72. Online democracy: Seven questions for government

An unconversation at GovCampCymru

This is my write up of the online democracy session at GovCampCymru (and some other linked conversations).  GovCampCymru was in fact a thoroughly excellent day organised by Satori Lab and friends.  What? You couldn’t make it?  Then come to the next one.

This particular session was about online democracy, in other words the minutes, agendas, reports etc etc that local, devolved and national government make available through their websites.  The idea was simply to start a conversation about how this stuff could be improved, who uses it, what they want and so on.  What I really liked was the opportunity to bring a mix of voices to the discussion; policy types, democracy types, technical types, community types etc.  Thank you so much for all the contributions on the day or otherwise. This is very much my take so please, if  I've got it wrong or missed anything - just add a comment.  Also – sorry if this a bit long.  I didn’t have time to make it shorter.

At the heart of our discussion were the following seven questions for government about their online democracy:

1. Is it readable?

Seems pretty basic but actually this stuff is hard.  The language of decision making is not the language that people use in the pub. Perhaps the process itself needs a more technical language but, when governments share, they need to make sure people know what they are saying.  We talked about the way that the Government Digital Service approach language and thought this was worth using.

2. Are you clear about the purpose? 

Have you thought about why you publish this stuff online?  For information? To ask for people’s views?  To ensure politicians are held to account?  Just because you have to?  Once this is clear you can design what you provide.  You can also tell people why you are providing it so they know what to expect.

3. Do you know what the users want?

‘Users’ here means the people who actually look at all of those online minutes, agendas and reports.  Do you know who they are and what their needs are?  Do you know how they come to your websites and what happens when they do?  In service design this is sometimes called mapping user journeys – putting the citizen at the centre of what you provide. As someone in the group put it: 'If we want people to get involved, we need to open up and work from bottom up. Need to ask people'

I did some initial twitter ‘research’ on who uses this stuff at local government level and why.  Here are a few of the suggestions:

• Councillors to support their role and find out what is happening in their community
• Council officers to help them do their jobs and to know what decisions have been made
• Active Citizens / Citizen bloggers to hold politicians to account and to make sure people know how the democratic process is affecting their area
• Charities and communities groups looking for anything that affects the people they work with and to support ‘lobbying’ of councillors if they need to
• Journalists to find information about planning applications but also any policy related news stories
• Local campaigners who want to know what is happening about their issue
• People who just want to find out what is happening in their area
• Students because they have to for their assignments
• Auditors so they can check if the council is being run properly

It was great to hear that the Welsh Assembly have been talking to citizen bloggers about their needs – I’d love to learn more.

4. How will your content get to the non users?

Most people, of course, have nothing to do with online democracy and may never want to.  But the stuff going through the democratic process affects them so how are you going to reach them?  Have you thought about the mediators (many listed in the point above), the ‘civic sharers’ who can pass this stuff on?  Government is not very good at working with the ‘hard to reach’ (terrible phrase, I know) but other bodies are.  How are you going to make use of them?

5. Is you content shareable?

The advantage of social media is that it is easy to share.  But online democracy is not particularly shareable.  Content captured in lengthy pdfs is hardly likely to go viral.
We talked about the short form / long form approach that many use in central government.  If every meeting item, every report was captured and published as a shareable summary it would be much more likely to get people engaged.  I also like the point that was made about making digital democracy digestible ‘like john Craven's Newsround’:)

6. How will you make your content relevant?

People want to know about the stuff that affects them yet government publishes only in a way that suits the process.  People in the group pointed out that:

• The content of politics is generally vague and/or boring 
• People shouldn't have to consume the whole damn process 
• Our democratic content is nothing then everything i.e. There is no warm up
• We need to work on how to get to the right people - digital democracy is not necessarily about getting lots of hits or likes 

There are lots of new platforms springing up (like vocaleyes) that might make the process more relevant and meaningful and relevant for people – how are you going to link with these?

7. How will you respond?

Finally, and perhaps the most difficult point is what are you going to do as a result of engagement?  If online democracy is just about informing then be honest and say so.  But if you tell people that you want to engage - then what does this mean?

The view in the group was that the culture of government is not a responsive one:

• The importance of having a responsive back end to go with any fancy front end for digital democracy
• We need to create organisations / democratic structures that care about what people say in consultations because generally they don’t
• There is a difference between disseminating information and starting a conversation

What can we do?

At the end of the session we identified two prices of work that would thought would really help:

• A style guide for online democracy to help ensure it is readable and shareable
• Research into what users want from online democracy – some user journey maps that government can learn from 

Ok, let’s get started then...


 

55. Democracy Bytes

Just as a byte is a unit of digital information so a democracy byte is a unit of digital democracy.

If we want to make traditional representative democracy more open, engaging and vibrant by digitising it (and we do) then we need to be clear, conceptually speaking, about what the stuff of democracy actually is. Democracy bytes are that stuff – democracy, broken down into its constituent atoms, so that it can be digitised and shared.

The argument here, which is about how we use digital to enhance local democracy, comes in four parts:

• We should be talking about the local decision making process rather than meetings, organisations or even elected representatives although they are all relevant and important of course.
• The local decision making process can be broken down into many separate democratic conversations that lead to decisions.
• Democratic conversations can themselves be broken down into four basic and distinct types of democratic statement; questions, opinions, proposals and decisions.
• Democratic statements can be digitised and shared with citizens as democracy bytes.

This post is a development of the ideas I’ve previously shared on Social Council Decision Making and is an aspect of the wider Digital Democracy Framework developed with Carl Whistlecraft. Carl and myself are part of the Localgov Digital Steering Group, where we are majoring on ‘redesigning local democracy in digital world’ and this is a part of our contribution to that work.

 

Democratic Conversations

If we want the public to be engaged in the local decision making process then we need to offer people simple routes into the decision making conversations that interest them. One big problem with the process at the moment is that local politics is, without an investment of time and effort, a mystery to most people. Lawrence Pratchett uses the metaphor of jazz to argue this point:   

The argument here is that the institutions of local politics have become like jazz: without a high level of concentration they are incomprehensible to most people.... This is not an argument that says that most people are stupid and that politics needs to be ‘dumbed down’. Rather, it is an argument that most people are too busy doing other things to worry about the institutions of local politics: they do not want to work that hard to understand something that is often deemed peripheral to their lives (1).

As Pratchett notes, Jazz was effectively superseded by rock and roll, a form of music that ’stripped back this sophistication to a much simpler sound that was easier to follow and understand’. Not that Pratchett is arguing for simplification at the expense of the necessary subtleties of a political system but rather that the answer might lie with intermediary bodies such as the media or voluntary groups who might act as interpreters.

Democratic Statements

To define a democratic conversation we have to break it down into its constituent parts. In short we can say that a democratic conversation starts with a question, ends with a decision and includes opinions and proposals. Questions, decisions, opinions and proposals are all basic types of democratic statement where:  

• Questions are the start point of conversations. They are a statement of a problem and an invitation to an audience to participate (they may not always have a question mark). They can originate from anywhere but must be adopted by a decision making individual or group. Examples would include scrutiny topics, consultations or planning applications.
• Opinions are statements that set out the view of a particular person or body in respect of a question. They will normally be supported by evidence or at least clearly stated reasons. Opinions belong to a named individual or group (e.g. Citizen, Cabinet Member, Council, Scrutiny Committee). They can be presented anonymously as part of a conversation but somewhere it must be known that they are owned by someone entitled to present them. ‘Facts’ enter the process as opinions, partly as every ‘fact’ has some element of subjectivity but more because the relative importance of a ‘fact’ for a question certainly is down to opinion.
• Proposals are statements that make a recommendation about what an individual or group, responsible for a decision should do. They are directed to the specific individual or group who has the power to make the decision. Proposals are promoted by questions in as far as closed questions limit the range of possible proposals down to a minimum of two whereas open questions are less prescriptive.
• Decisions define the ends of conversations. They are statements about what the council will do and relate to policies and services for which the council has responsibility. Decisions will be taken only by the individual or body that has the legal responsibility for that decision – the decision maker.

This is of course pretty much how it works already just stated in a more generic way. The intention is to define a language that applies whether we are talking about cabinet, planning, scrutiny or any other council function. Cabinet ‘conversations’, for example, operate within a clearly defined policy framework. Questions, often triggered by officers, lead to consultation processes that gather opinions and proposals before decisions are finally taken. Scrutiny inquiries follow the format of questions, evidence gathering, conclusions and recommendations. For planning process, applications are questions, objections are opinions, proposed amendments are proposals and decisions are, well, decisions.

The idea is that, by using a common language across all of these processes, we can generate one single flow of democratic conversations before providing them to citizens in a bespoke way; we can move from an approach that is committee centred to one that is citizen centred.

 

Democracy Bytes

Democratic statements linked in democratic conversations and made available digitally in a form that people can share and comment on, become democracy bytes. In one sense we can say that these are ‘digital minutes’; they are the open data of local democracy (the word minute actually means ‘chopped small’, which is exactly what we need the decision making process to be if we are going to make digestable it to the public).

How democracy bytes are shared is a matter for local debate – it could be a single site or a range of apps. Great examples already exist of course. Check out Ask Bristol or the Friction Free Democracy project for example.

By clarifying what democracy bytes are we can at least have a common understanding of what the stuff of local democracy actually is and a clear assignment for developers to work with. The challenge for local councils is to find the technical ways in which these democracy bytes can be shared. The day to say sharing of a democracy bytes will be, in the first instance, a role for democratic support staff. No, actually this will be an entirely new role for democratic support staff but that sounds like another post.

Update:  A suggestion from @gr8governance that there is a fifth type of democratic statement - Outcomes - makes perfect sense to me.  Outcomes describe the consequences of conversations that follow (or not) after the decision has been taken.  In the scrutiny world we might call these 'follow ups'.  Similarly decision trackers are concerned with outcomes and 'delivery' is a word that gets used in this context.  Care needs to be taken of course with the word outcome as it has a range of different meanings - here it means the immediate impact of a decision on the service or organisation to which the decision relates.  The wider social, economic and environmenatl effects are another story for another day!    

(1) Pratchett, L (2004) Making Politics Work in Stoker and Wilson (Eds) British Local Government into the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2551172370/  

20. Social Council Decision Making

This idea follows a few tweets I exchanged with @davebriggs, @ingridk and @acreoandy.  I've left it a while before getting all this down so apologies for what I've left out.  I should also point out that I am highly non-technical so risks of errors in that department are high.  I write this from the perspective of a local government policy person who has been increasingly interested in the way that social media can help with the day job and increasingly impressed by the many supportive people out there who have been willing to help.

The starting point of this idea is the generally poor state of online agendas, minutes and reports on UK local government websites.  More often than not you are presented with a list of pdf files, pages organised by date rather than content, reports hidden away in a larger 'agenda pack' documents and layers of pages that have to be waded through to find what you want.  If you want a metaphor then think of the final scenes of the first Indiana Jones film where hard won and precious treasure is lost forever in a massive warehouse.  Ok, maybe this is a bit harsh but you get my drift.

It seems strange, given the importance of this stuff to local democracy, that it is so badly presented online.  After all, those agendas, minutes and reports tell the story of local democratic deliberation and decision making. Its even more surprising given the availability and diversity of online tools that something clever isn't being used (as far as I know).

So, by way of giving some clever techie developer a start out there, here are my 10 essential features of social council decision making - in other words how to better present agendas, minutes and reports on local government websites, based on what I've seen on Facebook, Twitter and the Communities of Practice Site:

1. Everything should be broken down into bitesize chunks to look like status updates or tweets.  This makes things easier to share.  Instead of agendas, minutes and reports we should be talking about discussions, decisions and documents.  In other words, no more collecting everything into single agenda pack and minutes documents. 
2. Discussions and decisions should be taggable so its possible to easily find anything linked to a particular subject.  If I want to find out everything my council has discussed and decided about wind turbines I should simply be able to click on the wind turbine tag and find out.  Tags will also allow everything relating to a single geographic community to be found instantly.  This will be useful for citizens but also for councillors and for the officers supporting them.
3. Discussions and decisions should be shareable.  If I see something I'm pleased or angry about I should be able to share it on facebook or twitter quickly and easily.  Similarly if I want to bookmark something for future reference I should able to do that. 
4. Discussions and decisions should be commentable.  Just like a status update on facebook it should be possible to add comments.  It's an easy way to get people's views before a decision is taken and to find out what they think afterwards.
5. A well designed widget would be a great way of embedding discussions and decisions onto blogs and other sites.  Tailoring the RSS feed (yes of course there would be one) to specific tags would allow hyperlocal sites to only feature content relevant to that community or special interest bloggers to only pick up on the issues relevant to them.  Here is an example of Kirklees Council doing the sort of thing I mean.
6. Every committee and councillor should have their own dynamic homepage.  As well as providing for 'manual' updates each home page would automatically feature content relevant to that committee or to that councillor.  This would make it easy to see what your councillor was involved in and how they voted.  They could add their own commentary on to what they had done which would also be open to comment.
7. Reports should be stored in a searchable, taggable library just as with the communities of practice site.  Presentations and any other relevant media could also be included.
8. Of course it would also be nice to include a metrics page so people could see what activity was taking place and how many people were actively engaged.  Again, like they do on the Communities of practice site

All of these seem perfectly reasonable to me.  These last two features are perhaps a little more ambitious.

• Everything should take place in real time.  This is straightforward for items on agendas - these can just be published when they are normally published.  Points made at meetings and the decisions made may be a little more difficult to do.  The process of writing minutes is currently a formal one which takes place after the meeting where different people are consulted about what they should contain.  Minutes are not formally agreed until the stat of the next meeting.  Having real time decisions means a change in way this is done.  You can follow Kirklees Council (#kirkcouncil) on twitter to see what this might look like in practice.
• The platform that supports all this should be national.  The advantages are that information could be gathered across all of local government on a particular topic, say wind turbine applications, and work could be borrowed between councils saving time and resources.  This article about using the communities of practice site to do research explains much better what I mean.. 

There we are.  That's all I want.  Now go away and make it for me :-)