In preparing for a session at PICamp / Reboot Britain on Policymaking in the future, my friend Logan Wilmot (who I’m attempting to persuade to speak) sent me these YouTubes – examples of how the scale of change can be rammed home to an audience that may not be able to conceptualise what is being talked about.
I don’t know about you, but there were things in there that have changed the way I look at some questions. The ‘exponential world’ one is particularly interesting.
And on a slightly more trivial note, there’s this.
Both examples are here primarily to illustrate the way that WE are able to influence and help decisionmakers to conceptualise issues. I’ve done a number of posts on this blog about ‘visualisations’, looking at the way that issues can be explained with an attractive graphic.
The session – Policymaking in the Future – will look at ways that the old direct democracy problem can be solved. Policymakers generally don’t want to hear a torrent of opinion. They do, however, want to have the issues modelled for them. By presenting people with strong design, or other ways of conceptualising issues, we may be able to unearth new evidence in their responses. Debategraph and Mixed Ink go one step further and encourage people to actually start the process themselves.
I while ago, I also posted here on ‘eavesdropping’ – there is a growing body of evidence that shows how patterns of internet use in response to a current issue can tell us things we didn’t know. Ways of finding out what people think without actually asking them may help to avoid a number of common biases.
The old monopsonies – think tanks, pressure groups, academics, newspaper owners, civil servants – have led many areas of policymaking into a cul-de-sac. Perhaps changes in the way we communicate can offer alternatives to the groupthink of the ‘official channels’ and bring a lot of creative minds in to work on the issues that concern us all. In the process, very many more people can be involved in policymaking, the product may be better, and this approach may also show a way to avoid the ‘tyranny of active citizens’ problem?
The session to explore this will take place at the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain on (next) Monday the 6th. So far, I’ve had confirmations from David Price (Debategraph), Steph Gray (Department of Business Innovation and Skills), Nick Buckley (GfK NOP) and Deborah Szebeko (Think Public). They will help to kick off the conversation on this issue, and if you can come along, it’d be good to see you there.
*apologies – I’ve just noticed I posted up two instances of the same vid by mistake. Fixed now….
