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!

Neil Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard Society’s Andy Williamson had a similar post up here a while ago:

Innovation fails when the people with the ideas aren’t matched by the ones with the skills and power to make those ideas happen. End-to-end innovation – and, therefore, eDemocracy – takes in the whole of the organisation.

I’d argue that this is a political issue. Or, more to the point, it’s something that requires a political leadership. That can’t happen, however, until we address one of the key problems in promoting innovation in the UK: That the relationship between the permanent bureaucracy and the elected one is not one that promotes innovation of this kind.

In Yes Minister, Jim Hacker’s bright ideas were always punctured when Sir Humphrey congratulated him on making a courageous decision. It was a clear shot across the boughs.

I don’t want to get into the massive debate around the neutral civil service that we have in the UK, in contrast to the in-and-outers that other countries have. Suffice to say that…

a) I wish we had less of a fetish of neutrality here

b) You understand what the word hegemony means when you challenge the idea of civil service neutrality in the UK. It’s like poking a cage of tigers with sharp sticks.

But I will say this: It’s hard to see how this will change as long as politicians believe that they will be hopelessly exposed when they demand innovation and risk-taking from their departments. We currently break what I beleive should be a golden rule here: Never place 100% of the blame for failure upon the shoulders of someone with a veto. It’s a recipe for stagnation.

This is why, in order to promote a change in the attitude to the take-up of social media as a means of improving the quality of governance, the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain next Monday (6th July) will include a session dealing with what Tim Davies has identified as the ’50 small hurdles’ that prevent public bodies from unlocking their knowledge and opening themselves up to more conversational interactive processes.

At this session, we are hoping that participants will take part in the creation of an interactive charter that will create a momentum to remove these obstacles and promote a more open and transparent policy making. In fact, we’re hoping that more than just a charter will come out of the session – watch this space for more detail.

Euan Semple will be there to reinforce the benefits of interactivity, and Jeremy Gould – the erstwhile Whitehall Webby will be there – metaphorically stripped to the waist and showing us the scars he picked up

This session will be happening at 1.30pm in the Siemans Room

I thought I’d offer you a bit of an outline of the PICamp (Political Innovation Camp) strands that are making up part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain event next week. You’ll see that the sessions that are planned reflect a lot of the issues that come up on this blog regularly.

We’re offering these because we believe that innovation doesn’t just affect business and public administration. It often offers the potential to break out of a political stalemate.

Like the stalemate that politicians, journalists and bloggers are in. Like the stalemate between declining local newspapers and local authorities.

Every senior politician says that they want to devolve power down to local government. Local government says that it wants more power devolved from the centre.

But every politician also knows that this will never happen as long as the public blame central government for poor local services. Innovators can help local authorities raise their game, create new communications channels and start to address this problem.

Politicians know that they face obstacles when they want their departments to raise their game. Whether it’s the risk-averse veto groups in middle management or procurement rules that reward box-ticking rather than imagination, they know that the easy answers have all been tried.

These are small administrative hurdles rather than big political ones. Politicians and innovators can tackle these problems together.

Politicians also know that – if they yield to demands for a more participative politics – that they run the real risk of disenfranchising large sections of the population that are prepared to vote in elections, but that don’t have the ability or the confidence to fight their corner as active citizens.

Politicians will need to call for help from politically-aware innovators if they are to meet demands for participation while preserving the universal franchise.

In many cases, it isn’t just innovation, but political innovation that is needed. Politicians can offer the leadership, but they need to know that innovators are focussed upon their problems – and not just commercial and administrative ones.

It’s time for innovators to help get politicians out of the political stalemate that they are stuck in. Most of these issues will not simply be solved by a general election and a change of government.  They involve the kind of game-changing ideas that have altered so many other sectors of public life.

You can book your tickets for Reboot Britain here. If you’re interested in any of these issues, scan the schedule for more information on them, or please visit www.picamp.org and meet some of the session initiators. I’m hoping to encourage them to just flesh out what they are planning to talk about on this site a bit in advance of the event next Monday.

I’m currently convening a number of sessions at a Nesta conference on the 6th July called ‘Reboot Britain’, running a strand called ‘PICamp’ – Political Innovation Camp.

I’m looking for local government communications staff that have had any experience or thoughts about the changing relationships with the local media – and particularly issues around the politics of this.

I don’t mean the left/right/Lib/Lab/Con politics, I mean questions like….

• the politics of neutrality and incumbency – if local government communications staff aren’t going through the filter of professional journalists, will this cause problems from a democratic point of view?
• are local on-line communities – often very effective ways of communicating – suitable mediums to use to interact with people? Are such groups an effective substitute for traditional communications through the local press? Are they, perhaps, simply havens for unrepresentative sub-groups of local society?
• is there a way for councils to use social media to improve the quality of local democracy – or is it a minefield that is best avoided? And would an unwillingness to engage create a vacuum of any kind?
• how far are the local government rules on political communications being applied in an inflexible way? Does the uncertainly around this result in local government – particularly councillors – being unusually inactive in this space? And how can local authorities provide a leadership role in on-line communications without becoming de facto political press-officers?
• the politics of decentralisation: The changing relationship between local government and the mass media may provide scope for councils to change the way they communicate and reassert the primacy of local government in addressing local problems. Is there a political opportunity to promote the ‘decentralisation’ that all of the political parties claim to want?
• getting the obstacles out of the way. How can we remove the barriers that stop institutions from interacting?

These sessions have already attracted some great participants – the interest has gone well beyond my expectations with some real innovators putting their hands up to participate as well as a smattering of interest from prominent local and national politicians as well as mainstream-media journalists.

The schedule is still being finalised at the moment, but I’d be really interested in hearing from anyone with practical experience, or with considered views on any of these subjects – particularly from councillors or people working in local government communications / democratic services / electoral services?

If you have any ideas for sessions at this strand of Reboot Britain, please visit the PICamp site, register and let’s hear them?

Reboot Britain

We can learn things from the way they elect Popes – and the way they used to.

Chris Dillow reprises his ‘extremist not a fanatic’ theme – that it is rational not to care too much about politics – and that politics benefits from our indifference.

And finally ‘Reboot Britain’ will be worth keeping an eye on – it will have a significant strand covering democratic renewal.

I’m hoping that it will provide another run-out for the PICamp project that started very successfully in Belfast last month.