Benchmarking: Missing the point
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on the Australian ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ making a fairly universal point:
Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers themselves, or those who are not already active participants in public engagement. So the great ‘achievements’ of technology taskforces are celebrated in one thick and largely unread public report, and the new initiatives sparkle at their sauvignon-blanc launches, but thereafter are populated only by the usual suspects.
Instead of insisting in a specific set of standards, I rather wish government officials would make a habit of putting a spotlight on a new initiative every day. It might be tiring, but it would make more interesting reading than the avalanche of speeches, reports and criteria that usually pour out of these groups, and it would certainly make public engagement more attractive.
When I worked for politicians some years ago, I recall the dread that some of them had when they had to go and tour educational projects designed to get young people involved in the music industry. I’ll never forget the rictus grin of one well-known ex-minister being filmed listening to some banging choons at a FE College.
The minister was plainly not an educationalist and knew that it was probably as good a receptacle for funding as any – but didn’t really have a clue why 20 middle-aged white people who didn’t like UK House and Garage were standing in a room with a handful of young Bangladeshi kids who wanted them to just go away and let them get on with it.
I’m fairly sure that the reason that politicians and bureaucracies feel the need to fret around measurements, to recycle endless reports and pen long speeches that display a insincere and bewildered enthusiasm for participative projects is because there isn’t a shared view of where all of this fits in to the constitutional settlement that we have at present.
Maybe I’m being a bit thick, but as far as I can see, it’s very simple:
- You don’t need to change any of the processes that you use to fix policy
- You don’t have to allow yourself to be dictated to by individuals with an agenda
- You don’t have to be bullied into adopting policies against your better judgement
- You can break the monopsony of advice provided to you by civil servants, pressure groups and think-tanks by going over their heads and asking the public to describe and model issues for you
So put aside those awful experiences you’ve had with e-petitions and make sure you don’t have any more of them. Forget that brutalising experience you had when you wrote something for Comment is Free and got called nine different kinds of c**t in the comments thread.
These are not managerial tools. They’re not for benchmarking. Their prime users aren’t the Sir Humphreys of this world. They are primarily political tools. Most of the good ones are free of charge and you don’t need to be a genius to work out how to use them.
They allow all of you to do the things that only political parties could do in the past.
Simply find ways of putting yourself where the public are already (think of those ’street stalls’ that your local party runs on the High St on Saturday mornings) and find ways of getting them to describe the things that annoy them without them shouting at you.
The benefits are simple:
- You will make better policies
- You will be bossed around by your civil servants a bit less
- You will be able to raise your personal profile within your political party
- Your policies will be approved of by the public a good deal more than they are currently
- The public well feel consulted and involved
You don’t need to be a geek to do any of this either. It’s really simple – now relax, ignore all of those long reports and benchmarking exercises. Redeploy the people writing those reports to something more useful and just try anything new that you see to find out how far it …. er …. ticks all of those boxes.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
