“….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change is often self-defeating, since the only people not defeated by the bureaucratic hurdles are huge organisations like Tesco — while those traditional smaller cafés and shops that traditionalists claim to love cannot summon the energy to clear them.”

He continues by promoting a smart ‘planning permission in return for something’ proposal that I’m sure I’ve seen before somewhere (when you think about it, it’s a locally hypothecated variation on Land Value Tax, isn’t it?), but nevertheless, it’s a good one.

The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:

• It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
• It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web? When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road? And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?

Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.

There are three things we need to focus on:

• Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.
• Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.
• Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.

The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:

• Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.
• Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.
• Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?

So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…

About Political Innovation

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter andFacebook.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics still done like this?’

We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve.All of our proposers have been asked to ensure that their proposed innovation is one that could realistically garner support from all sides of the political spectrum.

The project is being managed in conjunction with political blogs of all hues. So from the right our largest media partner, The Telegraph will carry each essay which will be also be carried on Slugger O’Toole, Left Foot Forward, Lib-Dem Voice and SNP Tactical Voter.

Tweetminster will be helping us publicise each essay more widely and we’ll be doing some podcasting with The House of Comments. Other bloggers are welcome to get involved.

The essays will touch on a range of questions, including

• a proposed recasting of the whole FOI-based understanding of open government into something more ‘interactive’,
• a pop at the political problems that underlie dysfunctional government procurement,
• a version of ID cards that may suit both supporters and opponents of ‘the database state’,
• a proposal that could create a serious ‘reputational cost’ to politicians, journalists and campaigners who misuse facts and spin
• a measure to help bloggers get more influence over public policy in their roles as conversation-convenors

…. and a range of other ideas (let’s not spoil the surprises, eh?)

The (short) essays will start appearing on all of these sites shortly. We plan to follow it up with open gatherings in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin and London in due course – as long as we can find some local partners there who will help us with the get-togethers.

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

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.

It’s really for anyone who has looked at politics and asked themselves “why do we still have to do it this way?” The founding premise is that interactive technology is a game-changer.

On the one hand, it has had a huge impact upon conventional politics and it has compounded many of its minor pre-existing felonies.

On the other, it creates all kinds of possibilities – ones that would be welcomed by people across the political divides – to change the way that democratic politics is done.

For me, the interesting thing is that many of these game-changing ideas are supported by people who have a bit of a track-record of understanding how interactive technologies will change the media landscape, and opposed by the larger group who don’t. That seems like a good reason to go all evangelistic, doesn’t it?

So we’re running a series of essays – at least eight – possibly more – from political innovators with great ideas on how things can be moved on. We’ll be running them over the summer in partnership with some of the leading political blogs from across the spectrum – I’ve seen early drafts of a lot of them already, and they’re really very good.

Once they’re all written, we’re going to be looking for venues in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and – eventually – London to showcase them. (There’s an ambition to do this in the English regions and in the Irish Republic, but more on that later).

More later, but in the meantime, to stay in touch, join the Google Group, get every new posting send to your inbox, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, or just subscribe to the RSS feed. We’ve got some really exciting ideas to share and we hope you’ll be able to get involved.

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?

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?

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.

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.