Curiouscatherine’s Blog

Busy weekend with lots of literature review as well as proposal writing for EU funded projects.  I have also been reading around ideas of co-creation as well the Network Society this weekend.  Both of these are going to be fairly central within my literature review.

The network or information society is a way of describing the intrinsically connected way in which society now functions in terms of data, processes and increasingly people.  These terms are being used in the same way as the agricultural and then industrial revolutions are discussed and is widely regarded as a paradigm shift in the way which society works.  What is less clear of course is what this shift way which is why Frank Webster’s book “Theories of the Information Society” is so interesting as it critiques a number of different interpretations of what the fact that once we are online we can reach so many people and ideas actually means.  I am focusing on two main thinkers in this area – both of which I will need to write more on:

• Jurgen Habermas and his ideas of the existence and importance of the “Public Sphere” where social discourse should happen.
• Manual Castells and his ideas around  the implications of our main exposure to politics being exposure the media

This is obviously vastly over-simplifying things but these two thoughts are both ones which I am now reading more about.

Co-creation is also a central tenant of the CitizenScape approach I am advocating as it describes the way in which I believe that the sites that support democratic discourse need to be truly co-created by all contributors – both government and citizens.  Co-creation can be approached in two ways;  firstly as a tool of citizen engagement of the kind discussed in the seminal Arnstein article or as mass collaboration described in the crowd sourcing crowd pleaser wikinomics.  I am attempting a kind of ‘meet in the middle’ argument with these two ideas as I make the case that mass collaboration techniques need to be applied to democratic discussion in order to ensure that citizens are properly engaged in democracy.

Well the good thing about this research proposal writing is that it does get me thinking about other things in a massive work avoidance scheme. That and the fact the day is so beautiful means that progress on the main project is slow!!

Anyway, I have been thinking more about the tension that councils face between the need to set content free online in order to respond to the people’s expectations around “web 2.0” (and to benefit from its potential) and the equally strong need to ensure that this content is managed responsibly. This is a major cultural shift for most councils – away from a ‘command and control’ stance and towards something far more collaborative. I am just talking here about democratic and consultative content though there is also a conversation to be had about web 2.0 transactional services I am not the person to have it!

Its very easy to say that its all public content and so should be made publicly available because this is obviously true – but that doesn’t really get us anywhere. The difficulty comes in the complexities of the information and the fact that dealt with out of context many parts of the democratic conversation can be confusing and misleading. Data is only information when people understand it.

There is a huge amount of experimentation needed to work though the question as to how Council’s should present themselves online but I think that there needs to be at least an initial ‘rules of engagement’ conversation within the council so that all the people involved – officers, members and citizens – are engaged in this experimentation. This is the perpetual beta after all and the more people you get testing the better….

So – to start building those rules of engagement these are the questions and principles I would get a council to consider (some of these are from the earlier post of webcast meetings):

• There is a basic principle that public content should be public – and online this means it should be portable and reusable

• Context is important – it does not help the democratic debate if people do not have access to the full discussion and its complexities. Therefore content needs to be made portable in a way which keeps the integrity of the discussion intact - perhaps by chopping content into agenda items for instance and keeping links to explanatory documents

• There needs to be traceability and the means to draw the viewer back to the formal civic space to react to the  content if they want to.  It would be a shame to get more eyeballs and not use them democratically
• Think about the behaviours you want to encourage as much as the behaviours you want to avoid
• Individuals as well as content need to be identifiable and traceable – and therefore accountable. This means citizens as well as officers and members
• Debate is important wherever it happens – but if you want it to end in a decision or action then it needs to be in a format and place that the decision makers can respond to
• Any moderation must be done in conjunction with citizens and if at all possible by citizens. This is best way of achieving a co-created debate as well as the most sustainable model in the long term

I think these ideas need to be debated with citizens as well as elected representatives and I think council officers need to facilitate them. We are doing something along these lines with Citizenscape so I will report back on progress there once we have run a few of the workshops. Am sure I will change my mind 3 times in the course of that process so will report back on that as well.

I am really writing this to put a marker down for future thinking.  I am working on my research proposal for the PHD at the moment and this is a idea which is itching me but I can’t scratch it right now as I need to be focusing down on specifics of citizenscape for the proposal.

The more I think about online civic engagement and participation generally the more important I feel it is that government – local and national – creates new online spaces to house the debate.  The underlying design assumptions of the sites which currently represent the social spaces online are in the main part entirely commercial.  Facebook is not there to improve your social life!  This is just a side benefit to their ambition to put advertising in front of you.  Now – they may subvert this assumption if the community are happy to pay for ad free sites but the commercials are in the technical DNA of the site and can’t be easily ignored.  Contrast this to early online communities like The Well (read all about this from Howard Rheinegold) where you see a common purpose to connect and build a community which had nothing to do with earning cash.

I have a rather puritanical radio 4 view of this and don’t really want to see serious debate happening in a place where it is constantly being interrupted for ad breaks.  However I accept I may be on the extreme end of tolerance of advertising!   What I don’t think we can ignore is this;  the commercial underpinning of a site like facebook means that it is ephemeral.  It will exist as long as it has a business model and that will only be true while it is the ‘big new thing’.  Democracy needs a more permanent space online if we are to take digital democracy seriously and we ought to start thinking now about how to design this.

Right – got that off my chest – back to the research proposal.

I probably haven’t mentioned before but my ‘day job’ involves working with Local Authorities in order to help them use technology to enhance the democratic process – either by making old processes work online or helping them to create new models of democratic engagement (hence CitizenScape).  The core of this – and our oldest product – is a set of technology to help Councils webcast council meetings.  Now – no one can deny that a three hour council meeting can be a little dull but webcasting it does have some big benefits:

• It makes the democratic debate entirely transparent and much more accessible
• It enables people to access the part of the meeting that they are interested in rather than having to sit through the whole thing
• By tagging content by theme or issue it is possible to create a narrative of discussion that can really help illuminate the observer as to how decisions are made
• There are lots of other benefits but lets leave it at that for now shall we???

We have been banging on about this for some years now – pre-broadband in fact which is true dedication to the cause – but we have seen a real step change in the last 18 months with online video really taking off and the arrival of the BBC iPlayer making Councils feel that it can’t be all that bad if the BBC are doing it.  In parallel to this we have of course seen huge growth in the use of YouTube and the general appearence of video content on blogs and social networking sites.  And this begs the question for Local Authorities as to what they are going to do about YouTube and other sites – and should their council meeting webcasts appear on it?

As users are increasingly able to grab the section of the video that they want and reproduce it where they want it we are seeing a tension emerge between the Council’s concern about how this content will be percieved if seen out of context and the fact that these are public meetings and the public feels a sense of ownership over the content as much as the Council does.  It also highlights a tension between the a ‘command and control’ view of data ownership and the web 2.0 attitude to content as mobile and reuseable.

This is a general problem for Council’s and their explorations of the social web but I am hoping to use this more specific example to work through some of the issues.  I have promised our user group that I will do a first draft of a discussion paper on this which we can all talk about but the basic principles seem to me to be:

• The content is in the public realm and there is no stopping it – that ship has sailed and you cannot stop people re-using public meeting content – and nor should you.  Public meetings are after all….public.
• Context is important – it does not help the democratic debate if people do not have access to the full discussion and its complexities.  Therefore content needs to be made portable in a way which keeps the integrity of the discussion intact – perhaps by chopping content into agenda items for instance and keeping links to explanatory documents
• There needs to be traceability and the means to draw the viewer back to the formal civic space to react to the  content if they want to.  It would be a shame to get more eyeballs and not use them democratically

More on this at a later date when I write that discussion paper I imagine…..

PS For anyone who is interested I am still working on that pilot questionnaire…..

I have had a really interesting week and wanted to write a note on it before it drifted off and got filed somewhere in my memory for later retrieval as a few things have happened which have really helped tie together some thoughts around community building with a social purpose – in essence what we need to do in order to underpin the Citizenscape work. This is a slight tweak on the CitizenScape methodology which is why I wanted to note it.

The initial plan with a Citizenscape site was to speak to ’stakeholders’ and to find out what they were already doing online and then use this as the initial content for the site. After spending more time in the field actually talking to people this seems hopelessly optimistic as a starting point as so many of the people we want to engage are either still just shopping and surfing rather than participating or, in the case of some 14-16 year old that I spoke to last week, not inclined to participate outside their social network site (in this case Bebo) as they have such a strong affiliation to that as a location and a sense of what is appropriate in what place.

The question is; does this undermine the key principle of Citizenscape which was to use existing participation to guide people towards democratic engagement? I think it certainly calls it into question and this will need to influence some changes to the benchmarking questionnaire around how we measure online participation – I may need to start earlier in the process of participation. What it does mean for Citizenscape is that we need to amend the starting point – or rather introduce more flexibility at the starting point of the process. This should compensate for the fact that though people are shown to be online, we are not getting access to people who are already socially active online in a way which they can initially connect to the Citizenscape process.

So – I am proposing that the first ’stakeholder’ meeting be used to set the rules of engagement or code of conduct for the site and that this meeting it used to introduce citizens to the discussion board element of the site – ie we jump start the social networking from there. Once we have established this as a place for them to interact then we can look at taking that interaction out to other parts of their online life. If we do find an initial stakeholder who is already active online then we will use this on the site – but we cannot rely on this as a way of getting the site up and running. This also gives more structure to the local authority teams in getting started which might also help things. What we will need to ensure is that in doing this we don’t end up abandoning the idea of co-creation of the citizenscape sites. We need to ensure that we are truly enskilling the participants and not controlling the process.