – BLOGGING – should be the ones who get a more weighted vote? We’re the ones who care! We’re the ones that might have an idea which way up the country should be?

Why are the Electoral Commission even bothering about the nudniks who can’t navigate their way onto the electoral roll in the first place? Why are they forever wondering aloud about how they can extend voting to Saturdays, get us to Tweet or txt our choice of govt in, or vote on … like … uh.. Facebook, or something? Or somehow get Ms Dynamitee-he to organise a rave in the polling booth to attract yoof?

Surely the election shouldn’t be decided by people who only turn out if there isn’t anything worth watching on the telly? Or the ones who change their mind as their pencil hovers over the ballot paper? And don’t get me started on whether people who would be better off being removed from the gene pool entirely should have a vote equal to that of a brain surgeon.

We’re not talking about sullen stay-aways here, by the way. These aren’t principled abstainers – angry ‘none-of-the-above’ voters. These are the ones who forgot it was on Fursday. The ones who don’t read the papers that have obsessed about elections for the last … eternity. The ones who’ve spent tuning out any discussion of their future during the all encompassing campaign or looking at politicians hair instead of weighing their arguments.

In every other area of our lives, we use trade-offs. We stay out of the shops that don’t sell things we’re interested in, hoarding our cash to spend in the places we care about. Shouldn’t people be offered the option to trade their vote in elections for something they care about – a heavily weighted vote in The X Factor or a lowering of their car-taxes or something like that? Why not incentivise people not to vote with small-ish bribes? Shouldn’t voting be something you positively want to do?

I’ve posted here before about how the lust for certainty could be a sin. How important diversity is in the context of the wisdom of crowds argument. I’ve argued about how light preferences and the need to make trade-offs is the magic ingredient that makes representative government work and how active citizens can be a menace to a good democracy. I’d urge you to read this funny post about how obnoxious people with the halo effect are.

“Cyclists, not content with having lanes painted everywhere to accommodate their perversion, routinely feel free to jump lights or board the pavement whenever tedious interventions like the Highway Code interfere with their path of righteousness. My own view is that the lycra-wearing freaks should either pay road tax or face being hosed off the streets.”

So, for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think that the indecisive should be discouraged from voting – quite the opposite. I’d almost argue that their votes deserve some sort of weighting for them to count more heavily than people who read broadsheets and shout at the telly.

However, it does cut across a general metropolitan liberal prejudice that I hold: Like Brendan O’Neill, I think that politics should be a clash of ideas – a forum where big ishoos are thrashed out and decisions are not based on an appeal to the touchy-feely dumbed-down focus-grouped puddle of public sentiment. It is the ‘don’t knows’, after all, that this kind of politics is designed to appeal.

The belief that they should be banned from the ballots is implicit in a lot of the arguments that I hear favouring alternative versions of democracy where people choose policies rather than the quality of representation. I’d love to hear some lively loudmouth make the argument with a bit of passion so that it could be challenged.

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE).

I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now – BCSE grew partly out of an idea called School Works – a project intended to promote a more participative approach to the design of schools.

The basic premise is a simple one: The more progressive architects have worked out that it is a sensible thing to do to involve residents in the design of their own neighbourhoods. Long before anyone had ever heard of Clay Shirky, there was ample evidence that the people outside an organisation have more knowledge on a particular subject than the people inside the organisation that – supposedly – have specialist skills.

The benefits of co-designing an environment with the people who are going to live in it are obvious. As the blurb on this booklet on consensus design puts it, …“it can have an influence on social stability, crime-reduction, personal health and building longevity, all of which in turn have monetary and environmental cost implications.” Ty surmised that similar benefits could come from a more participative approach to the design of schools.

Now The Centre for School Design is not only – or even mainly – about consensus design. It is about raising the profile – or as counter-terrorism experts put it, the ‘chatter level‘ around the question of education, design and the built environment.

Ty and Ian from BCSE think that this is an important issue – that it has the potential to game-change the education debate. As long as the whole debate remains in narrow silos – dominated by higher-up civil servants, the think tanks that they commission and the commercial players that have the resources to gatecrash that conversation – then the quality of policymaking is likely to be lower. The dangers of regulatory capture and of budget maximisation are higher.

Think tanks, after all, do almost nothing to market the work that they are commissioned to do. Six or seven-figure research contracts that are handed out result in publications that are not disseminated widely or publicised effectively. They are rarely written to be read by parents, teachers, school governors or local councillors. They are written exclusively for the tiny clique of budget-holders that see the final result before handing a sanitised version to the ministers in question. It results in bad and expensive policymaking.

Jenni Russell in the Guardian summarised this beautifully here:

Clarke appeared to be a rare example of an education secretary who was prepared to entertain the possibility that the government wasn’t always right. He published a document encouraging primaries to be more creative and flexible in their teaching, but he moved on before he could lend political muscle to that instruction.

Since then, every education secretary and minister has been distinguished by an almost wilful determination to ignore the mass of research that does not suit their agenda. Politically, that is the easiest choice. They are encouraged in this by their senior civil servants, whose careers have been built around delivering a particular agenda, and who have nothing to gain by seeing it change course. What is truly alarming is that ministers rarely even glimpse the reports they dismiss. Last year I mentioned a particularly critical Ofsted report to one minister. “Oh, my people tell me there’s nothing new in that,” he said, breezily. In fact, it had a great deal that was new, and important, and the individuals who put thousands of man-hours into preparing it were probably writing it for an audience of three – of which the minister who never read it was the most important one.

Increasing the chatter around school design is what The Centre for School Design is all about. The site will make all of their pictures (and they have a vast bank of these) available to journalist under a creative commons licence (eventually – loading up and tagging the pics properly is not a trivial job). Any journo that wants a good quality pic to illustrate a story can use them freely.

Similarly, the C4SD will be paying out the huge bank of case-studies and experience that BCSE have picked up on a daily basis and making it all available under a suitable creative commons licence. The aim is to build up an open, inclusive and growing community that is interested in discussing and explaining the issues around school design to each other. If you want to re-use C4SD content to stoke up the debate, copyright worries won’t get in your way.

In short, I’ve been helping them develop a strategy that pushes their knowledge in an open-handed way to the public. Ty isn’t the classic geek by any means. He’s a highly interactive person as his track-record in promoting participation proves. But, up until now, he’s not used interactive technologies much.

This is the potential that’s going to emerge in the next few years. All of the non-techie-but-very-interactive people are finding these tools are easier and more rewarding to use. Organisations like the C4SD will raise the chatter level and make it harder for narrow cliques to capture and close down public policy discussions in future.

Just a quick response to Tim Davies’ verygood post about ‘The Myth of Easy Engagement’.

There is one argument that supports his general position that, I think, he misses. I’m sure that sooner or later, some will come up with a frivolous law (like ‘Godwin’s Law‘ or ‘Muphry’s Law‘) but if they don’t, let me dibs it:

Evans’ Law

The value of anyone’s opinion is in inverse proportion to their willingness, ability and opportunity to express it effectively.

I think that I’ve outlined this argument here, here, here and here already so I won’t bore you with it again. Chris Dillow has covered it nicely here as well.

It’s very hard to disagree with anything in this post:- the whole thing deserves a visit though:

“For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on…”

And this cartoon underlines Kevin Harris’s point about how online interactivity is no substitute for interactivity.

An Elephant yesterday. Best eaten a bit at a time. (Image: Wikimedia Commons - click for credit)

Shorter version: Often, the minor technical obstacles mask a wider small-p political obstructionism to the promotion of a more interactive form of government.

Having written this post about the small obstacles to open e-gov a few weeks ago, Tim Davies got such a comprehensive response in his comments thread that he’s rolled them out into a wiki.

The idea that there are ’50 small hurdles’ is a very powerful one – it enables those who want to move small mountains to understand that it can be done in the same way that an Elephant can be eaten: A bit at a time.

I think that Tim has missed an important one out, but I’m reluctant to break the symmetry and tidiness of the ’50′ number. It’s an important one though, and probably a bit less straightforward than the obstacles that Tim has identified, so the omission is understandable:

Promoting interactivity between local government and citizens is a thorny one. It presents a huge amount of potential for disruption. Nominally, under our political settlement, elected councillors are the ones that formally do policy.

Some local authorities take the view that their officers should be doing some research, second-guessing what their political leadership are thinking, and presenting well-thought-out options that the executive can enact. This is an obstacle because elected councillors don’t have the capacity to conduct a role that is legitimately theirs. Permanent officials do have that capacity, but strictly speaking, it’s not their job.

Then there is the additional obstacle – the highly centralised relationship between central and local government. In reality Councillors have few powers, and many of them are illusory. Often, they have the power to enact one of a couple of highly confined options that have been presented to them by central government.

And where they do have powers, these are often restricted by a highly bureaucratic approach to the the various pieces of guidance or codes that have been handed down from central government. A classic of the kind is a conversation that I picked up over the weekend in which council officers were seriously asking if it would be a breach of the publicity code if councils were to publicise councillors’ Twitter / Facebook accounts on council literature.

Anyone who is working to promote an interactive local conversation ignores this obstacle at their peril. In seven years working on a project that was designed to encourage councillors to start taking up simple interactive tools, I visited well over 150 local authorities. With few exceptions, the hour-long meetings generally followed this pattern:

• Presentation of the idea (10 mins)
• General agreement that it would be worth doing in principle (5 mins)
• Discussion of a question raised about how such a project could be compatible with the publicity code (40 mins)
• Conclusion that no decision to proceed could be taken at the moment, and that it needed to be looked into further (“we’ll get back to you”). (5 mins)

The frustrating thing about this is that – in those seven years, working with over 50 local authorities (half of whom had the project set up for them by regional government), the publicity code has never presented a half-serious problem. One grandstanding BNP councillor tested the code to the limit, and I suspect he did it so that he could brag that he’s been ‘gagged’ by the PC brigade (and it backfired on him completely).

But apart from that, it’s a non-issue. 

In 2005, I raised this problem with the ODPM and they commissioned research and published comprehensive guidance on the matter. The research resulted in a long document that, in a very crabwise way, stated the obvious. That encouraging councillors to use this technology was A Good Thing – this guidance can be viewed on all of it’s longevity and glory. They then followed this up with detailed legal advice.

It took me years of lobbying to get local government officials to acknowledge that this was a problem and get HMG to ccommission the research. It would be the understatement of the year to say that many senior local government officials are not that keen to encourage councillors to engage with the public on policy issues.

And then, once I’d succeed there and designed a system that could be implemented without breaching any of the various codes, the ICELE research concluded that it could be done – in exactly the way that we designed it (our problem solving involved a few short hours of intellectual manual labour and one meeting with a local government lawyer).

And then, at the end of this, most councils are still not doing anything to encourage the use of interactive tools among their councillorsI can promise you that if I visited most councils in the UK now, the meeting would still follow the pattern outlined above. And now officers are wondering whether they can point to councillors’ twitter pages on council literature.

This post has gone on for long enough, so I’ll save the second half of it until later. As a preview, though….

• Councillors do not work full time for councils
• Full time staff get training on basic ICT skills
• If councils want councillors to be active users of ICT tools they need to make them more usable.

Tim’s list of technical lock-downs tells only half of the story here. For people who don’t use email in their day-job (and many are retired from jobs that never involved using a PC), asking them to master Outlook, download attachments, change them, forward them, etc, is an obstacle too far.

Councillors are the most important people in the Town Hall from a democratic point of view. They warrant a special usability consideration. All they usually get is the injunction to take-it-or-leave it.

Well, the Power of Information Taskforce appears to have reached it’s conclusions. The job has been advertised. Dominic Campbell has a few very perceptive bits of advice for whoever the successful candidate may be.

This phrase leaps out of the job ad:

” …the job requires someone who would be acknowledged by their peer group to be a leader in this field. The successful candidate will have a CV that creates instant credibility and confidence with Ministers, senior officials and digital communicators in Whitehall.”

Does this suggest to you that they already know who they want to get this job?

I share a good deal of Dominic’s scepticism about the prospects for success here. I don’t get the impression that there is a working consensus of what ‘digital engagement’ should really mean.

There appears to be very little examination of why our political and constitutional settlement is the (slightly unsatisfactory) shape that it is. It certainly is reflected in the e-activism landscape, but I’m not convinced that e-democracy has caught up either.

As far as I can see, the insertion of the word ‘digital’ into the phrase ‘inclusive policy making’ neutralises the whole sentence. As Anthony said in a post here earlier today…

“Cohesive communities … need offline interaction. That can be supported by online tools, but they should not be an aim in themselves.”

But, more to the point, there’s the question of the voice of officialdom. The very term digital engagement sounds like a bureaucratic attempt to step into a space it doesn’t understand, and do it in a regulated way. You can almost picture the namebadge.

Anyone who has seen the film Good Morning Vietnam will recall that the slightly edgy DJ played by Robin Williams starts to do and say things that officialdom isn’t happy with. It is what passed for engagement in 1960s Vietnam, I guess.

Lt Hauk steps in.  The results can be heard here (mp3).

This is an important policy issue that I think we often forget when discussing how people can be engaged online in helping to form policy.

More on this in the not-too-distant I hope, but I’d be really interested to see how this plays out in the Digital Britain discussions.