Quick reality check (contd) - some wise counsel

From the 'Designing for Civil Society" discussion comes some salutary insights and wise advice from Tom Steinberg, MySociety founder and generally all-round smart thinker (and do-er) in the government 2.0 space.

In a post to the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, Tom writes "mySociety has traditionally worked on the assumption that it's basically impossible to ever get any part of any government to do anything of any real significance in the field of edemocracy, or in the wider field of greater access to data.
As a result we've always tried to pick projects that work as well as possible for the citizen without requiring government to do anything it didn't do before (think FixMyStreet, or WriteToThem). Picking a project that requires a bit of government to move a single inch in order for your project to work at all is a sadly proven path to failure.

Unfortunately, our need to campaign today is a validation of this highly pessimistic approach. It is absurd that this campaign is even necessary, given that we tried so hard to do it the 'nice way' with meetings, gentle encouragement and nicely written word documents in Whitehall-speak explaining why it was useful and cheap and non-threatening. But where it counted the unelected officials who hold the relevent power here just weren't persuadable for reasons that we're having to FOI to find out."

So, that's a bit disappointing.  But as an antidote to such a pragmatic assessment, Tom offers some advice. Instead of looking at what e-democracy projects don't achieve in terms of mass engagement, it is better to look at "pressure points, chinks in the armour where improvements might be possible, whether with the consent of government or not".

He concludes:

"Anyway, if this seems like a counsel of despair, it isn't supposed to be. I'm just saying that being realistic about the nature of actual progress in our field (tiny, incremental, currently peaking with things like TheyWorkForYou and Stemwijzer.nl ) makes for more interesting, useful discussions than comparing everything to the Holy Grail of True, Mass Scale Deliberative Democracy"

Small pieces, it seems, will 'loosely join' to achieve the larger 'transformation' only if we acept tht the real vaue we're after will inevitably be subverted by premature and over-weening ambitions for scale and scope.