Here’s Peter Levine on the study of deliberation:

“The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. Again, that could be because they don’t reject deliberation in principle but dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV. People who held those skeptical views were especially impressed by an offer from their real US Representative to deliberate. Individuals were also more likely to accept the offer to deliberate if they were young and if they had low education.

Further, if they showed up to deliberate, their opinions of the experience were very positive. According to the paper, “95% Agreed (72% Strongly Agreed) that such sessions are ‘very valuable to our democracy’ and 96% Agreed (80% Strongly Agreed) that they would be interested in doing similar online sessions for other issues.” These results are consistent with almost all practical deliberative experiments.”

Very boringly, I’d like to cut-and-paste Burke’s speech to the Electors of Bristol yet again (sorry to be repetitive). I’m underlining the bit that I think that everyone focusses upon and emboldening the bit that I think is often ignored.

“…it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.”

Peter’s conclusions are very positive. But isn’t that line – “….dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV…” – it does suggest that politics – and the way that the media report and portray political discourse – is getting in the way of democracy. We seem to have allowed the media to take sole responsibility for a task to which they are very clearly unsuited.

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here).

The thing is, on 606, because the BBC isn’t the Daily Mail, most of the more obnoxious racist bile gets filtered out. But we’re still left with a baying crowd – often led by a really annoying cheerleader (Alan Green). Why should it be easier to extract the distributed wisdom ‘signal’ from the horde of shouty blokes ‘noise’ when the subject is football?

I’d argue that it is easier. And the reason for this is in the partisanship. Supporters of hundreds of different clubs converge on 606 and the big premiership clubs aren’t massively over-represented. At the end of it, you can leave with a picture of what the balance of opinion is on cheating or poor refereeing. It’s not a complex subject and few people are really excluded from the conversation. Everyone, apart from Arsenal fans think that Eduardo should be slapped down for his dive against Celtic.

Politics and public life just isn’t like that. On the one hand, it is at least as partisan as football, though most spectators would’t thinks so given the narrow pre-rehearsed set of positions that are used to discuss most issues. The clash of interests and perspectives is also at least as pronounced. But in public affairs, most sides of the argument never turn up. Low income groups, people who work long hours, and most importantly, people that don’t have a settled strong view on big issues – they will never turn up to a public meeting or dash off a frothing letter to the local rag.

What we are left with, in politics, is a handful of highly over-represented positions, curated by media owners that are both partisan and monopolistic.

In a society that has a wide range of low-level corruption and graft on offer, why have we spent most of 2009 preoccupied with MP’s failings? I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that this kind of corruption is very much on the radar of a highly unrepresentative portion of society – but one that can always be counted on to get their voice heard. It illustrates why it is so important that the ‘hard to reach’ groups are included in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a argument for making some decisions along the lines of Anthony Barnett’s lottery-based model of Athenian Democracy?

Here’s a bit of music made using assistive technology to cheer you up. It was sent to me by my old mate and colleague Amanda – the best usability consultant and website project manager that I’ve ever worked with.

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuna2AWvqk]

What’s this got to do with local democracy? Well, I’ve worked with a large number of local authorities / voluntary sector / membership organisations that aim to promote a greater standard of inclusive policymaking / responsive communications / organisational interactivity.

A well designed set of interfaces is fairly critical to the success of projects like this. Un-useable interfaces … well … don’t get used.

If you are a non-techie, and you are going to work with techies on a web-project in this area, you have to understand the very basics about accessibility. It helps you to avoid the classic cause for IT project management failure: You tell the IT department what you want. They don’t understand you properly and give you something that they think will do, without disrupting their wider set of objectives. They are behaving rationally in doing this – it usually means that they get a slice of your budget to put towards their pet-project.

Even when they do understand what you want, it’s often not good enough…

Left to their own devices, they will give you something that they can deliver saying “I think this will just about do the job.”

For this reason, I’ve found that a discussion of web accessibility between the technical staff (who are often – unnecessarily – the gatekeepers on projects such as this) and the people who are doing the including / communicating / interacting is usually a very valuable way of getting everyone on the same page for the following reasons:

Firstly, it’s an area that techies find genuinely interesting – and it brings home the complexity of doing the job properly. And the reasons for taking accessibility seriously are legion.

Secondly, there’s the moral argument. Inclusivity is non-negotiable – especially in projects that are about consultation, participation and … er… inclusion.

Thirdly, there’s the legal one: Not meeting reasonable expectations of inclusion with a web interface will mean that your project may fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Fourthly (and this is the most important one for me – the previous two are a ‘given’), accessibility (or lack of it) reveals a lot about the project – stuff that has nothing to do with bureaucratic box-ticking or the moral questions of inclusion. It tells you about the professionalism of the techies involved. Accessible websites seperate style and content, so that information on one site can be syndicated to others. They work well on lots of different browsers and platforms – so you can often use them on your mobile phone. They are more future proof. The content can be moved to new systems more easily if a change of use is needed. If this is an issue that you don’t fully understand, don’t panic. It’s fairly straightforward, and either a bit of googling or a phone call to a professional who is selling accessibilty should clear it all up.

I could go on (and on and on) with the benefits. People that haven’t done this before don’t always understand why it matters, but anyone with a bit of expereince knows that it’s crucial.

There are ways of ticking some of these boxes without being accessible of course – but it’s not efficient. It’s like the old IT Project Manager joke (there PM jokes, believe me) about how an aeroplane could be built by strapping pigeons to a train. Any developer that can’t show a track record in this area, and agree to a payment-dependent post-project audit on it, will be planning to stiff you – the customer – from the very start of the project. For sure.

A good presentation on accessibilty and a review of the standard management guidance that is on offer tends to foreground a few issues that the ICT department may have been tempted to overlook. ICT managers have a strong understandable motive to act as gatekeepers, of course. It’s their budget, and they can often shut their internal customers up by knocking up something that is not-quite-good-enough using Sharepoint – which, as – any fule kno – is the intranet and website-building panacea that can give you…

• 50% of what you want for 40% of the cost of…
• giving you 80% of what you want.
• And 20% of the cost of giving you 100% of what you want

(Pause while you read that again)

But 100% is what you want, isn’t it? Nothing less should do – and you can usually have 100% affordably in these open source days. It’s a classic example of what economists call ‘the market for lemons’ – the value of good practice is driven down by the fact that the customers don’t know whether they are really getting it or not. Ask a Sharepoint advocating IT manager if it’s accessible – they will say yes. But it usually isn’t to any standard that would impress the aforementioned Amanda.

And here’s a tip for anyone who wants to remove those gatekeepers from the project – particularly if you know that they will not add much value anyway:

First some preparation:

1. Phone up AbilityNet or Bunnyfoot – two of the leading accessibilty and usability consultants. Or Amanda.
2. Ask them for an example of a horror story – where an organisation let the IT manager procure the solution only to find that it was so unfit for purpose that they had to start again from scratch
3. Write down the names of the organisations concerned

Say the following to your gatekeeper:

1. I have absolute confidence in your ability to procure and implement this project in a way that fully understands our needs.
2. I will leave the specification of this project to you on only one condition: That – once it’s built, we will hire an accessibility consultant to audit your specification methods, the accessibility and usability of the interfaces, and that you will fix the project to their satisfaction if they find any shortcomings. I’ll ask them to use the PAS78 guidance on this (don’t worry – you don’t need to read this – the threat should be enough).
3. Just so you know what this entails, why don’t you phone up the IT manager of (insert the organisations names that you’ve been given) and find out how it worked for them?

Then just sit back and wait for your gatekeeper to come and tell you that there are plenty of good solutions that can be implemented either using standard configurable open-source tools, or by external consultancies that have good references. Ones that really really don’t need an IT manager to get involved.

Oh yes – one other thing: Tell the consultants that you do choose that you’ll be asking a third-party accessibility expert to give their solution a once over. Just before the bill gets paid….

PS: Have a look at LASA’s knowledgebase for best-practice in the management of ICT projects – most of it’s fairly good and independent stuff. This article on low-budget site testing by Mel – an old colleague of mine is worth a look.