2009 predictions from elsewhere (and one of my own)

Looking into the crystal ball. NB: This is not an accurate painting of the author of this post.

My friend, former Hansard Society e-democracy watcher Ross Ferguson says:

A local government will fall head-over-heels in love with the promise of eDemocracy and launch into an ambitious project to put digital front-and-centre of its democratic processes and service provision. It will be facilitated with next-generation municipal ICT and it will capture our imaginations but it will come at a price.

On a new blog, Local Gov 2.0, Ian Vaughan predicts….

User Generated Content (UGC) is the key Web 2.0 tool I feel that should be integrated into LA’s website. Following the lead set by the Guardian newspaper and integrating a comments system throughout the website with user profiles, tags and clippings combined with a usable design (as many LA websites are still far from usable compared to the private sector) will help LA’s reach out to their citizens, and allow them to comment on topics that interest them and allow them to connect with fellow citizens on the LA website with similar interests.

Steph Gray thinks…

… we’ve done wikis, blogs and even widgets. We’ve talked a lot about consultation, and concluded the whole policy development process needs fixing. So in the year ahead, I’ll be putting the emphasis on participation rather than technology, not just in terms of formal, government-led consultation, but also using technology and good old-fashioned social skills which civil servants surely have, to draw on customer feedback, generate ideas and design solutions with help from outside the organisation. Maybe we’ll work on fewer projects, but have a wider perspective on the ones we really push.

And, lastly, Beth predicts that the need for increased return on investment in staff time, and the way that information overload is costing businesses and non-profits money will drive a take-up of collaborative media.

If I were to rank these predictions, I’d say that Beth’s is the most likely to be true. The chances of a reasonably high-selling management text book with an annoying title being published telling managers how they can ‘harness the power of information’ in some way or other must be close to evens. A slightly less-likely but more useful possibility is that someone will write a very readable Malcolm Gladwell-esque book about how interactivity is a moral duty and that those who don’t fulfil it are impoverishing humanity needlessly. (I’d be happy to co-author this if anyone is interested?)

But my problem with Ian and Ross’s predictions are that they misread one of the key problems with local government. The agenda of local government is set by bureaucratic priorities rather than by democratic ones. Were local government officials obliged to sit an examination in which they were marked on their ability to apply the principles of representative government to local democracy, then Ross’s prediction could come true. But they aren’t, and any local government ‘e-democracy project’ that attracts investment from local government will necessarily by-pass councillors (or involve them in a paltry way, as is the case with perhaps the UK’s highest-profile local e-democracy exercise in Bristol)

There are a number of barriers that need to be overcome before any local authority is able to say that it has gone some way towards pioneering a copy-able e-democracy project. They are…

1. An emphasis from senior management on the desirability of ‘interactivity’ at all levels – a management decision to remove information from silos and remove a good deal of the risk-aversion from all areas of information management. This is a major project that deals with the management culture of the organisation. Every officer that went off on a course that was managed externally from the local authority in question would come back with new obstacles and it would meet a good deal of resistance internally. I think it is safe to say that this will not be complete by the end of 2009
2. This ‘duty of interactivity’ would need to be communicated to councillors by their political leaderships. It would involve a programme of training backed by political encouragement from all of the political parties concerned. A few years ago, I met the leadership of Bracknell Forest council. The (dominant) Conseravative group would not select individuals that were not prepared to use interactive tools such as e-mail. A political decision on the part of a small number of political groups to promote interactivity among their elected members (and to de-select those who won’t play ball) would be do-able by the end of 2009 if any of the politicians concerned thought it was worthwhile
3. A decision from both the bureaucratic management and the political leadership to promote a widespread understanding of local representative democracy. This would involve a progamme of training that underlines the need of every officer to involve as many elected councillors as possible in each strategic decision that is made by permanent staff at the council. This would need to be done in a meaningful way. Again, I suspect that this is a good deal more than one years’ worth of work. And the use of the word ‘suspect’ is a bit generous here, I think?
4. This is the easy bit. In a representative democracy, it is possible to promote a higher standard of deliberation by improving the quality of conversation at a local level. Councillors, local volunteers, end even council officers could tune into the blogs linked from the sidebar of this blog and pick up new tips every day on how quality local conversations can be created.

On item two (above) I worked with Bracknell Forest on encouraging their councillors to manage websites. The project had a cost, and when the council was obliged to find cost-savings, cutting the resources designed to promote local democracy online was a bit of a no-brainer as far as the council as concerned. For this reason, Ross’ ‘it will come at a price’ element to his prediction may invalidate the rest of it.

So here is my prediction for 2009: That items 1-4 will not really be advanced at any local authority in 2009. However, a number of opinion leaders will grasp that item 4 represents a quick-win and that such conversations can start to be fostered sometime in 2010. This will involve the adaption of ‘point-of-view shifting media’ of the AccessCity kind – one in which citizens are encouraged to start a useful conversation about individual micro issues that concern them. I’d be very surprised if this were ever done on a local authority website (and I don’t think it should be either) and it may be the case that non-involvement from council officials may be the essential pre-condition to any successful venture of this kind.

The idea that risk-obsessed local officials would allow the public to comment in their website is fairly slim, I think? For this reason, I’m not very confident about Ian Vaughan’s prediction….