An Experiment in Open Government or What a Brave New UK Government Might Do

Problem statement:

Governments have improved consultation processes and experimented with other ways of getting citizens involved in policy-making, but policy-making is still seen as a black box that people feel excluded from. Also despite government efforts to listen more to outside voices including frontline public sector workers, the process of agreeing a change package can encourage a bunker mentality where potential problems (or implementation improvements) are missed in the drive to implement.

Potential Solution:

 In theory a combination of transparency and greater opportunities for participation could significantly improve the situation, but it would require a dramatic change in approach from ministers and policy-makers and at least initially require a significant investment of time and effort.

 The Experiment:

Change needs to be part of a comprehensive package, but it is unrealistic to think that this might be instantly adopted across government. It would make more sense to test the way forward in relation to the work of one minister for a limited period, e.  g. of one year. So what might that involve?

1)      Transparent Citizen Input

An online site that gave a clear picture of all the inputs (letters/emails/faxes from citizens) to the minister or related to his/her policy area and showed how these inputs were changing over time. Visitors to the site might be able to rate the various issues in terms of whether and to what extent they endorsed them.  The site should probably offer some scope for visitors and for the department to comment on the input. The site might also flag up whether an issue was active or not (and also whether or not it was a ministerial priority).

2)      Transparent Ministerial Priorities

The minister and his team would publically indicate their priorities including changes to those priorities over time. To avoid this simply being a bland, indefinitely extendable list, each priority might be assigned a percentage of ministerial effort with the sum of named priorities being addressed therefore having to total  100 or less. (To encourage reasonably specific priorities it might also be sensible to say that no individual named priority could have a score of more than 10%.) Citizens could then do their own suggested list of priorities (again totalling 100% and with no one issue allowed more than 10%.) On the site you would then be able to see how the minister’s priorities related to the average ratings suggested by citizens. Again, it would probably be good to also have a discussion forum related to this issue with occasional or regular departmental commentary.

3)      A Defined and Transparent Policy Process

a.       The fluidity of the policy process is one obstacle to making it easy for citizens to understand and contribute to. So it might be worth trying to impose the discipline of a clearer, more explicit process. So an issue would either be active or not active with some indication of what active means. Similarly, a ministerial priority would be explicitly presented as being either at stage one ( defining the issue and objectives) or stage two (designing a package of policy actions) or stage three (determining how best to implement a defined set of actions). This greater degree of explicitness would be designed to allow citizens to understand where an issue was in the process and what the potential next steps and timescales might be.

b.      Depending on the stage the policy process had reached, a variety of tools would be used to solicit citizen input, but an attempt would be made to get away from consultations where citizens simply got the chance to give textual answers to a limited number of pre-set questions. So the emphasis would be on allowing citizens to comment on all aspects of key documents and on using innovative tools to allow citizen response to be aggregated by voting/rating etc.

c.       There would be a commitment to publish all key policy submissions to the minister and to publish his/her feedback

4)      Transparency on Activities and Input

a.       Each week ministerial staff would publish a) a list of all formal meetings with external parties plus all key internal meetings due in the following week b) a summary of all such meetings in the past week including key players and main topics discussed.

b.      All communications to the minister from companies or formal organisations in support or against particular courses of action would be published in full or in summary.

Issues

The three most obvious issues raised by this proposal are:

·         The time demands it would make on the minister, his/her staff and policymakers;

·         The additional disciplines it would impose on the minister and policymakers by requiring them to be clearer on what they are doing and why and by requiring them to fit their actions into a more clearly defined policy process;

·         The challenge of designing a website that integrated all the information and participation opportunities that this proposal involves in a way that would invite citizen input rather than discourage it.

Note: The focus in this proposal is on online participation opportunities, but these could easily be supplemented by face-to-face participation opportunities as and when necessary.