Power to the people!

The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.

Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry.

If there’s one thing that I think Tim and I totally agree upon, it’s that these questions have a strongly political nature. They’re not simply neutral bureaucratic or managerial issues (indeed bureaucratic neutrality isn’t a notion that stands much examination, is it?)

To underline this, we jointly organised a session entitled ‘Political Theory 2.0′ at Barcamp earlier this year.

I tried to illustrate the political nature behind the need for an ‘Interactive Charter’ a while ago here, and we tried to make the session one that was focused around campaigning rather than worrying around the details. Whenever people come together to discuss these things, I always get the sense that they’re dancing to the sterile box-ticking rhythm of middle-managers rather than addressing the real challenges (or, more simply, the big challenge) that we face.

It’s the insight that marked Marx, Churchill, Che Guevara, Margaret Thatcher, Lenin, Tony Blair and Genghis Khan from the rest of us:

You make nothing happen until powerful forces are more frightened of you than they are of the others.

How many reams of reports, pilots, guidance, assessments, audits, research papers, initiatives and written-up brainstorms have we read telling us what that the dogs in the street have known for a long time? Surely all of these exercises are examples of co-option into an incompatible agenda?

We simply say we want to make organisations that touch our lives more transparent, interactive and responsive. We could shorten that and say we want them to behave in a human way. It’s not an unreasonable or extreme demand.

We want them to talk to us, listen to us and reason with us. We want them to ignore us when we’re being petulant and stupid and we want them to notice when we mention something that they hadn’t though of.

They know they should do it. In some cases, they’ve known that they’ve had the means at their disposal to do it for some time. A handful want to do it but can’t face the internal aggro. We’ve spent the last six months drawing MPs accross the coals because we know that some of them will jump when we shout at them.

Now, the real challenge is in Whitehall and in the Town Halls. The permanent staff who will still be there when the politicians have been red-carded. The management consultants who have been able to use each contract they win to create two more for themselves.

The QUANGOs that spend eight-figure sums each year purely to detoxify decisions that politicians could take. The campaign groups that set the pace but mask their paymasters’ agendas that are not in the public interest.

It’s time that we forced all of these organisations to come clean. Addressing the fifty hurdles that have been identified will enable organisations to take a giant step towards that openness. It’s what Trotskyists used to call a ‘transitional demand.’

We won’t do this purely by reasoning with them. As the MySociety campaign on Parliamentary expenses showed, you have to give them nowhere to wriggle. There is no point at pitching this at middle managers. None of this will be achieved by a conventional get-together of egg-heads or clever geeks.

The only way to make organisations do this is to use a combination of carrot and stick to get the people at the top of organisations to make a decisive change that they can’t get water down when the heat is off.

And though I’m happy to frame it as a political question, I’m confident that it’s one that will find supporters and opponents in all of the major political parties.

At the meeting that we had on Monday, I believe that we resolved to collectively do the following:

• Jointly check that the 50 Hurdles wiki is relevant and accurate – let’s get it right.
• Jointly pull together all of these things that we’ve been saying to each other about how marvelous interactivity is and how many problems it can solve – and put it into a short businesslike document that is much harder to ignore.
• Jointly think through the problems that a supportive big-wig would face and look at ways they can be overcome
• Pull it all together into a charter that anyone at the top of an organisation can sign.

This document has to be a tool for those people who work in organisations that they’d like to change in this way. We’d like to use MixedInk to convene this charter and anyone can contribute. Tom Watson MP was at the session and he said that he would put down an early day motion (EDM) supporting the resulting document. By the autumn, we could have something that we can campaign around.

We can look at how we get those who describe their role as one of ‘leadership’ to publicly commit to an acceptable timescale – and monitor how they’re doing.

Because remember, comrades, that the great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

PS: I hope that a journalist somewhere is watching how Andrew Stott sidesteps this question – it should provide the basis for quite a good Public Administration textbook!

There have been a few interesting developments in the last few days. Firstly, the post of Director of Digital Engagement has been filled by Andrew Stott.

Harry has a positive anecdote about him along with an observation that I’d agree with:

It [a £160k post] seemed like a strange move to make when creating two positions at £80k a piece would probably still attract very qualified people, and give you more time and knowledge for your money.

Dave Briggs, as ever, has a good comprehensive round-up of reactions to the appointment.

The second development (as Anthony has picked up in the previous post) is the as-yet unconfirmed report that the Community Empowerment Bill is to be spiked.

The Community Empowerment Bill always struck me as something of a curate’s egg. It was good, in the sense that it attempted to address one of the key problems with civic engagement – the widespread self-serving belief is large parts of local government that there is no duty to promote democracy at a local level – that this is simply the job of politicians.

Currently, local government officers can be given any number of excuses to avoid doing anything to encourage people to interact with them (or worse, with councillors) on policy issues, and the culmulative effect of the various bits of legislation has been to stengthen permanent officials against elected councillors.

All of that said, legislation is a very blunt instrument to do this. Had the bill gone through largely unamended (and we’ve always known really that this was never going to happen – this was the ultimate peice of ‘signaling legislation’ – designed to position the government politically rather than result in any outcome), anyone with local government experience knows what would have followed: Committees would have been convened – probably in each local authority – and clumsy bits of guidance would have been drawn up.

I have tender bits of my anatomy that I’d rather dangle in boiling oil than sit through that farce.

Oh – one other thing: The ‘duty to promote local democracy’ was probably the only good thing about that legislation unless I’ve forgotten something.

Later this month, in Belfast, the PICamp event I mentioned here earlier is going to pick up on Tim Davies ’50 obstacles’ initiative and look to see if anything can be done to take the idea forward. 

As we’ve seen with MPs expenses, legislation doesn’t work when you want to bring about constitutional reform; What you need is ‘gamechanging’ ideas. I think that the way MPs have been exposed in recent weeks has done a disproportionate amount of damage to democracy in the UK – but it shows that real change only happens when the people who need to change are looking down a gun-barrel.

I’m not sure that legislation or high-profile appointments will meet this need. They seem to be more about the need to be seen to do something.