Designing for Civil Society

Time to open source local e-democracy

I took my "critical friend" hat along to a meeting on local e-democracy tonight, and heard a detailed and enthusiastic explanation of the national UK project from the chair, Mary Reid (right). We heard about a wide range of fascinating projects, run by local councils, ranging from online surgeries and e-petitions to councillor blogs and democracy games for young people. The scale of the project is impressive - £4 million and apparently the largest of its type in the world. Mary is herself an enthusiastic blogger,a political website designer, and local councillor. The slogan on the leaflet is ambitious: "Harness the power of new technology to encourage citizen participation in local decision making between elections," and on Mary's slides "Your community conversation". My conclusion: we really do need local e-democracy, but this isn't it - yet. Here's why, in my view.

• The project isn't about elective democracy, because the project doesn't cover elections... presumably to avoid problems of funding party campaigning.
• It isn't about participative local democracy - as a whole - because these days decisions are not taken just by councils, but by many different partnerships and consortia of public agencies and nonprofits. This isn't reflected in the national project.
• The project planning and governance is, so far as I can see, entirely top-down without the involvement of either participation practitioners, nonprofits, or others involving in civil society.
• Claiming that council provides the forum for "Your community conversation" is just nonsense.

The project is certainly about enhancing the delivery of public services, and the engagement of citizens and groups with local government. That's entirely to be applauded. Local projects may well be involving a wider range of interests. But I think it is a matter of concern that the national project is developing an e-democracy toolkit, with such broad claims for participation, apparently in a non-participatory manner. Mary said that this is a first step, local government had to get its own act together first, and there is scope for broadening engagement at top level in future. But my experience of projects and organisations is that they retain the culture of their birth and childhood. In the case of the national local e-democracy project, this looks a bit like old-style local government... participation is about how to involve people "out there" on our terms, not help all stakeholders engage and negotiate. Earlier stuff about that here.
Mary took all this in good part, and I'm even hopeful we might see some changes in the publicity claims. I may have got it wrong... the problem is just a few ill-chosen phrases. Anyway, enough criticism, however friendly. What could be done in the next stages of development? While walking back from the event - organised by the Sociotechical Group at Westminster Business School - I remembered the previous item I had written, Open sourcing society, about a pamphlet produced by Demos. That argued we should take the metaphor and practice of open source software development into other areas:

Open knowledge. These are projects where knowledge is provided freely, and shaped, vetted and in some cases used by a wide community of participants. In these cases the common value of the knowledge being created is the primary concern.
Open team working. The loose communities of interest that work together through the internet to build projects like Wikipedia and Linux merge into a wider family of semi-open teams rooted in organisations. These generally have a clearly defined end goal.
Open conversations.These extend traditional forms of public discussion by constructing online conversations capable of handing more participants in more effective ways than previously possible. In these cases the process is as important as any goal.

Demos suggest that what is needed is a period of experiment. Where better to try some open sourcing than in e-democracy? Why not open up the local e-democracy toolkit development to the wider interests so far excluded - those who have expertise in participation, but not necessarily in technology?
I don't want to pre-empt what the project may say to that, if anything, but I hope it isn't on the lines of... nice idea, but we are well down the track, time is short, we have targets from central government to meet, we'll take account of what you say. In short, participation is too much trouble. That would really indicate that local government hasn't changed as much as we hoped, beyond adding an e-.
I'll flag this posting up on the project forum, and blog, and see what develops.
Originally Posted at Partnerships Online

Update: Mary Reid has posted an item on her blog, and there is some discussion on the forum.
See also Local e-democracy could help with digital empowerment

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