My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails.

A good democracy has to value everyone's time properly (click for pic credit)

This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a dedicated idea-site here – is so important.

We are, after all, being gently forced to comply with other people’s procedures where it is in their interest to invest in this compulsion (or ‘nudging’ as it is gently put).

This is the whole trajectory of the World Wide Web – from the first release of HTML scripts and early browsers in the early 1990s, through the progressive development of website coding and site-building tools, the burgeoning science of Accessibility, Usability and the ‘Semantic Web’ through to the aggressive mainstreaming that it has undergone in recent years as social media has dragged billions of people into compliance with the web. Social media is a conspiracy to dovetail all of our economic activity with the processes of the organisations that invest in online applications.

By ‘compliance’ I don’t just mean the ‘compliant code’ beloved of good web-designers. I mean our social compliance. We go to our local bank or town hall less often these days – we often go to their website, comply with their security procedures and fill out forms that are convenient for them – as suppliers – so that they can reduce ‘avoidable contact’ and thereby be more efficient.

In theory, this benefits shareholders and ratepayers respectively. But I’m waiting for a conspiracy theorist to start kicking up about this. One could take the view that this quote from the 19th Century Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could apply equally to our relationship with corporations today:

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured.

That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.”

OK. That’s all probably a bit OTT. But where it matters, the business logic behind usability is very strong. Make it easy and attractive for people to comply and they are more likely to do so.

But in a democracy, this is a double-edged sword. If an organisation or government ask us for our opinion, or evidence, without it being a low-cost exercise for us, they will get hugely unrepresentative responses. They will get responses from…

• the time rich
• commercial lobbies
• individuals with a vested interest in a particular issue (this can be financial, cultural, ideological or faith-based, for example)

Of course democracies can’t afford to pay the public all of the time (though the use of commercial polling firms and focus groups are a well-established way of consulting the public). Increasingly, we are going to be asked to participate in government.

It is for this reason that it is vital that quick light responses are sought. That people seeking feedback are prepared to invest in ways of going to where the public already are and making it quick and easy to comply with their requests.

Last week, I posted a list of attributes that a good democracy could have – attributes that I beleive would be accepted accross the political spectrum – and ones that most liberal democracies could do a lot better on. Of my original 17 points, eight would be directly served if Microparticipation were to become a mainstream idea (no17 in particular). They are…..

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

There is one other factor here: Democratic deliberation is better when people who are uncertain, disinterested and equivocal can dominate the conversation. I’ve argued it a number of times here before [example]. My own most oft-repeated quote at the moment is from Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – and my favourite Wikipedia link is to this page about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Shorter version: certainty is a bad thing!)

Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the risk accordingly)

Slow-loading screens weed out all but the most determined

So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time?

Of course, this makes a massive case for investment in ‘usability’ (and going beyond usability – almost into seduction) – making the online experience a compelling and pleasurable one. Compelling, not compulsory, as David Barrie puts it here. The ‘Nudge‘ argument, if you like? But it also makes the case for investment of time and energy in ways of getting people to make quick light responses on issues where they care very slightly rather than strongly.

Is there a case for using mobile phones to do surveys – sending people text messages and saying ‘answer our five questions and we’ll refund £2 from your council tax.’ This will incentivise people who….

• don’t have access to a computer, sufficient bandwidth or a local authority that could design a usable interface if their lives depended upon it
• don’t care about specific issues enough to sit through a clunky consultation questionnaire online
• think that saving £2 would make a slight difference to their lives

In other words, exactly the opposite kind of people who normally get involved in consultations in order to provide responses that are unrepresentative (and therefore, often worthless). If – instead of valuing people’s time at £0, we value it at £2 (or whatever figure finds the right equilibrium), we will get a more representative sample of collective wisdom.

I’ve been researching mobile phone multi-question survey platforms and I’d be interested to see if any local authority and government body would consider this approach instead of the usual ‘come to our website and Have Your Say’?

Local democracy: Not being pitched very hard on council websites

It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago)

Measuring usability may also be the key to ensuring that a big opportunity on the horizon is taken seriously.

As I mentioned the other day, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent in the not-too-distant. I covered the question of petitions the other day (and I’ll come back to this element briefly in a moment), but there is a bigger – even more interesting question about how far local authorities may thwart this obligation by a resort to box-ticking.

In summary, councils have to promote an understanding of…

• the functions of the authority and other local authority bodies that are connected to it
• the democratic arrangements that govern it
• how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part
• how to become a councillor
• what members of the principal local authority do
• what support is available for councillors
• the functions of authorities which are connected with the principal local

It’s something of an indicator of the level of self-confidence within local government that such a role should be mandated by central government, and I suspect that – when we look back on how these obligations have been implemented in a few years time, we may see just how enthusiastically local authorities actually embrace this opportunity.

As every civil servant knows, you can either give your political masters what they want, or what they say they want. You can understand their aims and seek to meet them, or you can tick the boxes that they put in front of you.

A glance at many local authority websites will give you some idea of this. Here’s a way of looking at it:

Give some schoolkids a look at their local council website. Then ask them to do a comprehension on it – and see how enthusiastic they are about getting involved in local democracy at any level.

OK. This is a big ask. But I’m certain that some council websites would get much better results than others – so to check this hunch, I had a look at a few:

Here’s the first three I looked at – purely randomly (I picked the local council of the last three people I spoke to on the phone – choose your own method and pick three of your own?)

Colchester Council: ‘There’s a council meetings and decisions’ occupying one of the less prominent parts of the website. If you click on it you’re offered a range of unstructured unprioritised pages in alphabetical order. If you know what you’re looking for, you may click on the Your Council link, but even then, there’s no attempt to offer any structure, any narrative or to persuade visitors that there is a worthwhile democratic process in place. Information on Councillors is poorly laid out and hard to navigate. If there is a postcode search that allows you to find out who your councillor is if you don’t know the name of your ward, I can’t find it. If you click on the ‘how to become a local councillor’ page, the result can best be described at regulation-speak. 3/10

Broxtowe Council: If anything, it’s a good deal worse. None of the language matched what I would expect to look for if I was trying to find out about my council decision-making processes. The front page has a link to ‘Cabinet and Committees’ but you have to dig around in the ‘About Us’ section to find any reference to councillors. The information provided is sparse and grudging (I suppose that the small amount of info is as good as Colchester’s site which offers more info, but renders it almost useless by it’s structurelessness) 2/10

Camden Council: Much better. There’s a ‘Council and Democracy’ link in the main menu and it takes you through to a not-bad set of information that has plainly been written for purpose, rather than patched together in a document-management-system-to-content-management-system way (information techies will know what I mean here, and what shortcoming I’m alluding to. Once you’re in, there’s a big webcasting link that shows you how to view council meetings and reasonably well-written content on how decisions are made. It could offer more of a sales-pitch, but the intent is there. You are left with the definite impression that Camden wants to promote it’s democratic practices and that the forthcoming bill may even get them to raise their game further. 8/10

These are, admittedly, snap audits. But in many cases, perhaps there is a case for the provision of this content – the information – it’s structure, layout and language – to be taken out of the hands of permanent officials at local authorities. I don’t want to re-open the question of whether it is in the interests of council officers to do anything that increases the prestige of elected members, but…. maybe it could be done better by schoolkids who have looked at Camden’s site than the people who were paid to write content for Broxtowe?

Finally, on the question of petitions: The take-up of these e-petitions (and the measurements of how many people arrived on the ‘petitions’ page and how many completed the process), will provide us with metrics. Comparative metrics. We will be able to see which councils have used all of the resources at their disposal to drive up interest in local democracy. I wonder if anyone will pull this information together?