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…..

Nick at Podnosh has a very interesting post up here – one that ties in with the ‘eavesdropping‘ theme that I’ve been trailing here a while ago:

Listening in: Not always sinister

“…listening with a purpose is exactly what [public sector bodies] should be doing, otherwise they would be wasting public money. It doesn’t follow that this will be a malign purpose.  Listening to the social web can help  the police improve the way they spend public money rather than waste it.”

It does kinda beg the question of what elected representatives are for though. Sure – public sector bodies should be keeping an eye on what people are saying about them – but really, this is the role of the elected representative. Because politicians aren’t stepping up to this particular mark, public authorities put themselves in this place.

Will this continue to be the case? Do politicians understand the options that the social web opens up for them? I’d say that they don’t at the moment, but like everyone else, lots of pennies are dropping for them.

We’ll see….

(Apologies – I’ve just realised that the link to Nick’s site was dropped in my editing process. Dunno how that happened – and fixed now!)

 

 

 

A sneaky listening device. It would be wrong for Councils to use them for consultations, but...

They say that eavesdroppers never hear good things about themselves. This may be true, but they probably get a more honest appraisal than the more direct forms of feedback can afford.

For me, this raises the question: Should we be asking people what they think about anything?

Or should we be encouraging conversations and finding (non-intrusive!) ways of eavesdropping on them?

No-one seems to be across the whole subject of local government’s use of read-write technology more than Dave Briggs – and here, he’s found an example of how local activists can humanise a consultation that has been started by a local authority. In this case, the problem that is solved is the LocGovSpeak one. They’ve humanised the text and put it in a way that is intended to stoke up a conversation.

This is exactly how eavesdroppable conversations can work well. The only qualm I’d have  about it is an instinct that – the more you point out that councillors and local government officers are going to act upon the results of the conversation, the lower the overall quality of the conversations will be.

(contentious statement alert!) So maybe it’s worth finding a way of not using direct policy input as an incentive? I’m arguing here that the only way that policy-makers can find a conversation worth listening to is to pretend that you’re not listening to it in the first place.

In his elevator pitch earlier this month, Steph Gray urged governmental bodies to be seen to respond to online comments so that those making them will feel that feedback is worthwhile. From the point of view of improving the takeup and the quality of feedback in the delivery of services, this seems fine to me.

But surely being able to eavesdrop on a conversation that is not intended for policy-makers ears will ensure that you have access to a more conversational discussion? One that lacks the poisonous certainty and the hectoring huckstering voices of the vested interests and fanatics that I posted on here recently?

Aside from the problems caused by shouting competitions, I’d suggest that there are other reasons for local authorities not to be seen to initiate consultations.

There appears to be a growing consensus that government isn’t very good at specifying, procuring, developing or customising tech. When it does, it either does it on the cheap, or gets ‘cheap’ sold to it at expensive rates. I’d also argue that it allows bureaucratic priorities to trump the value of interactivity and to eclipse the need to ensure that elected representatives can interact with anyone they like easily.

For a long time, I’ve been trying to get local councillors to simply go through their council’s website and find information that they can re-purpose in their own (human – not institutional) voice, and I’ve had some modest successes with these councillors (among others) – but there’s huge scope for improvement.

For this reason, I’d say that the Big City Talk website is a fantastic idea, and that it’s originators deserve congratulating. But it would be even better if they could find a way of getting people to discuss local policy without any expectation that anyone would take any notice of what was said.

It’s hard to see how people could be incentivised to do it in the first place, but if this awkward circle could be squared, it would be well with taking notice of!

PS: For the avoidance of doubt, I’m NOT suggesting that councils should spy in the public. Just that fostering a conversational local polity may yield better content than bureaucratic consultation methods would.

PPS: In the US, the DIY idea seems a good deal more established. Here’s a post listing the things that Americans can do to make things better. Note, waiting for the government to do something isn’t one of them.

Bless me Father, I've been a bit certain about something...

In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood.

The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a Guardian reader rather that an Anglican traditionalist.

Jonathan Dimbleby asked him if it wasn’t the case that people needed a bit of certainty about big issues in order to live their lives. the response that the Archbishop gave stunned Dimbleby and Aaronovich. He said…

Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?

The whole programme is really worth listening to – I think that podcast subscribers get the option to download all of the archives and the transcript is here.

One of my favourite political bloggers, Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling has written a great deal about the curse that the apparent need for certainty places upon democratic politics.

Just for reference, all of these posts are worth reading, but Chris’s strapline – ‘an extremist, not a fanatic’ is probably traceable to his previous career as a stockbroker – and the advice that every trader receives during their career – that not being sentimental about stock is a good thing – and that fanaticism always clouds judgments.

Chris often promotes a Rortean irony as a way of viewing the world, and seems very stuck by James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds thesis – an attractive one, particularly to those who are more open to ideas of direct democracy than I would be.

And what does this distrust for certainty mean for advocates of local democracy? I’d say that it tells us that a great many consultations throw up the most useless information, as opposed to the most useful. If the general public are widely seen as being too apathetic to turn up to a polling station every few years, the idea that the bulk of people with lightly-held preferences will participate readily on a subject that they are not too bothered about, is a bit outlandish.

So we have, instead, the usual suspect problem. Where people with views that they hold fanatically are very keen to participate, and keen to be heard over the noise of the general public. People who have a vested interest are also likely to be much in evidence. But the eavesdroppable conversation – the one where ordinary people who hold their views fairly lightly meet – is one that is never fostered by most consultations.

As a result, we end up with the kind of balance that pervades so much of public life – one where balance is equated as being the mid-point between two poles of groupthink – rather than the balance that emerges from a wide range of views.

Which brings us back to the parliamentarian argument – the need for the distributed moral wisdom of the elected.