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
Achieving Massive Citizen Involvement in Policy-Making
Today (March 22) UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a major speech on building Britain’s Digital Future which included a commitment to opening “the door to new ways of enabling people to influence and even decide public policy”. And of course this is also something the Conservative Opposition have committed to. So how do you do it?
Well, any new citizen participation platform needs to extremely user-friendly – you need to be able to go there, find the issue you want to participate on quickly and then relatively quickly be able to make your contribution. This raises the first issue which is about deliberation. Should this new platform (or platforms) allow or even encourage 5-second participation? Take an issue such as road pricing – should the platform let the citizen jump in, not read anything for or against road-pricing, not consider how it might be implemented or what it might (or might not) be packaged with and just give their positive or negative view? On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t want to argue for a platform where you are not allowed to do anything until you have done 40 minutes of background reading!
One possible way to mitigate this is if the platform lets people build a reputation and gives added weight to people who have made lots of contributions or who have made contributions that have been rated positively by others etc. This is quite an interesting possibility, since it potentially also gives people an added reason for staying involved. But it risks playing into the hands of those who say that online participation is undemocratic, since minority groups (geeks and fanatics) end up dominating the discussion. So the extra privileges you can give to super-contributors are probably quite limited!
I still also think that structuring the policy debate is very important. Government should try to involve people at as many points in the policy process as possible from objectives to principles to concrete proposals to detailed implementation issues, but to do that it needs to flag up clearly what stage of the process a particular issue/proposal has reached. Otherwise lots of the input is going to be people disagreeing with the objectives that underlie a proposal and wanting to go back to first principles. That’s why you need some sort of very simple framework, so when the citizen wants to enter a particular debate then can quickly understand what stage it is at and have some idea what is (and isn’t) up for grabs at this stage of the policy process.
The idea of creating a platform for collaborative policy design sounds great, but the challenge I see is finding good ways of factoring in constraints and conflicts. Imagine you created a wiki platform that presented you with the currently most popular text with a mark-up which showed all the alternatives that have been proposed and let you suggest new options or vote on any existing suggestion.
There are probably quite a few difficult technical issues hidden underneath this description, but let’s focus on the constraints and conflicts issues. How, for example, do you factor in cost and keep the policy package within a financial budget? Obviously you can have tools that put a cost on 8 different proposals and then let people decide what combination they like best subject to different financial constraints, but it is hard to see how you can combine that with giving people the freedom to tweak the proposals (and so affect their cost) and the ability to add totally new ones.
Similarly, on the policy wiki platform how do you handle consistency if each element is voted on separately? If I am looking at 15 proposals, it is quite possible that I might be in favour of proposal 2 only if proposal 12 is also part of the package, so how do I cast my vote on a platform that allows individual voting on each? Multi-stage processes can perhaps handle this issue to some extent, but at the cost of requiring people to keep coming back to the platform to participate at every stage.
The final and biggest issue is how does all of this fit into the rest of the policy process? It is easy to present this as the people vs the faceless bureaucrats in which case it seems obviously that whatever comes out of the citizen participation process should trump everything. In reality, however, the policy process ties in with our democratic system and in principle we hold ministers accountable for the policies they endorse. Furthermore, the policy process already involves quite a lot of negotiation of one kind or another with a range of stakeholders from opposition parties to industry associations, unions, pressure groups, NGOs and opinion formers of various kinds. And it is a dynamic situation. Who is to say whether or not a new development undermines the previous discussion because if people had known about it they would have supported very different proposals?
For me, this sort of consideration means it has to be mainly about greater citizen input, but with final decision-making and accountability remaining with the elected representatives. I also think it means that it is not just about creating one superb participation platform. I do think there is a need for some vastly better participation tools, but I do think much greater transparency is just as needed supported by lots of dialogue tools including simple things like a blog.
Finally, on the transparency point we also need to think about how you can easily enable citizens to track a policy issue. If I come late to a policy debate, how can I get an easy picture of how the debate started and how it has got to where it is today? Of course, you can google and you could do more fine-tuned searchs, but this would generally not give you a very user-friendly result. Could you create a government policy platform that generated informative potted histories of individual proposals with minimal manual intervention? For me, something like that would be a good companion to any new participation platform.
Comments
I really enjoyed this post, and that's a great set of questions. I've been doing a lot of similar thinking while developing Poblish - my attempt to create a crowdsourced policy-making platform - so I thought I'd share some of my thoughts and experiences.
My take is that because politics is complicated, and because there are conflicts, constraints, and trade-offs, any system that conceals these inevitable facts of life from users risks producing results that are useless to policymakers. That discredits distributed decision-making - I'm sure online polls and petitions aren't held in high regard - and simply shifts the hard decisions back to bureaucrats, to be made behind the scenes. So I think the challenge has to be to appreciate that people's time is valuable, but to raise expectations about how constructively we can use 30 minutes of it, rather than going for the false economy of trying to reduce political issues down to a 5-second attention-span. Perhaps the idea can be sold to voters along the lines that it's a lot cheaper to spend the time thinking now than to have to unravel a policy that had disastrous unintended consequences?
As for factoring these conflicts and constraints into the policymaking process, what Poblish does is to maintain a political knowledge base - comprising blog posts, wiki pages, Debategraph-style maps, etc. - so that all participants have access to content that is closely related to the issue at hand, updating as they type. So rather than forcing users to think entirely afresh, give them access to a mass of - potentially supporting or opposing - evidence, argument, and experience. Hopefully if that can be done in a seamless-enough kind of way, people might be more likely to read around.
Essentially we take a MixedInk-style approach to policy design: a collaboratively-edited document, with each version weighted by the amount of activity, and the ratings it gets. Because each document itself becomes part of the knowledge base, related policy exercises will have access to its content, hopefully giving a greater chance of producing policies that are consistent. I'm not sure if that's enough to solve the consistency problem, but it's a start.
Yes, "reputation" is a tricky concept: while we want to value constructive contributions, the last thing we want to do is allow the contributions of the 1% of "activists" - the kind of people who will already be well plugged-in, in real-life, and especially online - to crowd out others. The bottom 90% are the people we hear least from, and so I think it's their insights that we really want to capture. Perhaps a solution is to *acknowledge* contributions, but to stick to the idea of non-excludability, i.e. ensure that content-matching is done purely on the basis of relevance, not on the basis of reputation, and don't allow a contribution from a highly "reputable" contributor to trump one from someone else. Do you reckon that's plausible?
As you say, Google just isn't geared up to tracking policy debates, and it's no substitute for having a proper API of structured political content. That's something I had to solve, so that even people who don't use Poblish directly could nonetheless follow the course of a debate in a feed reader, view the activities of an elected representative on a timeline, or hook into the aggregated knowledge base for their own projects. It feels like all this content needs to be easily accessible.
Anyway, lots of food for thought!
posted about 1 year ago