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As Professor Stephen Coleman says in his interview it is the people-to-people power of networking rather than the institution-to-people connection that is proving most powerful these days. Cisco agrees.
Cisco weren't making a great fuss about their proposals, but I was struck by the clarity of the White Paper The Connected Republic 2.0 that they produced recently, and the associated web site. It is a set of resources and a community space for "anyone interested in exploring how connectivity can help transform public services."
The White Paper sets out three imperatives:
- Use the network as a platform for collaboration and creativity
- Make the best use of all available expertise and and experience by "empowering the edge".
- Harness the "Power of Us" to create knowledge, solve problems, and deliver better services.
He explained that Cisco aims to explain to the public sector - who are of course, major customers - just what the implications of the networked world are. In doing that, Cisco recognised they couldn't just talk it all up, they had to set up a networky site to engage with other people with similar interests. They see it as a voyage of discovery.
Paul is blogging on the site, demonstrating he is prepared to take a critical look the way things are going at present:
I wish we had heard more on the day. I think the Cisco view chimes with that of Matthew Ellis, chair of ICELE, but not necessarily - as Matthew said in his interview - with many of those in charge of our democratic institutions.The final session had three UK politicians (Andrew Miller, Theresa May and Ed Davey) giving their thoughts on e-democracy. Not surprisingly, they were strongly focussed on the use of Web 2.0 by politicians, political parties and representative assemblies and all three of them made clear that they wanted to embrace these tools. None of them of them, however, seemed to have much sense of the real transformational possibility of Web 2.0. There was very little sense of the scope for opening up all sorts of decisions to public scrutiny and public involvement. It was much more a case of - how can some of these tools give a bit of a boost to our existing democratic processes? Not surprising but it does show there is still a huge amount of work to do in getting people to see the real possibilities of a connected world.
More generally, the conference was a lively event, but there seemed to be quite a lot of ambiguity about what e-democracy really was and could deliver. Professor Stephen Coleman made a typically challenging speech where he called for more e-democracy projects that involved real deliberation and generally more rigorous analysis of the impact different e-democracy projects had had. Interestingly, he wondered whether a key aspect of e-democracy was really citizen-citizen rather than citizen-government. In other words (if I understood him rightly!), projects should be aiming to get citizens interested and talking to each other rather than holding out the illusory possibility that they can interact with government on an individual basis. The most obvious UK examples of Web 2.0 in government are things like the No 10 petition site and David Millibands blog, but I tend to agree with Coleman and think they are a transitional phenomena. The real future are sites that - with or without government support - bring citizens together to discuss and take action on public issues. That, of course, and the much wider issue of moving to a public sector culture of openness and feedback the like of which has never been seen!
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