by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Us Now: On the Road to Self-Organised Government?
Yesterday I saw Ivo Gormley’s film US Now at the RSA. It’s a beautifully made film about the power of self-organising groups and what that might mean for society and the public sector. As well as clips from interviews with Clay Shirky, Charles Leadbeater and many others, the film follows some interesting real-life stories – an internet-based group of football fans that bought a football club with all the investors voting on team selection etc; a social networking site whereby complete strangers offer each other accommodation for free; the UK virtual community NetMums; a free volunteer-staffed service that lets you ring a local person when you in the area and have a question; a small local participatory budget initiative. It all comes together really well with interesting ideas, some good humour and some interesting characters. So many congratulations to Ivo!
The audience was a largely (but not exclusively) youthful crowd of the converted, but what struck me was the anti-government feeling that many of those present seemed to have. The chair of the event (who holds a senior position in BT) suggested that if only government could take up Ivo’s message perhaps “independence day” – the time of the year when people stop paying tax and start earning for themselves – might occur in January. Somehow he seemed to think that one person and a dog could run public services, while presumably his own organisation (which he suggested had already adopted a lot of this stuff) stayed more or less the same size. Strange. Drawing the conclusion from the film that everything should be done through group-based processes would also be a bit strange, since what gives it much of its charm is the individuality of the director and the skills of the team who worked with him on it. Crowd-sourcing ideas for the film would probably have further improved it, but selecting the shots and editing them together through group discussion and voting would almost certainly not. Interestingly, there were also some in the audience who wanted to take the ideas of the film and give up on representative democracy. One interesting experiment mentioned was the Swedish councillor who got elected on the basis that every decision she would make would be based on a poll of voters.
As you may have gathered, my reaction to all this is mixed. I do think there is an amazing amount of stuff you can do in the directions that Ivo’s film points, but I think you have to be careful not to suggest that self-organisation is the answer to everything (and, of course, Ivo and lots of the people in his film do recognise this). Even the participatory budgeting I had quite mixed feelings about. Ok only £20,000 was at stake and it was great to see people getting involved, but it is pretty obviously not a model that can be applied universally. Those who turned up to vote were a fairly (but not totally!) random selection of the population and I suspect that the looks and personality of the spokesperson for any proposal played quite a large part in determining whether or not it was successful. For example, one proposal was for a school and there were some cute kids involved in making the pitch. I suspect they got their cash – the model railway anoraks, on the other hand, certainly did not. So my conclusion would be that this sort of initiative is a great way of getting people involved and we ought to be exploring how to extend it and make the involvement more long term and truly deliberative. We shouldn’t, however, conclude that the time for representative government is over. Nor should we forget that a lot of what makes government difficult is trying to find some kind of process to generate an outcome in a world where there will always be conflicting interests and even conflicting principles or priorities. The web brings fantastic new possibilities for government, but it is still a pretty tough business.
Comments
Instinctively I have a couple of thoughts - first is that this self-organising context plays to the desire for absolutely minimal involvement with Government - that's when citizen satisfaction would be at its highest - but ....
Surely this is how County / Town / Parish councils came about - they were essentially self-organising communities - and that extends to School Governors etc - so this isn't a new idea - it's perhaps simply a way of seeking to make the process more participative. But .....
What's going to overcome the apathy that effectively arises around all the existing self-organising communities I've mentioned? One of the big issues that is arising from the proliferation of the technology is that we end up using the technology to communicate / participate - but not to actually come together to "do" something - instead we're busy contributing to decisions but that's our contribution finished at that point, and we can sit back with a smile and feel warm that we're involved. That reminds me of the old story about the hen and the pig - when it comes to bacon and eggs, the hen's involved but the pig's committed - so what is it that will get the folk in the self-organising groups to be committed?
My second point is simpler but more fundamental - we keep talking about outcomes - but outcomes require incomes - I believe strongly that the overwhelming priority for Government right now has to be about facing the economic challenge - not just in becoming more efficient but in identifying and developing a more robust, differentiated (and diverse) base for the economy after the credit crunch.
posted over 3 years ago
All the difficult issues captured here- really good. Scale, complexity and especially Paul's concern about resolving conflicting interests and the nasty trade-offs that is the stuff of politics. Does this mean the new tools are only useful when life is simple and friendly?
posted over 3 years ago
I do think that the Internet makes possible a degree of self-organizing that was not possible in the past. Having said that, the Internet does not automatically eliminate politics or the essential role of political leaders. Maybe this would be easier to understand for some of the libertarians in the audience if we used the term "public entrepreneur" (from the old public choice theories). This makes it clear that someone plays an entrepreneurial (i.e., leadership) role in the creation of public goods.
Of course, there is nothing prohibiting such a person from using the Internet and co-organizing other individuals to deliver public goods and services. Rather than self-organization, I suspect we'll see more hybrids where political leaders combine such voluntary efforts with those of the official government. This, too, is not exactly a first in history, but the network now makes it much more likely and possible.
Norm
posted over 3 years ago
Manxman's comment reminds me of a couple of points on this debate abut self-organisation. One is that the current fascination with self-organising communities is very much a 'back to the future' phenomenon. Parish Councils and other forms of local self-government, together with much of the mutual movement in health and social care, have been good examples of exactly the kind of engaged self-governance in whose favour so many of us seem to be speaking.
The second point is that, in the end, self-governance only works if there isa real job of work to do and if the consequences of becoming involved, or not getting involved, are sufficiently serious. if they are not, people won't bother.
Of course, no system of human organisation is fool proof and destined to be successful without at least a modicum of the usual ingredients - energy, motivation, leadership, the ability to engage at a cost in terms of time and effort that is within most people's capacity etc. So we can't get too moist-eyed about the wonderful examples of previous self-governance or of the potential of the new web 2.0-motivated experiments in modern self-governance. None of them will matter unless people find them compelling enough to give them a bit of time and effort. And that won't hapen unless, in the end, contributing matters.
posted over 3 years ago