The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties.

It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in the public sector for ideas on how they can curb costs. It is a fairly standard site developed originally – as it happens – by my mate Simon (who deserved more credit than he got for it), built to invite ideas but not to publish them unmoderated.

The treasury site’s findings will prove to be a slow burn, but as far as I can see, the idea of saying ‘OK, you work here, what could we do better’ has to have an appeal that goes beyond the small-state fixations of the governing coalition. No-one who is critical of British management standards can fail to see that there must be some benefit in asking the  workers what they would do better.

As my friend Big Pete put it in the context of postal workers a while ago….

“Most of the people who work on the front line are not obstacles, they are experts. Their knowledge is far more valuable than the snake oil of management theory. The denigration of the workforce and the elevation of the great talents who brought us the credit crunch into superheroes is one of the more unlikely episodes in a class war, one being waged, increasingly successfully, against workers, rather than by them.”

Your Freedom is a different matter. It uses a standard tool -the Dialogue App – developed by those good people at Delib.

Firstly, a bit of disclosure: I’ve found the meme that we have, somehow, been stripped of our liberties to be very problematic and I said why here a while ago. I’d go further. I suspect that the Conservatives will soon tire of it once their feet are fully under the table in the same way that they tired of the notion that we were an elective dictatorship at some point between Lord Hailsham’s pronouncement on the subject in the late 1970s (under a Labour government) and Mrs Thatcher’s massively-centralising rate-capping reforms of the 1980s.

All of that said, how have they done, and what could they have done better? Well Chris Applegate rather lays the boot in here, effectively endorsing the treasury’s approach rather than the ‘Your Freedom‘ one. Some of his suggestions raise way too high a bar:

“If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000?.”

Surely the point of doing this is to circumvent the way that well-heeled pressure groups dominate public discourse? You’d need a team of savvy researchers to be able to meet that bar.

On the other hand, Chris also offers a load of good practical suggestions for weeding out the Clarksonism and his ideas on moderation and de-duplication are good ones. But I think that the real problem here is that it is the bolting-on of interactive tools to a government that isn’t fundamentally interactive in the first place. This isn’t a particular criticism of the Lib-Servatives either – Labour were significantly worse at this than the new crowd.

However, it has to be said that the government are trying – they’re doing something innovative that they will learn from – and that can only be a good thing. When I first saw the site, I used Twitter to float the idea that it would be better to create a tool that promoted collaborative authoring,  allowing a large-ish number of people to collectively describe the problem rather than to propose solutions. Replies suggested that this was too high a bar. They’re right, of course. I can’t point to many successful examples of people using collaborative authoring tools to describe a problem.

But there are some, and they show what is needed to succeed.

MixedInk has had a number of successes crowdsourcing a single description of something. They used weight of numbers plus fanaticism (in different cases) to get a good single document out of a lot of people – one where strong points were promoted and weak ones were exorcised. I like this idea because it is a good use of active citizens – it makes them the servants – rather than the masters – of elected politicians.

If a government minister were to find the right way to introduce a narrow-ish subject, I’m confident that a useable outcome would result.

Similarly, Debategraph has made a start doing similar things, but it is still in need of development in terms of usability. On the one hand, MixedInk, Debategraph and the various wiki tools (including MediaWiki – the tool behind Wikipedia) are no-where near as usable and accessible as Delib’s tool, and any politician who were to put all of their chips on following my advice – ‘crowdsource a description of the problem using collaborative authoring tool’ – they’d probably not last the week out.

But – on the other hand – if the government were prepared to invest a portion of that £1m that it offered for a public-policy website on usability specialists that would make collaborative authoring more attractive – perhaps it would be make enough of a difference. It may even be enough to simply signal that ‘a crowdsourced description of problems’ is their preferred means of consultation – perhaps that sort of clarity would unlock the necessary investment?

One of the best examples I’ve seen was the one introduced in advance of The Interactive Charter last year by Tim Davies. He managed to crowdsource the ‘50 barriers‘ wiki. Tim is a savvy guy who knows how to use participative tools.

As an individual, Tim knows how to do it and has developed the a range of personal skills that he needs. There are lots of ways of weeding out useless commentary, but the bottom line is that the best application for doing it isn’t any kind of script: It is, instead, a carbon-based lifeform – one that has been elected and has the executive power to take high-quality input from the public and do something useful with it.

At the end of the day, there is no substitute for getting actual politicians to develop interactive skills and do this themselves. So many initiatives will only back-fill until the time that this is accepted.

Not being a supporter of either of the coalition parties, the current range of opportunities to accuse them of betraying their manifesto commitments are very tempting. It’s hard not to relish a few years of Nick Clegg having this video replayed constantly in the light of Tuesday’s budget VAT hike.

But taking the partisan hat off, the upsides for the quality of democracy are hard to avoid as well. I’d broadly agree with Lib-Dem blogger Mark Thompson in this ‘campaign in majoritarian, govern in coalition’ post that the experience of participating in – or watching – coalition government will bring a number of improvements to the way that political discourse is conducted in the UK. If it results in more equivocal value-based electioneering, it can only be a good thing.

The thing is, all political parties are coalitions anyway. They’re clusters of smaller social interests that oppose the other clusters more than the rival components of their own. Our First Past the Post electoral system usually promotes coalitions within political parties rather than between them and any significant change to that system will probably result in a re-alignment of those components.

When election campaigns – and the conversation inbetweentimes becomes more of a pluralistic struggle about values, we’ll have something that misrepresents the decisions that governments have to take a good deal less. This can only be a good thing, surely?

It’s almost self-evident that a manifesto stuffed with pledges will reduce the scope for pragmatism. Election campaigns where parties pledge to take particular decisions have always resulted in broken promises and poorer policies. They also reveal a fatally compromised approach to policy that can’t be commensurate with good governance. They represent an attempt to buy-off vocal and active pressure groups at the expense of The General Will.

In 1983, Labour fell foul of ‘The Longest Suicide Note in History’ – I posted elsewhere on how an obsession mandates damaged Labour at the time. In 1997 – and in subsequent elections – Labour also succumbed to the temptation of using pledges to counteract its problems with the media – at best, fair-weather friends – and it’s overwhelming sense that the public didn’t trust it. The relationship with the press was never addressed and one can’t really conclude that the public trust Labour (or politicians in general) more now than they used to.

“Well isn’t this an exciting moment?”

I got ‘the fisheye’ when I said this earlier today to a bleary-eyed crowd of people who had been canvassing for different parties in Northern Ireland.

Some of them were into their thirtieth hour without sleep. There’s a time and a place for train-spottery musings about constitutional permutations.

Electoral reform looks like it’s on the cards though. Whatever the Lib-Dems say, I doubt that they will exit a moment where they can exert leverage without firstly securing a commitment to PR – probably of the STV variety.I’ve tried to stick to observations on this blog that I’ve not heard widely elsewhere, and my two points for today are…

• Everyone seems to be saying that the Lib-Dems will do a deal with the Tories. They are obliged to run this by their membership (remember the ‘Cyberlock‘?) and I’m not sure that they will stomach a deal with the Tories that readily. Also, the electorate seemed to be quite keen on a Lib-Lab deal
• On the other hand Labour has a minority of MPs with a visceral hatred of PR and they may struggle to honour any deal they offer the Lib-Dems

We’ll see. On the issue in question, I’m undecided whether PR is a good thing. OK – it may secure a more proportionate representation from the available political parties, but does it give us a government that more accurately represents the General Will? Political parties are, after all, largely coalitions of people who come together to game the voting system.

Can more people tick of more comparison points within the government that match their own views? And more importantly, can the government be said to be hitting any kind of sweet spot in representing the material interests of the nation? Carrying out the wishes of the public – expressed and implicit – are surely what democracies claim to do?

So PR? Not sure. But voting reform? That’s a different matter. There are two obvious benefits, I think?

Firstly, I think that STV elections will be more frank and less groupthinky – less of a scrabble for the middle ground. In ordering our preferences there seem to me to be two advantages: The discourse will be more flexible and inclusive. If someone who has views outside of the hotly-contested centre ground is going to have their votes re-allocated, more of the parties will court their vote and seek to compromise with them.

That calculation in which I asked how far governments reflect the expressed wishes of the public would seem to work out OK under STV. More people will vote and politicians will be sent clearer messages and engage in more debate (which is good, right?). And remember – after the last few weeks – other forms of gauging opinion are not very reliable. Remember Cleggmania? Where did that go?

Secondly, politicians will know what they’re being told. Today, Nick Clegg – despite a fairly poor showing – will decide who will form the next government. He can’t reliably ask those who voted for him (remember, opinion-polling sucks!). Lots of his voters were Labour tactical voters, and some were Tories gaming the system to keep Labour out. Some were bona-fide Lib-Dems. And with all of that scepticism about polling, a new version of a poll like this one (!) would be interesting.

OK, we’re still left with the fundamental problem with elections in that they don’t allow us to weight preferences in the way that we do when we tell bookies what we think will happen. But you can’t have everything.

So I’m quite keen on STV. It only leaves me with one question on which I don’t know the answer: Will it foreground the representative and diminish the powers of political parties relative to MPs?

Anyone know the answer to this one?

I think that a lot of election commentary is missing something important about how we vote. As some commenters here have said, in the past, ‘at elections, we order our preferences’.

That makes this really interesting. Nick Clegg doesn’t seem to be strongly objected to in the way that Gordon Brown and David Cameron are. Could the Lib Dems win my a landslide?

Digest these figures……

Update: What if Clegg could convince a significant number of us that he was winning.

Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.

Cllr Mary Reid (a Kingston-Upon-Thames Lib-Dem) has a short  post up about percentages of councillors blogging. Cutting to the chase….

In the UK …

• 7% of all Liberal Democrat councillors have websites/blogs.
• 2% of all Conservative councillors have websites/blogs.
• 1% of all Labour councillors have websites/blogs.

The Lib-Dems plainly value interactivity more highly than the others, and this should be seen as a mark in their favour.

Seasoned political watchers, however, will have come away from the Lib-Dem conference last week with one abiding impression: Of a party that values it’s independence.

Where the leadership were keen to push populists lines of attack, they were very clearly clipped back by indignation from middle-ranking party figures complaining about top-down policymaking.

First question: Is there a correlation between the interactivity of a party’s grassroots and the relative lack of willingness within the party to adopt collegiate positions? I would suggest that there is.

Next question: In the current climate, is a willingness to adopt collegiate positions an essential pre-requisite to electoral success? Again, purely on personal experience, I’d say that there is.

Labour was blessed / cursed with a herd of independent minds rich diversity of internal debate in the 1980s – an experience that shaped the 1990s predilection for ‘control freakery’ in the party.

There is another way of looking at this though: David Herdson makes a strong case here, arguing that the Lib Dems steady progress – it’s slow upwards trajectory – is down to the party’s niceness – and that it is a fool’s errand to even try to behave like the Government-in-waiting.

Last question: Is Cllr Reid wise to be pleased about all of those lib-dem blogging Councillors?

Using the revealed preferences of the voters, I’ve been trying to compile the profile of local elected representatives that the public want – in the cops do in police procedural dramas. I’m not sure that they’re ready for interactivity.

As a further observation, is it the case that party division is really unpopular with the public? Or is that political journalists are so lazy that any easy-to-find evidence of a schism is likely to get a disproportionate amount of press-coverage – and that this issue then adds to the impression that open debate is electorally risky?