Designing for Civil Society

Government plans major discussion about British Statement of Values

Thanks to the Our Kingdom for noting that Justice Minister Michael Wills has now confirmed in a recent speech there will be a programme of events and online discussions leading up to a Citizens Summit about a proposed British Statement of Values later this year. This is one of three strands to implement the Green Paper Governance of Britain proposals I wrote about here.
The speech is interesting both for the details it give of this process, and asides on the balance of representative and participatory democracy.
After speaking about the Constitutional Renewal Bill - which will "surrender or limit a wide range of powers currently exercised by the executive, transferring them to Parliament" and the British Bill of Rights and Duties, Michael Wills said:

The final strand of the programme is the formulation of a British Statement of Values. Our national identity matters. Most advanced democracies have developed ways to express formally their view of who they are as a nation. This country has throughout much of its history vigorously discussed what it meant to be British. It was only in the years after the Second World War that we went through a period of introspection, lacking in self-confidence when such discussions were often regarded with embarrassment. We are now far more successful and self-confident as a country and the government believes the time is right to find a way to express who we believe ourselves to be in a way that is inclusive and commands broad support.
If we don't do this, others will. National identity matters to people. If there isn't a national process to discuss it, in ways that are inclusive of everyone on these islands, then there is a risk that this territory will be colonised by sectarian and sometimes even poisonous views.
For us, here the process of discussion and deliberation is as important as the outcome. That's why we are doing this through an innovative constitutional process. Shortly, we will start a series of discussions up and down the country, accompanied by print material and online forums, on what it means to be British, what's best about it, what best expresses what's best about it. This will all be fed into a citizens summit - a representative sample of perhaps 500 people, selected randomly, for example, from the electoral register, but filtered, in much the same ways as opinion polls filter their samples, to ensure it is demographically representative. And informed by these consultations and by presentations directly to them, they will deliberate - and we hope decide - on four main questions: should there be such a statement of values, if so what it should be, how it should be expressed and finally what it should be used for.
Their decision will then go to Parliament for a final decision.

Writing at Our Kingdom, Guy Aitchison highlights the Minister's caution about the benefits of edemocracy:

Wills discusses the transformational role of the web, but with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. He celebrates the ease with which constituents can now contact their MP, but is uneasy that new forms of technology and communication might challenge the representative principles upon which our democracy is based. “The electronic plebiscite”, he warns, “is just a click or two away” and we should be “very careful about embarking on a slippery slope towards plebiscitary democracy.” He imagines what might happen if an unscrupulous billionaire wanted a policy change and set about a nationwide campaign of mass emails and advertising to convince voters to support it online. Could MPs be trusted in such a situation to meet Burke’s ideal of the representative, using their “unbiassed opinion, mature judgement and enlightened conscience’”?
Wills’s misgivings, I’d suggest, reflect a much broader anxiety on the part of government towards the power of the web - something memorably brought home to them last year with the huge success of the anti-road charge e-petition. For government, the challenge is to use new technologies for deliberation and engagement between elections, whilst ensuring that, what has been called, the “mainframe” remains intact. Is this possible given that the mainframe belongs to a previous age?

However, Michael Wills does end with a general commitment to great engagement with citizens, saying:

In these circumstances of the changing societal base for our democracy and the advent of new technologies which, indeed can be a benign force enhancing democracy, this government is convinced that we need to work more vigorously to re-engage citizens in the representative democracy we all share - and from which we all benefit.
Hence the surrendering or limiting of the power of the executive, the development of new mechanisms to make policy development a collaborative venture between government and citizens, instead of a top-down exercise which can only be accepted or rejected at elections with no in-between options, and giving citizens greater opportunity directly to monitor and scrutinise the delivery of policy.

See my original post for references to Gordon Brown's ideas on engagement, including citizens juries.
The Ministry of Justice has rather a good Governance of Britain web site with news feeds that you can add to your own site, and a what others are saying section  fed by del.icio.us bookmarks. If you tag your blog posts "for:governanceofbritain" you may get included on the site. You can read here how that was developed using Wordpress by Simon Dickson, working with the MoJ's own blogger and UKGovwebBarcamp organiser Jeremy Gould.

It's comforting to know that when the Ministry does start to roll out online discussion it has some in-house expertise.
Declaration: I did done some early work for MoJ with Drew Mackie, running a workshop with staff to help design the programme. We used a game like this to simulate the process, and I think it helped wok through how the mix of online and events might work.

Technorati Tags: edemocracy, governanceofbritain 

Do e-petitions make a real difference? We may never know

The e-democracy project with the biggest media and political impact over the past year has been the No 10 e-petitions project ... but we may never know whether it made much difference to democracy.

At the recent e-democracy 07 conference Professor Stephen Coleman was pretty scathing about the system because it isn't clear what happens after people have posted their petition, and collected support online. It disappears into the government machine, but no-one knows whether policies change. Jimmy Leach, the No 10 civil servant responsible for introducing the system, was at the conference, and Stephen pressed him hard on the question of an evaluation study. Jimmy said something was being planned with mySociety, who designed the system .... and it would be independent.
It now seems that any study has been dropped and the whole thing is something of a mystery to mySociety too. The  E-Government Bulletin, produced by conference organisers Headstar, reports:

E-Petitions Review Plan Shelved By Downing Street.

Plans for an independent review of the Prime Minister's e-petitions system have been shelved following the departure of Downing Street head of digital communications Jimmy Leach to join a PR agency, E- Government Bulletin has learned.
At this month's e-Democracy '07 conference, hosted by the bulletin, keynote speaker Professor Stephen Coleman of Leeds University blasted the lack of an independent report into the first six months of the e-petition system. The e-petitions had captured the headlines, particularly in relation to road pricing trials, but there needed to be proper analysis of what types of person engaged with the process and what its results had been, Coleman said.
"Has there been a report? If not, it is just a gimmick. If there is, and it is now languishing on the desks of civil servants, then what does that say about transparency and integrity?"
At the time, Leach responded by saying an independent academic report would be commissioned and published in the months to come.
However, E-Government Bulletin understands that such a report has yet to be commissioned, and all plans have been shelved following Leach's departure this week.
The record of the Downing Street electronic petitions system was defended by Leach at the conference as a useful tool among many for gauging citizens' views.
"It had its uses and had its impacts, but it shouldn't and won't be the only solution favoured by government. It is a digital manifestation of a single strand of the constitution."
And while there was no direct line between electronic petitions and Parliamentary debate - just as with paper petitions - he said the triggering of a policy reply from a civil servant to all petitions signed by more than 200 people had already represented a significant cultural shift in government.
"It has been quite a shift, to have civil servants sit down and explain why they are doing something. So far, three and a half million people have received answers. If we were to do that physically it would cost £1 a letter, which would be unsustainable. But we have spent so far £140,000 on this."
Meanwhile, the House of Commons moved a step further to installing its own electronic petitions system this month, with the announcement of a new inquiry into the topic by its Procedure Committee. The committee proposes that electronic petitions to Parliament would have the same status as paper petitions, and is seeking views on how the process could work. For details see: http://fastlink.headstar.com/parl3 .

The question of the evaluation study was raised on the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, where Tom Steinberg of mySociety says he knew nothing of the plans announced by Jimmy Leach. Message thread here. Tom adds:

We're just starting to conduct an independent evaluation of our own sites, some of which are 3 years old, having systematically failed to find an academic partner willing to take on the cost of doing this before then. So I can't be too holier-than-thou on this front.
Obviously it's a site worth evaluating though, so I'll ask about it.

I was at the conference doing some video blogging on behalf of Headstar, as you can see here. Further specific links below, where I have reposted to this blog.

Interviews with Jimmy Leach and Ann Macintosh on Westminster and Scottish e-petition systems
Stephen Coleman on people's loss of trust in politics and TV
Publictechnology.net provides an overview of the first year of operation of the e-petitions site
Other posts about e-democracy on this blog

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

Ross rounds up UK Government & Social Media initiatives

Ross Ferguson, until recently the Director of the Hansard Society's eDemocracy programme, has now returned to his native Scotland to work at Dog Digital, started a blog, and is able to offer us some useful insights from his new perspective away from the Westminster bustle.
I talked to Ross at the e-democracy 07 conference just before he left, when he reflected on the past few years in e-democracy. Steady progress made, he felt, but in order to achieve more a greater number of politicians need to engage with the possibilities offered by engagement online. At present developments were too often  driven by officials, companies and activists. Gaining more commitment would involve paying more attention to the way that online working can integrate with politicians'  day-to-day work - rather than focussing solely on their external communications.

Click To Play

Ross has now posted a piece to his blog - UK Government & Social Media… Ones to Watch - which gives us a round-up of initiatives that he sees as promising.

I was lucky enough to start work with the UK Government just as it began to take an interest in what we are now/currently calling social media. That was 2005 and there was hardly anything happening. Today, it's a different story.

With a host of initiatives on the go, I thought I'd pick out 10 that I think are particularly interesting:

1. Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea floating about waiting to happen, and Jeremy Gould got it off the ground. It's the first event of its kind for government.
2. National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components. The issue is meaty and its an intriguing opportunity for NHS stakeholders to direct its development. But will the people come? And how will the government tie up their online with the offline activity?
3. Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get in on the action and duly did.
4. Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities, being led out of the GCN, is taking on the challenge of helping an area of government so used to controlling the message to adapt to a new communications environment.
5. Downing Street - it's use of ePetitions was the biggest UK eDemocracy story yet. But will it see out the winter? Well, yes, but with parliament planning its own online petitions system, will time be called on the government's biggest and most infamous social media experiment yet?
6. Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software. The CLG was one of the first departments to make a conscious effort to utilise social media. The use of deliberative forums by a range of policy teams is worth watching alone, then you factor in the blogs and wikis and you start to realise the importance of this department's activity.
7. Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with the government data, has been made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.
8. DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK's web users have accessed government services via DirectGov. So, where to now? Is there room for a social media angle in the next phase of development?
9. Ministry of Justice - OK, I'm a bit bias but Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain since all this social media interest kicked off.
10. SS/SIS - a bit of a flippant inclusion. I've no idea what they're doing with social media but whatever it is, it's bound to be worth keeping an eye on.

Please flag up any others you know about. Maybe there's some similar stuff going on elsewhere in this big globe of ours.

You can see other videos from the e-democracy conference across on the Headstar e-government bulletin live blog.

Technorati Tags: democracy, e-democracy, e-democracy07, politics, e-government

TV voting scandals and poor e-democracy both destroy trust

Click to Play or go to blip.tv

The keynote speaker at last week's e-democracy 07 conference, Professor Stephen Coleman, draw a direct parallel between interactive TV voting scandals, and people's loss of confidence in political engagement processes.
Deceptions over the naming of the Blue Peter cat, and location of the pink pig in Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway might seem trivial - but were enormously important in terms of trust, he explained in more detail in an interview after his presentation.

People assume that if you are asked to make an input there is a consequence, and that consequence is transparent, tangible and makes you feel you have influenced something. People feel cheated when that doesn't happen
I started from that basis because I wanted to say that politics is often a very similar experience for many people, and the question I wanted to ask is whether e-democracy is the panacea to that feeling of frustration and being cheated, or is it in fact a part of the problem.

They key issue, said Stephen, was that people want to be respected. If politicians and officials are to be trusted - as they wish - then they have to respect people.
After 10 years of the Internet in politics, the argument that it makes a difference has been won.

The question now is how do we re-establish rules of the game that make it fair, make it meaningful to provide real efficacy for people - that's where we need to be thinking now - not shall we do it, but how do we do it. For me that has to be about a contract between the public and politicians that sets out very clear standards of engagement.
If you are asked, whether it is to sign an e-petition, or to engage in an online consultation, or to send an email to your MP, there have got to be transparent procedures for what is expected to happen to that and where the process is.

Stephen went on to say that e-democracy has not significantly build trust between politicians and voters - the Consumers to Business relationship. What has happened is that social networking has developed the Consumer to Consumer relationship. That is where new ideas and better collective action is being developed. Government now has to have the humility to enter that social networking space to learn, and to make sure that there is equality of voice for the potentially socially excluded. What we need - among other things - is a common online space which is trusted and protected for online deliberation.
BBC conference report: E-petitions: Godsend or gimmick?

Other conference views on e-petitions

Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

Slugger O'Toole explains why a good blog is like a good pub

I'm always looking for ways to explain the value of blogging to those who might otherwise characterise it as just soapboxing, diarising, or vanity publishing. I've now got a good explanation from ace political blogger Mick Fealty, best known as Slugger O'Toole: it's like a good pub conversation.
I met Mick yesterday evening at an event co-hosted with Paul Evans, co-founder of Poptel Technology, on the theme of improving the quality of policy discussions. We heard from Mick about the start of Slugger as a research project into Northern Ireland Unionism that grew and grew into a very lively site with guest bloggers and much commenting. The focus is on policy rather than personality, guided by 'play the ball not the man'.
Paul talked about a project to pull together on one site, by a sophisticated system of tagging, policy papers as they emerge from government, think tanks and other sources. This would be a boon to researchers, and hopefully help raise the level of policy discussion.
We met upstairs in the Edgar Wallace pub, and everyone was pretty constructive about the idea ... aided by the fact that Paul was buying the drinks. Paul developed Policybrief a few years back, but hit problems with technology and funding. He reckons he can get it right this time around. 
Click To Play and at blip.tv
I pulled Mick away from the general conviviality at the end of the session to ask him about the success of Slugger, and about the clue he gave us earlier on his inspiration for worthwhile exchanges. He explained that his father was a publican, and he grew up in a pub. The conversation could be light, could be heavy, and the publican knows that in order to keep order he has to anticipate where the disorder may come from, and be ready to deal with it. Mick extended the metaphor to blogging with other guests, and commenters:

My role is less about trying to police what people say - that opinion is in, that opinion is out - and rather police the freedom for people to express those opinions within the same civil space. It's that capacity to express diverse ideas within a single space that's crucial. If there's something that is unique about Slugger, that's probably it.

I'm sorry the audio is lousy, but I think the good humour and inspirational snatches emerge from the hub-bub. Just like any good pub conversation.
PS. If there are no comments, does it mean you are drinking alone?
Update: Mick links back here, and acknowledges an excellent 2003 Voxpolitics article by James Crabtree and William Davies as the source of Blogs are like pubs.
The article is still a good read. You can muse also upon Blogs are like ...Flower Gardens, A Good Job Doing, A Smile, Your Front Door, Cities, An Episode of Lassie, Live Jazz, Apples, Soapboxes, ALL BAR ONE, and Cocaine.
I like the comment from Maria Benet suggesting the archives of blogs mean they are also like an Attic or Garage.
Hmmm, makes me wonder if I should dig back and throw out the empties.

Technorati Tags: politics, sluggerotoole

Encouragement from the BBC

Bill Thompson in his BBC column today gives us an overview of the political scene online as Gordon Brown waits to take over as Prime Minister, with some welcome encouragement for bloggers:

Recognising, perhaps, that Brown will be far closer to Blair in his policies than many of his followers would wish, the debate has moved up a level to address the processes, structures and operations of our flawed democracy.
And in a reflection of the changed times in which we live, much of the discussion is taking place online instead of in the traditional smoke-filled rooms or on the editorial pages of our finer newspapers.
Anthony Barnett, who founded Charter 88 nearly twenty years ago and has consistently argued for a written constitution, has seized on hints that the incoming PM may be receptive to a new constitutional settlement and launched OurKingdom to explore 'the destiny of Britain'.

Then this, which will give me some blogging motivation for a while:

Serious thinkers such as David Wilcox use their blogs to badger our representatives to think more carefully about the opportunities for collaboration, participation and transparency that network-based tools can generate.

And a sidebar link too! I await more visitors eagerly. Over at OurKingdom Jon Bright picks up the story:

What could the internet do for democracy?
A lot, in theory. Thompson muses on the possibilities of direct democracy - people getting more control over the policy making process, for example, by allowing large petitions to form the basis of ‘people’s bills’. Social networking sites like Facebook are providing simple ways of bringing together large groups of people with shared concerns. And, paradoxically, this truly global network could make a truly local politics again possible, providing influential forums for local issues as well as ways to engage your MP.
Thompson notes that George Osborne was onto open source politics for the Tories before Gordon Brown called for a new dialogue and he notes that OurKingdom is (thanks, Bill) helping to make the web part of the debate over the promised new settlement. He recognises that the internet is not (yet) universally available and no ‘IT solution’ is infallible. But his call is for the internet to be recognised as part of the landscape politics operates in, to “make it a core part of the political process just as the telephone and television are”. It’s not long, in my opinion, before it becomes even more fundamental than that.

I like the way that Bill underlines this point:

In 1994 I helped my then MP, Anne Campbell, to build her website and set up an email system for constituency correspondence. At the time it was a sensible use of her time and effort because Cambridge was one of the most-wired cities in the UK if not the world, but just having an email address did not mean that she stopped reading letters or taking phone calls.
But we can surely now begin to think about the way we organise society and the ways in which political power is exercised on the assumption that the network is here and can be used. Not by everyone, not all the time, but to a sufficient degree to make it a core part of the political process just as the telephone and television are.

For politicians (and the rest of us) it is no longer a case of creating a website, blog or whatever and expecting people to come to us. The network is the place. You have to go where people are.
Now, I wonder if Bill would like to host my "how MPs can spend their £10,000 communication allowance game". Don't want to seem tooo serious.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, politics

Voter apathy? Try TheirSpaces

A traditional voters' complaint about politicians is they never turn up until there's an election, then they are all over your streets and doorsteps, expecting you to turn out for them. It's a bit unfair, since traditional communication methods don't enable even the most diligent to be in lots of places at once, except perhaps on special occasions with much dashing about.
That's now changing, at least for MPs and other representatives prepared to embrace new media ... and tonight the Hansard Society gave a number of speakers the chance to explore the implications of the Internet for political awareness, participation and trust.
Professors John Curtice and Rachel Gibson offered analyses that were heavy on research but a bit light on significant shifts. Is it that the politically interested are more likely to use the Net ... or the Net helps people become more interested? Not yet clear.
Derek Wyatt MP tried showing this Blair-Cameron video comparison, Hilary Clinton's online conversations, and the French Presidential elections, but was rather defeated by lack of bandwidth in the Thatcher Room, Portcullis House. Maybe the lady doesn't really approve of YouTube politics ... but Derek's enthusiasm was enough to make me explore more here later.
However, the most interest remarks, for me, came from another professor who is also an MP - Liberal Democrat Steve Webb.
He has dealt with being everywhere at once by first setting up an opt-in e-mail list for constituents to receive non-partisan news from him. One in eight households - 5000 people - now hear regularly from Steve, and e-mail him with queries and problems. He says they come up to him in supermarkets with a nudge, a wink, and "I sent you that e-mail ... I really like hearing back from you." He says it is not about sending out political propaganda, it's about building relationships.
Even more significant, I think, is his strategy of setting up profiles in MySpace and Facebook. As he explained to me, it's all about going to where people are, rather than expecting them to come to you. (Click thumbnail for Quicktime, or here for Google video) Since younger people are failing to turn out at elections in large numbers, go to their places and engage. Earlier in the meeting I asked whether the new £10,000 communications allowance for MPs was such a great idea, since e-mail and social networking was relatively inexpensive - except in MPs' time. Would less Net-savvy MPs just spend the money on yet more boring newsletters and brochures? Steve smiled, spelled out his approach, but declined to score a point. Does the Internet help create nicer MPs, or do nicer MPs use the Net? There's one for the academics.
Previously:
Government explores going where people are ... online at least

Open Source politics - fine make sure you join in

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, politics, socialnetworking

Free conference on new media and society: old-style event

The RSA is following up discussions it hosted recently on open source politics with a more substantial free conference on The social impact of the web: society, government and the Internet on May 25. It fits with moves by the new chief executive, Matthew Taylor, to re-energise the 250-year-old institution with new forms of engagement inside and out. Earlier posts on that here and here. The e-mail invitation says:

The RSA is looking to explore the political culture and norms that the internet has been instrumental in fostering, both in relation to centralised democratic politics, and more diffuse social and civic networks, including blogging.
Our view in essence is that the high hopes of the 90s for e-democracy and new forms of on-line consultation and community mobilisation have not been met. Rather than fostering new forms of constructive engagement, dialogue and 'pro-social' community action, the type of politics most favoured by the internet seems to be conversations between fellow believers, anti-establishment cynicism and single issue mobilisation.  Too many attempts by public authorities to use the web simply involved putting existing information and processes on-line.
The communication model has been vertical and mainly downward. But we think the emergence of web 2.0 offers an opportunity to revive the idealism of a decade ago. While internet 1.0 continued to reinforce an 'us' versus 'them' divide between citizens and power, we can envisage web 2.0 encouraging a rich and constructive 'us and us' dialogue in which citizens deliberate, innovate and act together.

I have signed up with the promise of these speakers:

• Professor Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Dist. Service Prof. of Jurisprudence, Law School, Dept. of Political Science and the College, University of Chicago
• Tom Steinberg, Founder and Director, mySociety and former policty analyst
• Andrew Chadwick, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Royal Holloway, University of London
• William Davies, Goldsmiths, University of London

I'm sure these speakers will have lots to tell us, of great value. But I am also sure that there will be even more wisdom in the several hundred people attending, and I suspect we will be rather inhibited in contributing beyond the usual question and answer sessions, and coffee-break networking.
The problem is that the RSA has a wonderful theatre-style Great Room (pictured) that is terrific for 'us' to 'them' lectures, but no good for more participatory events where everyone gets a say, perhaps with a mixture of presentation and open space or unconferencing.  We'll be collected, barely connected and certainly not collective. Definitely not Web 2.0. The invitation says:

This conference will ask: How can new internet technology empower us to interact with each other in novel ways?

Daring thought: might the RSA modify its events format on special occasions, and "explore how new meetings technology can empower us to interact with each other in old ways (conversation)"? Any ideas?
Update: William Davies is promising an update on what he calls his bah humbug thesis ... may be Curmudgeon 2.0. The earlier version included:

My plea is simply that we should give serious and sustained thought to what types of cultural norms are going to be needed to make ours a civil and decent society which can respect the norms of public space, without being locked into private forms of entertainment and quasi-socialising.

Evaluating participation, amidst political realities

My friends at the participation think tank Involve have published Making a Difference: A guide to evaluating public participation in central government - pdf download. It is written by my former colleague Diane Warburton of Shared Practice, so I'm altogether well-disposed, particularly when there's an admirably brief and clear set of web pages as well as a download. The intro explains:

Public participation has become a central plank of public policy-making. Increasingly, decision-makers at all levels of government build citizen and stakeholder engagement into their policy-making processes. Activities range from large-scale consultations that involve tens of thousands of people, to focus group research, on-line discussion forums and small, deliberative citizens' juries.
This guide to evaluating public participation is intended to help those involved in planning, organising or funding these activities to understand the different factors involved in creating effective public participation.
It helps planners set and measure attainable objectives, evaluate impact, and identify lessons for future practice. Using clear language, simple instructions, illustrative case studies and a glossary, this guide is a valuable tool for anyone involved in running or commissioning public participation in central government and beyond.

The guide has been published with the Department for Constitutional Affairs, who are promoting work in this field as well as e-democracy (including this game). I hope the good practice advice resonates throughout Government. This includes starting evaluation work early by setting up a design group to agree the objectives of the exercise, the methods, the scale and the scope. If that's done, it should help those actually doing the participation work define just how much participation is on offer. As the guide says:

As long as there is room for change in the policy and the results of the engagement will make a difference, it is worth considering public engagement.

There's a rather good diagram, which I've taken the liberty of reproducing on the right - click to enlarge.

However, I was reading this at the same time as I was picking up on the reported remarks of former cabinet secretary, and top Civil Servant at the Treasury, Lord Turnbull. In an interview with the Financial Times. He gave a frank assessment (not intended for quotation, he now maintains)  of the ways of Chancellor Gordon Brown, presumed to be our next Prime Minister. The Guardian summarises it like this:

In the interview, Lord Turnbull said that Mr Brown had a "very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues".
And he added: "He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and 'they will get what I decide'. "And that is a very insulting process."
Lord Turnbull suggested that Mr Brown's style had an impact on the effectiveness of the government as a whole.
"Do those ends justify the means?" he asked. "It has enhanced Treasury control, but at the expense of any government cohesion and any assessment of strategy.
"You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all."

I don't know Gordon Brown, or his views on public engagement. He may well be strongly in favour of processes that enhance the influence of citizen consumers, and so put pressure on public services for improved performance. But his remarks do highlight that in matters of participation attitude is at least as important as method. I looked in vain in the glossary to the guide for mention of Control and Culture, but maybe they don't need explanation.

There is, however, a section on public participation goals which reproduces the spectrum of levels of engagement:

Inform: To provide the public with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives, opportunities and/or solutions.
Consult: To obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions.
Involve: To work directly with the public throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.
Collaborate: To partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives and the identification of the of the preferred solution.
Empower: To place final decision-making in the hands of the public.

From Lord Turnbull's remarks, the cynical may expect a Brown government to set engagement firmly at the Inform and Consult end of the spectrum. I hope someone someone can offer some evidence the other way. Political bloggers like Dizzy tend to say "what's new":

It is a commonly held view that in the control-freak stakes Brown is probably even worse than Blair.

... and then interpret Lord Turnbull's remarks as another round in the Blair-Brown feud:

Whilst some commentators make allusions to rapprochement and a thawing of the Cold War at the top, I'd rather make allusions to that being an illusion. It's interesting that Stalin should be invoked because frankly, it looks like a very Stalinist, ergo Soviet, détente.

There's participation (or not) and there's politics.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Open source politics: will top policy bloggers now lead the way?

Paul Evans at Never Trust a Hippy suggests that good blogs by those close to power may be more interesting than those in power. I think he has a point, and also that some high-level blogging around issues of climate change may provide opportunities to promote the open source politics and conversational democracy that politicians and policy people agree is desirable. Here's how.
Paul notes the new chief executive of the RSA Matthew Taylor has now started blogging:

This is a good thing, as he has a very good vantage point. He's been a big noise in the Labour Party, he's been the gaffer at the IPPR and has worked at No.10. And he's waded into discussions about how blogging impacts upon politics without - IMHO - really understanding how the blogosphere works. He's now running the RSA, and I hope that his blog will evolve into a ministerial proxy-blog.
Why anyone wants ministers themselves to blog, I don't know. The Chatham House Rule throws up more of interest than any ministerial statements ever do. Matthew Taylor can offer a deniable sounding board - and that's what I hope his blog turns into.

As Paul indicates, Matthew Taylor sounded off at the e-democracy '06 conference against political bloggers contributing to a "shrill discourse of demands", and called instead for more deliberation online - as I caught on video. He is now at the RSA, and recently chaired an event where Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne promoted open source politics and got some strong support for a more positive use of the web. Internally Matthew Taylor is working on how the RSA can make far better use of the collective intelligence of its 26,000 Fellows.
Anyway, back to Ministerial and associated blogging. Environment Secretary David Miliband has been diligent in maintaining his blog, and yesterday posted a detailed rebuttal of the claims made in the Channel 4 programme The Great Climate Change Swindle.

Several people have said to me that they couldn’t quite believe what they were being told in Channel 4’s programme last week on climate change – and I promised yesterday in my interview on the Today programme  to put the facts on my blog. Below I have set out what Defra scientists say about the 11 main allegations in the programme. You can read for yourself what the International Panel on Climate Change say or the statement of the Academies of Science of the 11 largest countries in the world.

On Monday Matthew Taylor started in on climate change on his new blog, reflecting on the twists and turns of Labour and Tory positions, and their coming together:

What should we make of all this? Obviously it is good that the politicians are putting climate change centre stage. After last month’s grim IPCC report (itself probably erring on the cautious side), there was nowhere left to hide on the issue. Environmental groups must feel like the only girl at the ball so assiduously are they being courted. Put both Brown’s and Cameron’s ideas together and you have a pretty serious action plan. Brown is right that action must be taken internationally; Cameron that the domestic requirements of such agreements will not be met by voluntarism alone.
But there is a danger in the environment being seen as a political fad. As the sociologist Stan Cohen brilliantly analysed in his book 'States of Denial', most of us rely on a capacity to turn our faces away from difficult truths. Thus were most Germans under Nazi rule able to deny responsibility for the Holocaust and even otherwise progressive white South Africans willing to live with Apartheid. And maybe it is how we can live affluent Western lifestyles while a few thousand miles away African children starve?
In persisting with denial we rely on certain mental tropes such as 'it's not really happening', 'it's nothing to do with me' or 'there's nothing I can do about it'. By making climate change feel like an issue of political point scoring rather then unarguable science and clear moral responsibility we run the danger of providing an easy route for denial.
Ultimately I believe we can tackle carbon emissions and have better lives, but in the short term we face some tough choices. Once this row is over, our politicians should try to find a basis for an agreed way forward.

Not many clues there yet to what's going on, but since the RSA has a major proposal for personal carbon trading, and the FT is commenting on Matthew Taylor's reaction to Tory plans, we can feel he is in the middle of it, and certainly talking to some key people offline.
There now seems to me a good opportunity here for Mr Taylor and Mr Miliband (who must know each other well) to lead the way in developing some of the online deliberation desirable around these complex issues ... as well as talking privately. The term "conversational democracy" cropped up when Paul and I bumped into each other at the RSA event, which reminded me that Stephen Coleman wrote a good pamphlet on that for IPPR and "the importance of building respect and empathy into the relationship between public and politicians". Matthew Taylor wrote a Foreword in which he said:

Stephen Coleman is right to urge a more sophisticated and ambitious use of ICT as a way of modernising and refreshing the representative relationship.

Good time to start. We now have a key politician blogging, and Mr Taylor leading an organisation committed to using social media more effectively to generate ideas and action, and a Big Issue. So I hope we will see, as a start, some linking and commenting on each other's blogs, and attempts to draw in others.
If distinguished politicians and chief execs just use their blog for declaration rather than conversation, we won't be any closer to open source politics or conversational democracy.  I'm flattered to see I'm in Mr Miliband's blogroll. That's the sort of encouragement we smaller fish in the blogging pond need - and I'm sure they do too . Put Mr M and Mr T in your news readers and blogrolls now, and let's throw them some comments and links.

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