This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here:

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…

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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!