The Conservatives’ £million question

I’m not a natural Tory (if you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m quite the opposite) but I can’t help but be impressed with their grasp of a few of the opportunities offered by new (potentially) democratic tools lately.

The first one is their use of Google Moderator in the Q&A that is embedded in their draft NHS manifesto launch. It’s a very savvy way of avoiding the appearance of control-freakery that has dogged Labour’s ‘Big Conversation’ while at the same time weeding out the trollery that neuters a lot of online political discussions.

But on a bolder canvas, their offer of £1m to the developer of the website that can “harness the wisdom of the crowd” by producing an online platform to solve “common problems” is very striking. The dovetailing of this approach with Cameron’s notion of the post bureaucratic age is very deft.

There are a number of constructive responses to this, but they don’t really include Marina Hyde’s bit of hired trollery. Rosa Prince at the Telegraph has picked up on what appears to be an imaginary hostage to fortune here – the opportunity that the internet offers to give the people who call Radio 5′s 606 phone in the opportunity to pick the England team. The Ebbsfleet United project was designed to offer living proof of this blog’s central thesis – the value of representative democracy – and Anthony’s account of it here is worth revisiting this. But as far as I can see, Hunt has simply not mentioned the idea that the England squad is a suitable candidate for crowdsourcing.

In a recent Times column, Matthew Parris touches on a fair bit of what must – and should – make up the Tories motivation in all of this:

Responding to Margaret Thatcher’s unfairly quoted remark, “There is no such thing as society . . .”, Mr Cameron has said, repeatedly: “There is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same as the State.” I’m sure Cameron wants the phrase to be seen as a philosophical anchor.

He concludes:

There will never be a better time to make that journey, now everybody knows that the State cannot afford its present level of beneficence. Do Cameron Conservatives acknowledge, even to themselves, that if they are going anywhere at all, this must be their destination?

There is a sweet spot here: where doing the right thing is also doing the populist thing and doing the Tory thing: a move to break the monopolies that dominate policymaking – the think-tanks, pressure groups, civil servants and party bureaucrats – is long overdue. Only £1m to fix such an obvious glaring hole? As a Labour supporter, I find the neatness of it to be quite crushing.

But beneath that, a serious attempt to gamechange the failing public policy processes  needs to understand what causes those failings. Using the internet to break one stranglehold only to step into another one would be disastrous, and the Tories do have bad form in this department. For example, this approach needs to be a good deal more literate than last years’ bloody awful ‘localism’ proposals.

What stands out from the Editors Notes in the press release is that – largely – this plan is avoiding many of the populist forms of crowdsourcing that are likely to result in poor-quality policymaking. The refreshing thing here is that there is no simplistic appeal to anyone with a bit of time on their hands to Have Your Say. This is an important concession. There is, however, a danger lurking in the final bit of the editors notes – ‘Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in policymaking’. It looks suspiciously like a muffled appeal for a lot of expressed opinion.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the editors notes were written by … ahem …. Tom Steinberg (who does know what he’s talking about and has the imagination to adapt good ideas from elsewhere) and then that last one was added by a politician who didn’t really understand the idea properly.

There are a number of reasons why the harvesting of expressed opinion will not necessarily (or even usually) result in good quality policy-making. These are – in no particular order:

The ‘detached wisdom’ problem: if you want to find out what people really think, you have to find a way of getting a representative cross-section of people to lodge their mild preferences. Stockbrokers will often advise you make your best judgments when you are not emotional about stock. There appears to be a parallel here with The Long Tail argument: That the most evident views on any subject are either those who really REALLY care or who have a vested interest in a particular outcome. The larger volume, however, comes from the general bubble of conversation that is largely ignored by the media and by politicians. If policymakers only have the opportunity to hear what self-styled experts or enthusiasts have to say about a particular subject, they will miss precisely the wisdom that Jeremy Hunt seems to be looking to harvest.

The ‘active citizen’ problem: related to the ‘detached wisdom’ one: Time-rich, often more materially wealthy than average with particularly strong views on specific issues. It makes for shrill, populist, non-inclusive policy-making and it foregrounds the concerns of a small social group over a wider one.

The ‘convening power’ problem: that wealthy or influential individuals (newspaper owners, celebrities) can campaign on particular hobby-horses at the expense of the issues that have more general lightly-held support from a wider range of people.

The groupthink problem: There is a point here that all points of the political compass should really acknowledge: That high-quality thinking is incompatible with the kind of groupthink that mass-media led politics promotes (a central plank of James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds thesis, by the way). This one is related to the ‘convening power‘ problem. Processes designed to harvest observations from the public will be gamed by political opponents, and particularly by newspaper editors. Outliers will be castigated and apostates will be hung out to dry. It’s also too good an opportunity for your political opponents to turn down.

I’ve argued before that the best way to harvest The Wisdom of Crowds is to quietly eavesdrop upon it rather than do it in a high-profile way. The form that questions take is important as well – asking the public to describe the problem rather than shout their proposed solutions at you. And these are the tasks that the semantic web can solve. It offers a tremendous potential for new forms of collaborative working and interdisciplinary exchanges. Again, the Tories are hitting exactly the right notes by promising to free up public data.

At this point of this post, I need to link to a good easy-to-read politician-friendly article entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’ I can’t find any at the moment, but if anyone has seen one, I’d welcome the link.

By the way, I’m not completely opposed to the idea of harnessing expressed opinion and finding ways of getting value out of it. This guy seems to be looking for this idea and I hope that they talk it through. But if the Tories want to spend their money wisely, they need to work with the sort of people who could write that essay and build a spec around it.

In fact, here is an idea that I’ll give them – something that they can do before they get their hands on that £1m Cabinet Office nest-egg: They can take the Conservative Party’s petty cash tin out and offer a £1,000 prize for the best essay entitled ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking.’

It would need to be written for an audience of politicians and party bureaucrats and it would need to soft-pedal on the threat that this approach holds for party bureaucrats as well….