85. Driver diagrams

Driver diagrams are logic charts with three or four levels.  They are a neat way to capture the links between strategy and action.  They provide a one-side-of-A4 description of what you are trying to do and how you are planning to do it.  They also show how different services contribute to broad outcomes and how all these contributions link together.  Driver diagrams are now at the heart of our One Swansea Plan (the overarching strategy for the area).  We rather like them so I thought I would share.

We got the idea of using driver diagrams from health, specifically our local public health team who use them in the Public Health Strategic Framework.  The idea of including them in the One Swansea Plan then came ‘bottom up’ from various partnership and policy coordinators who saw the approach and really wanted to use it.

In our plan we have six population outcomes – conditions that we want to achieve – for example Children have a good start in life or People learn successfully.

For each of the population outcomes we have produced a driver diagram that includes:

• The Population Outcome 
• Primary drivers that describe what needs to be in place for the outcome to happen
• Secondary drivers that describe the most important things that we need to do to achieve the primary drivers 
• Key Indicators to help track progress

For example, for the Population Outcome ‘Children have a good start in life’, a primary driver is ‘Babies are born healthy’ and a secondary driver that contributes to this is ‘Improve the health and safety of pregnant women’.

This example could also be written like this:

Children have a good start in life when babies are born healthy so we need to improve the health and safety of pregnant women.

While not included in our current plan, each diagram can also include tertiary drivers; a fourth column that covers the services, projects and other activities that contribute to the secondary drivers.  We will be adding these as we develop the driver diagrams further.

Each diagram has been developed through our Multi Agency Research Group by subject experts and through wider consultation.  In June 2015 we held a workshop to refine the diagrams.  We know that the diagrams will not be perfect and we intend to update and improve them every year as part of updating the plan.  

Our strategic partnership (Swansea Local Service Board) will use the driver diagrams to set their priorities for each year.  If you are working in Wales then you might like to know that this approach is entirely compatible with the Well-being of Future Generations Act and that the secondary drivers can be used as well-being objectives.

Looking forward we will continue to develop the approach. The one area that we definitely need to explore is how the driver diagrams can be used to get the public more involved with the strategy.

83. Honeybee democracy and beecision making

Honeybee Democracy is the title of a book by Thomas Seeley.  It's about how bees make decisions and, as Seeley points out, there might be something here for people to learn from.  In this post I want to highlight those insights and suggest how bee decision making might be adapted to the practice of local democracy.

The new idea here is beecision making - a method that a group of independent minded people can use to explore a range of solutions to a given problem.  This idea combines insights from honeybee democracy and from the unconference movement.  As with a bee colony there is no powerful leader and no political parties.  As with an unconference there is no formal structure or process and people are free to vote with their feet and follow their own judgements.

How Bees Decide Stuff 

Contrary to what you might think, the queen doesn't run the colony - she just lays the eggs.  Instead decision making is governed by something called swarm intelligence - wikipedia define this as 'the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial'.

We know how bees decide on a new home thanks to Thomas Seeley's work.  The process goes like this:

The swarm perches on a nearby tree, then sends out a few dozen scout bees to scour the neighbourhood. Their job is to find, measure and evaluate every hollow tree or other enclosed space. When the scouts return to the several-thousand-strong swarm, they dance atop the other bees, telling them what they have found.

A potential nest must be large enough to hold ample honey to feed the colony through the winter, high enough to offer protection from predators, and have a small entrance for the same reason. The vigour and duration of each scout's dance reflect her enthusiasm for the site she has found.

The decision-making process...is both effective and efficient, involving a "debate" over the several sites the scouts discover. When a scout returns and dances vigorously, other scouts fly off to check on her choice. Over the course of hours or days, they reach a consensus, and advocates of rejected sites simply stop plumping for them.

This selfless process works because all the bees in the swarm are the queen's daughters, and they share the common goal of colony survival. Though an individual bee is not particularly intelligent, the collective "swarm intelligence" produces impressive results. 

via New Scientist 

As Mary Myerscough points out: "Individual bees don’t compare multiple sites, but visit only one and instinctively know the difference between a so-so spot and “a bee five-star mansion,”.  There is no benchmarking or options appraisal - just the wisdom of crowds.

This LGIU post:  'What can councils learn from bees?' reflects similar work by Peter Miller:  

Miller suggests that three main lessons can be learned from the bees: seek a diversity of knowledge; encourage friendly competition of ideas and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices. 

These insights from swarm intelligence, mixed with some ideas from the unconference movement can, I think, provide a neat method of decision making.

A Beecision Making Conference 

The unconference movement is associated with events that are participant driven and reject the need for top down organisation and pre agreed agendas.  There is a clearly a lot in common here with the bees.

Starting with the idea of an unconference, honeybee democracy might be applied in practice like this:

• A problem is framed and participants are invited to attend - 50 or more would seem about right 
• Up to 10 participants are signed up as scouts - their job is to go away and research solutions and to select the one they like best 
• At the conference each scout pitches their solution to the whole group then withdraws to a separate room / table 
• A second group goes to talk to the scouts (as many as they like) and they come back and pitch to the room the solution they like best - they then return to be with the scout of their preferred choice 
• The rest of the group is then free to roam around the conference and engage with the different solutions - once they are happy they  have found one they like they stay there (unless persuaded to leave) 
• After a set time the conference ends and the solution that has attracted the biggest crowd is selected. 

I'm sure this can be improved - maybe it's been done already.  Let me know!

P.S.

I'm struck by how much this chimes with Rousseau's ideas about democracy.  The process relies on independent individuals concerned with the common good; parties and factions would prevent this process from working.

PP.S

See also the 'people swarm' idea, put forward by Finlayson and Martin that I've written about before.

Photo: https://flic.kr/p/sAKF59

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/  

44. Local Digital Democracy: A Five Point Checklist

Back in February 2011 I wrote a joint post with the legendary Carl Whistlecraft setting out some thinking on local digital democracy and what it might look like.  You can find the original post on Carl's blog here.

In the post we defined local digital democracy as:

• Using social media to make a bridge between the formal world of local politics and the real world of real people
• Being clear that local government is not just about services – it has a distinct and important democratic role with elected local councillors at its heart
• Recognising that the world is changing.  Social media is changing the way the world works – local democracy needs to catch up
• Recognising that local democracy needs stronger citizen engagement
• Building from the traditional ways of doing things and using online tools to make them work better and reach more people

We could also see numerous benefits including for decision making and for reputation, for councillors, officers and citizens.  

In the post we identified the five essential features of local digital democracy.  Here I have just tweaked them into a into a checklist of five questions.  I think they provide a nifty little framework for assessing whether any given council 'has' local digital democracy.  How does yours score?

Local Digital Democracy:  A Five Point Checklist for Local Government

1.  Are Councillors Online?   

• How many councillors are blogging, tweeting, facebooking etc?
• Is training and support provided for those using social media?
• Are awareness sessions provided for those who haven't yet put their toes in the water?

See CllrSocmed for much more info on this.

2.  Is the Council's Online Decision Making Social? 

• Can online agendas, minutes and reports be easily shared via social media?
• Are items broken down into bite sized chunks rather than published in unwieldy PDFs?
• Is it possible for people to comment on decision making items via social media?

See my previous post on social council decision making here. 

 

3.  Are Council Meetings Social?

• Do meetings have webcasts that allow engagement via social media?
• Can councillors and citizens tweet at Council meetings?
• Does an officer provide a formal live commentary on meetings via social media?

See the Kirklees experience for a great example.
Dave Briggs has also been looking at the issue of tweeting at council meetings.

4.  Are Local Elections Social?

• Do election teams make use of social media to promote the election process?
• Do candidates share their election materials online or parties provide online manifestos?
• Are results shared via social media?

Again, more wonderful stuff from Kirklees.

5.  Is There a Local Digital Democracy Community?

• Is the Council proactively supporting local digital democracy?
• Are initiatives such as Local Democracy Week being used to support digital engagement?
• Are there online communities supporting local digital democracy and looking at how it might be improved?

I've posted before on Council's producing democracy plans - what's needed is a digital version.

So, what does your Council score out of five?  I'd be amazed if any actually scored five but, who knows, maybe one day...

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3660047829/

32. Proper Methodology

If you follow me on twitter you might have heard me moaning about people who use the word methodology when what they really mean is method.  You probably think this is just some grumpy middle aged bloke being pedantic and, well, you are probably right.

Anyhow, I do wonder whether 'proper' methodology has something to offer for council decision making.  Before I explain what that might be, here is my go at defining methodology - forgive me if you already know this stuff - you can skip to the last bit. 

Methodology in Research

In broad terms methodology refers to the consideration of methods (survey, focus group, participant observation etc etc) and is a word normally found in the context of research.  Specifically it tends to refer to a discussion of why certain methods were chosen over others. If you have ever produced a dissertation for a course you will probably have written a methodology section (you know, that bit about quantitative and qualitative methods – you probably wrote it last).

A methodological discussion in the context of research would normally include:

• The aim / purpose of the research
• Your philosophical assumptions – such as how you view the nature of reality (ontology), how you think things can be known (epistemology) 
• The different methods available
• The resources available to undertake the research and any other practical limitations
• Ethical considerations – if your research involves children, for example.
• The characteristics of the group, people or things being researched –researching an elite is different to researching the public for example

Having taken all these factors into account the researcher can then justify the choice of research method and how set out how the research will proceed.  A clearly stated methodology provides transparency and supports rigour.  By setting out your choices it is possible for others to challenge poor decisions and see if your reasoning is consistent.  This point about consistency is why it is important to set out your philosophical assumptions even if these things may seem ‘academic’ and are ultimately difficult to prove one way or the other. 

A Proper Public Service Methodology

Boiling it right down, methodology is simply an aspect of decision making and this is why I think it can be applied in the public sector which is, after all, constantly considering methods.  If you think about it, many of the questions that go to local government cabinet and council meetings are about choosing methods e.g. ‘which method should we use to deliver this service?’ or ‘which method should we use to achieve this policy aim?’.

Why not include a methodology section, similar to that used for research, in every report that considers this type of question?

I am not suggesting that every council report should spell out the author’s philosophical assumptions (although, why not!) but, while many factors are explained (aims, needs etc), there are some important assumptions that inform decision making that often go unstated such as:

• Assumptions about human nature and how people will behave
• Assumptions about what people want
• Assumptions about staff behaviours, capabilities etc
• Ethical assumptions

Exactly how this might happen in practice might need some further working out but I hope you get the gist.

Let me give the example of sickness absence policy to show what I mean.

Essentially there are two views of human nature / behaviour that can underpin this policy each having very different implications for the methods that get used.  One is to assume that people want take advantage of the organisation and ‘pull a sickie’ given the opportunity.  This assumption lead to policies such as increased monitoring by managers and use of disciplinary procedures.  The alternative is to assume that sickness is genuine and that employees want to be in work.  This assumption leads to investment in occupational therapy, stress counselling and the like.  A third option is to assume that both types of behaviours exist and this implies that both strategies need to be used but is this really possible?  Does one set of strategies cancel out the benefits of the other?  To be honest I don’t know but if these assumptions were set out clearly then the implications could be tested and debated.  

So, by introducing proper methodology into council decision making we should get a more transparent, rigorous and ultimately effective process.

It's the democratic equivilent of showing the working out.

And, if I have used the term methodology incorrectly – please feel free to tweet me :)

Photo credit (presentation): http://www.flickr.com/photos/fumi/2740537902/in/photostream/
Photo credit (blackboard):  http://www.flickr.com/photos/gianpierre_soto/5505213117/

24. Participatory Budgeting

This is really a guest post by Robin Clarke of the Office of Public Management. I am grateful he offered to write the short piece below as it meant I finally got round to highlighting what is one of the more interesting local democracy ideas around.
According to the Participatory Budgeting Unit:

Participatory budgeting directly involves local people in making decisions on the spending and priorities for a defined public budget.

The idea, which comes in many shapes and sizes, started in Porto Alegre in Brazil where it has been a major part of governance in that city.  As Graham Smith says in his excellent 'Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from the world':

Of all the participatory initiatives used in developing nations, it is Participatory Budgeting that has caught the imagination of practitioners and academics.

If you are interested in PB (as folk like to call it) then Smith's case study in Beyond the Ballot is an excellent place to start. After that you can dive in to the many, menay reports, posts and articles that are out there.

In terms of what is happening in the UK, this report - 'Communities in the driving seat: a study of Participatory Budgeting in England' - gives a in depth and up to date round up.  However, what is happening in the UK doesn't look much what is happening in places like Brazil.  This is a shame as PB really is one of the more interesting ways to transform the structures of local government in the UK. 

Here is Robin's take:

Participatory budgeting still needs a shake-up?

Somewhere in my distant past I worked at the IPPR think-tank on developing ideas for new democratic processes which could have the potential to liven up the UK’s less than vibrant democracy. Democracy had come to be seen as something which happened once every few years at the ballot box and was then filed away until the next election. To me democracy should also be about the conversations and activities that take place between elections.

Some of the work we did at IPPR did make something of a difference, for example, deliberative approaches such as citizens’ juries attracted interest and even found their way into Prime Ministerial speeches and policy. But other things fell by the wayside or just became a side show never quite realising their potential. I remember hosting a seminar to look at whether we could introduce Participatory budgeting (PB) into the UK context. At the time they did not quite fit into any of my project briefs but I felt sure that they could shake democracy up in a fairly big way. Here was an approach which was not about just consulting people but actually handing direct decision making power over to them. Potentially large budgets could be put in the hands of ordinary citizens.

For the next few years I knew that PB had found a niche in the local government world but I had not read up on the practical detail. Then a few months ago I attended a conference to celebrate 10 years of PB. But the models that were being presented did not look anything life what we had speculated about all those years ago. PB had become a process whereby small areas of discretionary spending were decided by small groups of local people. A typical example would be that a budget of £20k would be shared out amongst 10 local projects with no single project being allowed to receive more £2.5k. The project proposers would get up on a stage and say what they wanted to do with the money and audience would vote. It is not hard to imagine that those projects which managed to pack the hall with the most people would be the most likely to get the £2.5k.

More recently there has been a push by NESTA to scale-up PB so that it deals with bigger budgets and more mainstream areas of spending rather than the small less hard hitting discretionary areas. There should be so many incentives for PB becoming more like the model we envisaged. The coalition government is pretty clear that it wants to redraw the relationship between public bodies and their publics. Local people are to become more powerful. They should be co-deciders, co-creators, co-deliverers…co everything. But this won’t happen unless local authorities are pushed and encouraged to make this change and at present I don’t see much evidence of PB being a tool for driving some of this.

22. The Co-productive Council

I’ve been doing some work with the excellent Prof. Tony Bovaird lately on co-production and it prompted me to think about what a co-productive council might look like.   First, however, a few words about co-production as, if you didn't know, you might have thought it was all about making movies...

 Co-production in Public Services

Co-production is an idea that is certainly gaining traction. There are probably too many definitions but a good place to start is where the phrase was first used:

The term ‘co-production’ was coined originally at the University of Indiana in the 1970s when Professor Elinor Ostrom was asked to explain to the Chicago police why the crime rate went up when the police came off the beat and into patrol cars. She used the term as a way of explaining why the police need the community as much as the community need the police.(new economics foundation, 2008: Co-production: A Manifesto for growing the core economy)

The New Economics Foundation and NESTA describe it this way:

Co-production is a new vision for public services which offers a better way to respond to the challenges we face - based on recognising the resources that citizens already have, and delivering services with rather than for service users, their families and their neighbours. Early evidence suggests that this is an effective way to deliver better outcomes, often for less money.

A great summary can be found here.  This overview by Tony Bovaird, Elke Löffler and Frankie Hine-Hughes, highlights how the concept can be broken down to apply to different aspects of the service delivery cycle such as co-planning, co managing or co-assessment.

For a really interesting example of a whole Council approach take a look at Lambeth Council.  They have recently defined themselves as a 'Cooperative Council and are seeking to underpin all of their service delivery with the principles of co-production.   A white paper was produced and a special commission set up to work through the proposals before the approach was agreed - there is plenty of material to look at.

Can Local Democracy Be Co-produced?

In many ways this sounds like restating the question about whether representative and participatory democracy can work in tandem or even be combined.  In some ways it is but in some ways, however, applying the debates around the co-production of services to the co-production of policies and decisions opens up a new perspective on some old problems.  Start thinking about politicians instead of professionals, citizens rather than service users and policy cycles rather than service cycles and I think there definitely something new to be had.

Borrowing from Bovaird et al, the benefits of co-producing democracy can be stated as follows:

• citizens know things that many politicians don’t know
• ... and can make a policy more effective by the extent to which they go along with its requirements
• ... and have time, information and financial resources that they are willing to invest to improve their own quality of life and into helping others
• … and have diverse capabilities and talents which they can share with politicians and other citizens
• … and can engage in collaborative rather than paternalistic relationships with politicians, with other citizens and with other members of the public

The Co-productive Council

Adapting the principles of the co-production of services, then, it is possible to imagine a Council that co-produces its democracy.   

Like the ideal of co-producing services, where initiatives can take place at every stage of the service delivery cycle, the co-productive council would have in place co-productive activities at every stage of the policy and decision making cycle.  So, borrowing again from  the model by Bovaird et al, it is possible to conceive of a co-productive policy making process:

Co-defintion of problems – e.g. area forums, community conferences, petitioning

Co-formulation of options – e.g. co-option of public onto scrutiny committees, community / user consultation

Co-decision making – policy juries, referenda, online deliberation

Co-implementation – (see co-production of services!)

Co-evaluation - co-option of public onto scrutiny committees, area forums

This simple framework might be the starting point for identifying gaps and looking at what areas might need to be developed if a council is to be truly co-productive.

One final thought, a co-productive council would also be one where councillors, like the Chicago Police, would get out of their metaphorical patrol cars and onto the metaphorical beat.  Although this is of course what many, if not most, councillors do already.  It seems that the foundations for a co-productive council may already be in place.

21. Collective Pledging

I was reading this piece today in the Guardian.  It's about a website called Groupon which offers discounts to subscribers on a wide range of products.  The Guardian piece summarises the way it works like this:

each morning, you open your email to discover one or two offers of steep discounts on restaurant food, or beauty treatments, or adventurous experiences: recent London deals, for example, included 54% off a kite-surfing course, tapas for two at £19 instead of £48, and six sessions of laser hair removal at a quarter of the regular price. Nominally, there's a catch – you get the deal only if it "tips", meaning that a sufficient number of people sign up – but today that almost always happens.

In other words discount deals are proposed by retailers but are only triggered if a specified number of consumers sign up for them - thereby, in theory, reducing the risk for the retailers and allowing them to manage their promotions more effectively.  The added value of the website is the extra reach that it gives to companies.  There is also an added social effect whereby people who have signed up for a deal may seek to encourage others they know to sign up so that it will 'tip'.  It's not all straightforward of course, read the article if you want to learn more about the downsides.

The interesting question for me is whether this kind of collective pledging could be applied to local politics with the local council acting as a kind of democratic groupon.  It might work like this:

• The Council would maintain an email list of interested citizens - all would be eligible but some may choose to opt out
• Proposals would be formulated by councillors as potential solutions to current policy problems
• Proposals would be sent to citizens as offers - these might be targeted to specific groups such as council tenants, businesses or people living in a particular community
• If the support of enough citizens was received the proposal would be enacted - citizens pledging to participate directly would enter into some kind of formal contract to help ensure continued involvement

Different types of proposal might include:

• Decisions that need a certain number to sign up to be validated
• New models of service delivery, such as community trusts, that require citizens to be formal stakeholders
• Voluntary community initiatives such as litter picks, walking school buses or elderly care schemes
• New services that require high levels of community support or that the council does not have the resources to enforce such as perhaps new parking or recycling schemes

Of course this could all happen without the technology but it is social media that makes this easy to organise and fun to use.  It also creates a social environment for collective pledging to take place.

So , there it is, all it needs now is a catchy brand name.  Anyone?