Wonderful pop-up social enterprise thinktank Popse (possibly the first pop-up thinktank ever, but certainly not the last) popped up in London’s Exmouth Market from 9-13 May.

Among other hot topics was a proposal from the Waterways Project that a community ‘right to manage’ (or a ‘presumption in favour of community management’) should join the existing proposals in the Localism Bill.I’m pasting below some ruminations which I initially posted to the Popse website. More importantly, for reflections from the Popse team themselves, head over to this post.

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The social enterprise space is where you currently find some of the most interesting conversations about democracy; its quality; our aspirations for it here in the UK.

Tuesday evening’s drop-in session provided an opportunity for one such conversation when we mulled over proposals for a ‘community right to manage’ and the prospects for mutuals.

Each of the three community rights-based proposals that are currently out there in the Localism Bill brings real potential to stimulate more vibrant spaces for democratic, participatory engagement.

They all raise concerns, though; because they promise, in essence to leave it to ‘the market of community’ (aka the Big Society) to handle some of the most significant risks.

To put it bluntly, the reality of ‘community’ across the UK doesn’t come with a ready-made cookie-cutter commitment to sustainable development, nor consistently high levels of belief in the value of participation or free association among equals. That commitment is something that has to be discussed, nurtured, debated, traded, and advanced.

The risk is that stripping away much of the current policy framework for and local level technical expertise on sustainable development leaves little institutional infrastructure for managing trade-offs or competition between adjoining communities; or even within groups in the same community. Local level traffic calming and parking campaigns, for example, are often a case in point.

All these issues aside, (and they’re points for discussion, not show-stopper objections) The Waterways Project’s proposal for a ‘community right to manage’ deserves our serious attention.

For one thing, community groups wouldn’t need to raise sufficient funds to exercise a ‘right to buy’ if they were only looking to exercise a ‘right to manage’. For another, they might be able to benefit from the skills and knowledge transfer potential of asset owners with oversight of lots of community managed assets – so long as those owners themselves were operating within a framework that allowed them to benefit from cooperation with ‘managing’ groups.

There are lots more things that need thinking through, of course, in the ‘right to manage’ proposal. In common with the ‘right to bid’, there may be restrictions in any requirement for a community group to have been accepted for registration as a Charity (the list of charitable purposes can be quite restrictive, for example; and I suspect the last thing the Charity Commission currently wants to have to deal with is tens of thousands of new micro-charity registrations resulting directly from the Localism Bill).

There are some fairly dull issues that would need to be tackled to do with risk and liability (think Japanese knot-weed and other invasive alien species for example; let alone breaches in river or canal banks). And with many of our waterways under-utilised, the idea of ‘canal-side’ or ‘bank-side’ community doesn’t necessarily translate into geographical spaces (6 or even 20-mile long strips) that make sense for the assets likely to be available.

A community right to manage in relation to our waterside assets (and waterways) would likely call for at least a wee bit of community engineering. But if environmental assets such as canals, for example, were more intensively used for transport or recreation, we might find that their associated senses of ‘community’ also stretched out.

The trick would be to find a way to ensure that the whole exercise of community management was fun; more about the participation than the risk management; and more about shared space and cooperation than competition for scarce resources and assets.

Links: http://www.popse.org.uk
http://www.waterways-civa.org.uk
http://www.fdsd.org

My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails.

A good democracy has to value everyone's time properly (click for pic credit)

This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a dedicated idea-site here – is so important.

We are, after all, being gently forced to comply with other people’s procedures where it is in their interest to invest in this compulsion (or ‘nudging’ as it is gently put).

This is the whole trajectory of the World Wide Web – from the first release of HTML scripts and early browsers in the early 1990s, through the progressive development of website coding and site-building tools, the burgeoning science of Accessibility, Usability and the ‘Semantic Web’ through to the aggressive mainstreaming that it has undergone in recent years as social media has dragged billions of people into compliance with the web. Social media is a conspiracy to dovetail all of our economic activity with the processes of the organisations that invest in online applications.

By ‘compliance’ I don’t just mean the ‘compliant code’ beloved of good web-designers. I mean our social compliance. We go to our local bank or town hall less often these days – we often go to their website, comply with their security procedures and fill out forms that are convenient for them – as suppliers – so that they can reduce ‘avoidable contact’ and thereby be more efficient.

In theory, this benefits shareholders and ratepayers respectively. But I’m waiting for a conspiracy theorist to start kicking up about this. One could take the view that this quote from the 19th Century Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could apply equally to our relationship with corporations today:

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured.

That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.”

OK. That’s all probably a bit OTT. But where it matters, the business logic behind usability is very strong. Make it easy and attractive for people to comply and they are more likely to do so.

But in a democracy, this is a double-edged sword. If an organisation or government ask us for our opinion, or evidence, without it being a low-cost exercise for us, they will get hugely unrepresentative responses. They will get responses from…

• the time rich
• commercial lobbies
• individuals with a vested interest in a particular issue (this can be financial, cultural, ideological or faith-based, for example)

Of course democracies can’t afford to pay the public all of the time (though the use of commercial polling firms and focus groups are a well-established way of consulting the public). Increasingly, we are going to be asked to participate in government.

It is for this reason that it is vital that quick light responses are sought. That people seeking feedback are prepared to invest in ways of going to where the public already are and making it quick and easy to comply with their requests.

Last week, I posted a list of attributes that a good democracy could have – attributes that I beleive would be accepted accross the political spectrum – and ones that most liberal democracies could do a lot better on. Of my original 17 points, eight would be directly served if Microparticipation were to become a mainstream idea (no17 in particular). They are…..

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

There is one other factor here: Democratic deliberation is better when people who are uncertain, disinterested and equivocal can dominate the conversation. I’ve argued it a number of times here before [example]. My own most oft-repeated quote at the moment is from Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – and my favourite Wikipedia link is to this page about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Shorter version: certainty is a bad thing!)

Here’s US blogger Peter Levine on the various qualities that we can apply to political discourse:

“I would tend to favor stronger, bolder policies. I think our actual policies are weak rather than moderate. I welcome a robust debate but I would recommend conducting that debate with basic rules of civility even if one’s opponents fail to be civil in return.”

It may have happened fifteen years later than it needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.

Click for pic credit

That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.

Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.

It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*.

The concern here is, primarily, a democratic one. In his ‘Undeclared War’, David Puttnam quoted Francois Mitterrand expressing this argument succinctly:

“What is at stake is the cultural identity of all our nations…. it is the freedom to create and choose our own images. A society which abandons the means of depicting itself would soon be an enslaved society.”

At the time, multi-channel TV was an unknown quantity, there were legitimate worries that new broadcasters (a euphemism, usually, for BSkyB) were claiming that regulation would be impossible in a multi-channel broadcasting environment – and that, consequently, it should no longer be attempted. Sky particularly had in mind the rules that say that 51% of broadcast content should originate within the EU**.

Words like ‘dumping’ were wheeled out all the time. And, of course, this debate provided the perfect cockpit in which to rehearse the opposition between Froggy cultural fragility and their apparent nemesis, our crass Anglo-Saxon values. Not only did it encompass cultural interventionism (something that the French have never pretended to undervalue) – it also touched on the deregulatory agenda.

It was certainly hard to make the case for regulation in British circles at the time. Yet, though this debate was often portrayed in this way (with the UK, as ever, held up as a Yankee Trojan horse), there was a minor problem with this:

The UK is, in fact, not only the most heavily regulated broadcasting market in the world, but it also shows signs of benefiting enormously from this state of affairs.

In terms of home-grown content on TV, we produce more for our own marketplace than anywhere else in the world apart from the US. At the same time, we don’t have the clumsy regulations that used to apply to French radio and that still apply to French Cinema (I say clumsy, but their cinema regulations seem to have the desired effect). In short, we have out-froggied the Frogs without even having to make ourselves look like them.

As long as viewers in the UK can have a wide choice of new original content (particularly drama) from a diverse range of sources, we can be reasonably confident that our own stories are getting an airing. But I’m not sure how far either the ‘public service broadcasting’ intervention that we have in the UK or the other EU models can be applied in the future.

** Footnote: I should declare an interest here – I was once Carole’s researcher – this is a subject that I know inside out – and it’s a huge relief to find the chattering classes finally waking up to it. Carole assembed a huge weight of evidence in support of this argument – evidence that was largely ignored at the time.

**This is a crude rendition of the rules, but I think you get the picture.

As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The tool of a Kenyan plot to take over the US Government

This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post from The Onion to make the point that the virtue of open-mindedness isn’t a universal one;

Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution’s very clear stance against birth control.

“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.”According to Mortensen—an otherwise mild-mannered husband, father, and small-business owner—the most serious threat to his fanciful version of the 222-year-old Constitution is the attempt by far-left “traitors” to strip it of its religious foundation.”

The wider article is based on the notion of information ‘backfiring.’ This is the phenomenon that you will be familiar with: if someone has a factoid within a strongly argued argument authoritatively contradicted, it often leads to the host opinion being held more – not less strongly.

One of the key factors here, according to this article, is the question of self-esteem:

“Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.”

Personally, I’m particularly wary of this article precisely because it seems to confirm almost every prejudice that I’ve aired on this blog and elsewhere in recent years. It gets worse as well:

“A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.”

The solution that we’re offered here is also an interesting one: Raise the ‘reputational cost’ of peddling disinformation. Here’s a thought experiment for you: What if we could actually make it very difficult for pundits or politicians to get away with exaggeration of misinformation? Would the result be a better type of politics? This is a question that we’ll be returning to shortly as part of the Political Innovation project.

But here’s a wider point: Does this article show that a more informed public =a poorer democracy? I’d say that it doesn’t, and that this is a category error. A more informed and fanatical public may result in poorer politics, but it’s perfectly possible to insulate democracy from politics to a degree. That fact that we aren’t doing so as much as we used to doesn’t alter the core argument here.

There are also many issues that haven’t slipped into the culture wars and on which The Daily Mail hasn’t got around to terrifying people yet. The design of hospitals, schools and housing schemes – the whole question of co-design is one obvious one. Even issues which – to the cognoscenti are politically charged ones – what is the best structure of ownership and control for public services – is one that a broadly selected citizens jury could be consulted on fruitfully.

The question of presentation and framing is the one that democrats need to focus upon.

*My certainty about that opening quote being attributed to Churchill will only increase the more you insist that it was actually John Maynard Keynes wot said it.

The Political Innovation project I’m currently working on (more soon!) is going to be very focussed upon the political aspects of interactivity – with the premise that more, freer, better exchanges of evidence and opinion are a public good – and that not enough is being done politically to facilitate these.

Via Norm, who offers a good summary – here’s Michael Sandel on ‘The Lost Art of Democratic Debate’, making the case against pussyfooting around difficult moral issues. Do watch it all if you can – it runs to 20 minutes, so maybe put the kettle on first?

The BBC – in it’s current incarnation – sees itself as an asset to liberal democracy in a variety of ways.

Are 4iP working to re-articulate what public service media is for?

I do to – and given our many failings as a democracy (our centralisation, our unelected second-chamber, our politically independent civil service, the huge unchecked power of pressure groups and media-owners, etc), the BBC acts as a hugely important counterbalance.

My own hasty list of ways that it currently does this would include the following:

• Providing a balanced alternative to the biases of commercial media in news reporting and current affairs (acknowledging right-wing suspicions of metropolitan liberal bias here…)
• Acting as a British expression of the Cultural Exception (updated to a more politically fashionable role as the guardians of cultural diversity) and providing other counterbalances to market failure within the media – creating a shelter from the monopolistic content-production ecology that is dominated by US producers, etc
• Giving us an alternative to the bloody awful tedium of ad-driven TV (both the distortions to the schedules and the actual ads themselves) and providing a hugely efficient provider of value-for-money at the same time in return for the minor loss-of-liberty that arises out of a near-tax imposition
• Providing a counterbalance to the increasing fragmentation of the media to provide a shared national platform that can promote a sense of citizenship

Personally, I’ve bought most of these arguments for most of my adult life. Increasingly, though, the first one is starting to look like an impoverished objective for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, there’s the question of how far pluralism is preferable to neutrality. I’d make this case in more detail, but Mick did so a while ago on Slugger O’Toole.

Secondly, there’s the question of how far the relationship between political structures and the media is a single adversarial one. Sure, there’s a role for the media in holding the political establishment to account. But there is also the task of the ‘candid friend’ – helping innovators know what will work, broadening the adversarial fire away from just the elected political establishment and focussing some of it on its unelected rivals.

The media is extremely good at bringing the low-hanging fruit to the attention of the political class. A quick perusal of the spaces in which the public are invited to sound off shows that it is very easy to get at the public minorities (trans: The Silent Majority) who know exactly what they think and are passionate about their beliefs. But the tougher – but more important – task is how you can tap into the sentiments of the larger body of people with mild preferences. Twitter’s business model appears to be based upon the creation of a space where a wide range of easy sentiment is exhibited – and then monetising that data in one way or another by selling it to search engines.

Is there a role for a public service media in creating quick light conversations on a wide range of issues and then mining them – using sentiment analysis or – much less cleverly – simply flushing out routine conversations expressly for the purpose of listening to them? Getting conversations going is something that Mick at Slugger or Hugh at Harringay Online are very good at (but few others are quite as adept…)

Is this something that a public service broadcaster could do? Is it something that a commercial media organisation could ever be trusted to do? My preference is with the public service broadcaster.

Taking this one step further (and I apologise now for linking to more of my own posts) is it perhaps the role of public service media to destroy the monopoly that public sector communications staff have in describing their own services?

Is it possible that the future role for public service media is to be a trusted intermediary – a detached and independent ears and mouth that helps the state? Is this what the final destination of 4iP projects such as MyPolice and HelpMeInvestigate (among others) could be?

Looking at the Personal Democracy Forum session on ‘New Tools for Listening‘, there’s a presentation from Localocracy and Opinion Space along with a quick trot through Google Moderator (which has now been integrated into YouTube to help deal with their burgeoning comments issues there).

Opinion Space: A topography of arguments: You're in there somewhere...

It’s an interesting approach that allows people to participate in local discussions if they can validate themselves against the local electoral roll (I’m pretty sure that this wouldn’t be possible under UK legislation but I’d be glad to be contradicted).

Step three of Conor White Sullivan’s presentation is an injunction to ‘Do Awesome Stuff’ which is, I think you’ll agree, pretty annoying.

It’s worth sitting through to get to Ken Goldberg though. Ken looks at ways to mine huge amounts of commentary without being hampered either by the binary nature (the like / unlike button) or the linearity of 4 squillion people responding to something that Mark Zuckerberg or Clay Shirky have to say.He showcases ‘Opinionspace‘ – a ‘collaborative filtering‘ project that allows users to identify people who share their general views. Once they’ve done that, they post comments and then rank each others’ contributions – saying whether you agree or not – and whether you find their comments more insightful or not.

It throws up the particularly interesting space where people don’t agree but do commend insight. It looks to promote interaction between different political positions, avoiding the problems of cyber-polarisation and it analysis the language used to create a topography of arguments as a way of informing politicians how public discussion is shaped on a particular subject.

Clay Shirky then asks the question that this blog would always ask – about how this participatory politics dovetails with the existing representative democracy settlements. But I’m spoiling it for you…..

Apologies for the very light posting here in recent weeks. When you blog about politics and elections a lot, you probably have the excuse that you are doing rather than blogging during elections, and this is true of some of our contributors. In my case, a tide of work that was only indirectly related to the election hit me about five weeks ago and I’ve been drowning in it ever since.

We have a plan to crank up the volume here, and you’ll hear more about it shortly. But filling our recent silence has been an unprecedented volume of quite excellent blogging on the subject of the election and the constitutional issues that arose from the inconclusive (by UK standards) election result. The 2010 Election Blog has been very good, and I hope the continue it – if they’re looking for a longer-term home for it, modesty forbids me from mentioning the perfect blog for them to do this on.

On the longer finger, Peter Levine has offered this collection of posts that I’m linking to in the right order with his subheadings.

• Creating informed communities (part one)
  • Strategy 1: A Civic Information Corps: Using the nation’s “service” infrastructure to generate knowledge
• Creating informed communities (part two)
  • Strategy 2: Universities as Community Information Hubs
• Creating informed communities (part three)
  • Strategy 3: Invest in Face-to-Face Public Deliberation
• Creating informed communities (part four)
  • Strategy 4: Generate Public “Relational” Knowledge
• Creating informed communities (part five)
  • Strategy 5: Organize People to Defend the Knowledge Commons

Stay tuned. We’ll be back to our usual posting-rate shortly.

This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online

People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.

So, starting in February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected.

I’ve pretty much always voted in the local elections, out of a sense of civic duty as much as anything else. I imagine that’s not unusual. By covering the local elections, I hope we’re filling in some gaps for people like me and perhaps encouraging those who’ve not bothered to vote in the past to get involved, if for just one day out of every 1,460.

There are three wards which fall partly or entirely within our neighbourhood. That’s 29 candidates. To start with we’re trying to build up online portfolios on each of them. So far we have basic information on most of them, including bios. We’re also digging around, and lifting the curtain, seeing what else we can find out, mainly through a Google-based search.

We’re adding short video interviews with as many candidates as we can as well as the leaders of the main party groupings. Quite a novelty to see video of your local candidates in your living room, if you think about it.

Finally, we’ve taken a leaf out of the Democracy Club‘s book and we’re uploading copies of all local election leaflets

We’re still hoping to organise a hustings, but a number of logistical problems mean that we’re cutting it fine. Our plan is to use a “real-world” venue and also use Cover-it-Live to take the event into people’s homes.

As well as giving local people a better sense of who’s who and what they think, we hope that this indelible record will go some way towards holding our elected officials to account in the years to come.

The initial reaction of the candidates was mixed as was their willingness to be involved. Some were enthusiastic; others were extremely cautious. They’re coming round. Trust seems to be building as they recognise that we’re trying to be scrupulously fair.

In my naivety, I assumed that the politicians would be our biggest challenge. As things are turning out it may well be that the biggest issues will be thrown up the heartfelt passions of some HoL contributors. Curating discussions fuelled by those passions whilst successfully riding out accusations of being in the politicians’ pockets is proving to be a wild ride at times.

However, as long as members continue to add posts like this, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing:

I think this kind of scrutiny is superb I wasn’t going to vote in the Euro elections but did so because of Harringay Online putting the link to working out how individuals views tally with which party. Perhaps I’m rather superficial but that little exercise fired me up not only did I vote but told friends and neighbours who aren’t a part of HOL and they all did the online quiz thing. This created great discussion and at least four other people who weren’t going to vote did so. So, the citizen power of HOL stretches beyond just its members!!

Many of us can’t be bothered with politics and HOL has made me think about voting and invite the neighbours in – the elderly, those for whom English is a second language – for a cup of tea or a sherry and a pakora to discuss the message on the video.