E-Democracy

Democracy and knowledge

Great, meaty article in this fortnight’s issue of The London Review of Books by David Runciman:

The wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few. We-think: the power of mass creativity. Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge. Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. These are the titles of just a few of the books published in recent years on one of the hot topics of the moment: knowledge aggregation, or how lots of different people knowing many small things can result in a very big deal for everyone. The obvious impetus behind this publishing trend is the internet, which has generated astonishing new ways of finding out all the different things that people know and bringing that knowledge together. If you look for these books in bookshops (itself rather a quaint idea given that you’re supposed to be buying them online), you’ll discover them in the business or management sections, where their lessons about openness, flexibility, innovation and the importance of listening to what your customers are telling you have their most immediate applications. But the authors are usually more ambitious than this and want to apply their notions beyond the confines of management studies – and in social policy. If businesses can use the wisdom of crowds to predict what people really want, to innovate new ways of providing it, and to test whether it actually works, why can’t politicians?

Learning from Obama

Edelman have published an interesting white paper on what lessons can be learnt from Obama’s use of the social web in his campaign. It’s worth a read.

Here’s the headline list of learning points:

  • Start early
  • Build to scale
  • Innovate where necessary; do everything incrementally better
  • Make it easy to find, forward and act
  • Pick where you want to play
  • Channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further the campaign’s goals
  • Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign

This seems to tie in rather nicely with some of the messages I have been banging on about of late, including the emphasis on prototyping, ‘worse is better’, etc.

Be less boring

I wasn’t sure whether or not to blog about this. But I think I ought to, simply because this is such a cracking example of how badly digital engagement can be, and how easy it could be made much better.

My local authority, South Cambridgeshire District Council, has a modest announcement on its homepage:

Your views count!

Great!

Only, on clicking the link to the consultation area, what did I find? Classic local gov: PDFs and an email address. Sigh. Just click that link and look at that page! Hardly inspiring, is it? Not the sort of thing that makes you think ‘This is something I want to get involved with’ – is it?

But it does get worse. Try clicking one of those PDF links. Here’s one you can try from here. Yep, that’s right: they are just excerpts from council meeting reports. That one I linked to opens on page 11. You might want to know where the other ten pages are – it’s a reasonable question. I don’t know the answer.

Not rewriting the content to be more accessible for non-local government geeks is unforgivable. But to not even change the formatting, or the page numbers! to make it more understandable for the layman? Criminal.

In total there are four PDFs to download and read, cogitate on and then respond by email or in writing. The only way you can do this sensibly is by printing them all out, highlighting the important bits and then writing the response. And that’s assuming you can make sense of the reports themselves.

In fact, this consultation is so bad that I wonder whether the Council – shock, horror – actually wants any responses at all.

There are some occasions where providing some weighty PDFs and an email to respond to is an appropriate online consultation method. For example, when dealing with a large organisation, which needs the detail, and needs to incorporate the views of various different people in a response.

But this is most definitely not the case with consulting with what one might legitimately call normal people. For a start, it’s too boring. Why would anyone want to do it, seriously? Another issue is that by making people fire emails off into a black hole, how is anyone meant to know whether their comments actually make sense or not? With no conversation to react to, and very little in the way of context, those less confident at responding to these things just won’t bother because you can’t know whether what you are saying is appropriate or not.

Here’s what I would do with this, and similar attempts at engagement:

  1. Set up a micro site using something like WordPress.
  2. Split the material down into five sections.
  3. Put five big buttons on the site to go to the consultant for each section. Make it clear what they are about.
  4. Describe that section of the consultation in easy to understand language on different pages, linked to from the big buttons. Don’t use any more that half an average screen’s height to do so. Be informative, but keep it succinct. You can still link to the PDFs if people want to see the detail.
  5. Allow residents to leave comments underneath. Keep it all public, so that everyone can see, and respond to each others comments. Allow conversations to flow.
  6. If you like, make sure the relevant officers are on hand to answer any questions or put right misapprehensions.

What’s more, this would be really quick and easy to set up. It wouldn’t even use up that much time to moderate or manage. And you never know, some value might actually be generated.

I’ve emailed Cllr. Tim Wotherspoon, my local councillor, who happens to be the ‘Policy, Improvement and Communications Portfolio Holder’ – perfect! I’m hoping we can talk about making the way the Council engages with its residents just a little bit better.

If you don’t do it, someone else will

Here’s more proof.

bcpt

Birmingham City Council are asking for people’s views on their ‘Big City Plan’. They have even created a website to help people to do so.

I asked Jon Bounds, Birmingham blogger extraordinaire, what was wrong with the Council’s approach. He answered:

Not so much “wrong” per-se as we thought helping discussion (rather than just comment) would generate understanding & ideas.

So Jon and others did something to generate that understanding and those ideas. They’ve translated the consultation document out of local government regenero-speak and into something approaching normal English. They’ve also made the thing properly commentable enabling people to have discussions about their city and what should happen to it.

They’ve called it Big City Plan Talk, and it’s a lovely thing. Let’s hope that Birmingham City Council take note and engage with these people with an obvious love for their city.

Readers working within local government: how could you make the most of the civic energy in your area, to work with residents to create something really worthwhile?

Everyone else: What’s going on in your local area that you could take a bit of time out to help out with, or improve?

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