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.

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.