Transparency – sticking plaster or panacea?

MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned.

Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent.

“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.

Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”

It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:

One possible fly in this ointment is that it’s quite hard to make the case for public spending on usability testing. If I were a minister, I like to thing that I’d sign it off, but I’d expect to be given a hard time for doing it. MySociety’s rejoinder to this would probably be to (correctly) point out that they’ve managed to get volunteer hackers to build gov-related sites that knock the spots of gov-financed ones at a fraction of the cost, and follow it up with the view that the best gov-info sites aren’t built on a .gov domain.

The rest of Tom’s peice outlines how every stage in the deliberation process can be made more transparent.

I’ve always had some concerns about MySociety’s approach to this – and this line in Tom’s article…

One can imagine in future that the moment such a vote is tabled, all around the country activists would be immediately informed and able to mobilise even if they don’t know each other…

… foresees a scenario that may chill many advocates of representative democracy to the bone. Imagine the way that the Daily Mail was able to deep-six the very idea of road-pricing, and then think about it happening every day… it has capital P-political implications, promoting a right-wing populism over a more reflective and rational deliberative process.

However, I find myself in the rare situation of suggesting that there is a form of transparency and openness that Tom hasn’t suggested first, and one that could transform parliament. Regular readers here can change channel now……

The Virtual Researcher

One of the features of political centralisation is the accumulation of resources to a handful of nodes. For thirty years now, the British PM has been able to call upon a personal Think Tank stocked with paid political posts and a cluster of elite civil servants.

With an independent civil service, a cabinet that is picked by the PM (rather than the other way around) and a team of Special Advisers who owe at least half of their loyalty to the PM rather than the minister who hired them, the top of the political ladder is very well resourced.

Think Tanks are paid to service the needs of this office, journalists write with at least one eye on the reaction from that one office … if you could put a price on the amount of money that is spent upon supporting the thought processes of that one office, I’d guess that it runs into seven figures – and possibly eight.

Contrast this with the description of the average MP that Jenni Russell provided the other day – social workers for constituents – and you have a parliament that is almost entirely supine. If Russell’s article has one failing, it doesn’t recognise the near-futility of MPs behaving in any other way than the way they do.

When they’re not carefully indexing their paperclip receipts and providing a paralegal service for their constituents, MPs need to be able to, in Burke’s words, be in “the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents.”

If constituents were prepared to collaborate with each other to provide detailed briefings to MPs, giving them the answers they need to rebuff the party whips, that would be a distinct improvement upon representative democracy.

I mentioned this idea to a few friends with a social-media orientation and their minds immediately raced off on the various clever possibilities that this idea suggested. Life’s too short to mention the tangled web of bootstrapped XML and existing applications that was proposed, but the bottom line is this:

So far, social media has been added to the armoury of sticks that are used to beat local elected representatives. I can’t think of a single social media / democracy project that hasn’t objectively bulwarked political centralisation.

But if MPs and councillors could be the beneficiary, this table could be turned dramatically.

It’s about time they were armed against their political leadership elites, pressure groups, newspaper proprietors and civil servants.

That could go further than making our slightly broken system chugg along in a more transparent way – it could actually fix it.