Curiouscatherine’s Blog

Europetitions update

We had the second meeting of the UK ePetitioning cluster for the Europetition project this week – and who can fail to have enjoyed a meeting with a group of people who are prepared to work the word lustre into an EU project meeting??

The aim with the cluster is to get a group of Council’s using petitioning at a local level and to share best practice and ideas throughout the cluster. We can then work together to try and encourage petitions which may have relevance in the other EU countries which are part of the project. As the cluster sites are all fairly different we should gain some wider experience of the best ways of getting the petitioning process set up and of adding an ‘e’ element to existing processes. To help with this we are trying to define a project methodology (as we have with other projects) which can be used for other new sites – as with the Citizenscape work this will not just look at the technology aspects of the project but also at the internal process, marketing and democratic implications. We hope to get some early research findings published on this so that we can see how that methodology is shaping up. And finally – we’ll then try and use the experience we are getting here in the UK to help the other clusters in the project also get up and running.

But why petitioning?

Obviously the heart of this project is the petitioning process. I am fairly fascinated by petitioning (sorry – I can’t help it) for a number of reasons:

• Its just so simple! “Sign here if you agree with this statement and we will try and do something about it” – everyone understands the process and the underlying promise
• Its the smallest action you can take and still be part of the democratic process – lets not underestimate the power of a group of people being prepared to put their name to something.
• It can connect online and offline processes up – its very easy to run a petition in parallel which increases the reach and the inclusiveness of the campaign.

Now I know there are a lot of downsides to petitions as well – of course – the risk of them being hijacked by campaigners, the risk of them forcing the debate to be oversimplified in the sense of people either being for them or against them and the undermining of a truly deliberative democratic debate. However these are risks which exist for any political conversation and at least petitions bring with them the chance to bring that conversation to a place with government can react to it – what’s more if you decide to doing petitioning online then you are creating a mailing list of people who at least have a passing interest in local decision making.

If we are looking for ways to reintroduce citizens to the democratic process then petitions are an obvious starting place – and you have to start somewhere.

PS  That last point – “you have to start somewhere” – clearly this is a massive assumption!  We could all just let democracy gently crumble around our ears with facebook-like cultures leaping up to take its place with decisions made on the basis of ad revenues – but probably best not to don’t you think??

This is just a segue from the research proposal work of the weekend…….

Manuel Castells talks about the fact that institutions will evolve to accomodate new power structures.  I think he’s right – very few institutions are foolish enough not to change and one thing that a universal media age has done is to form institutions in such a way that they are constantly considering how they are percieved by the outside world.  This analysis also supports the idea that institutions will react to social change around them which I also agree with.

The risk with accepting this idea is that it does not encourage you to think deeply about the process of change and, more concerningly, it does assume that these institutions know what changes are needed in order to fit in with a networked society.  My observation when working with Local Government is that very few people within these institutions have a clear idea of how to address the social web and where they need to think about changes to process or to principles.  It is concerning that council’s are currently more likely to block facebook access than to try and figure out what to do with it.

But the big concern is the speed of change online.  Government generally tends to move at a slower pace than the commercial world and this is massively exacerbated when it comes into contact with the internet.  The internet moves in dog years with seven passing online for every one in real time.  Without some fairly bold action from government the internet could evolve past a point where government can catch it up – and then what?  The internet, social websites and mass media are growing in power and influence.  If government wants to have a  part in its own evolution I believe it needs to step up and take part in the debate.

We do live in an information age where change can happen astonishingly quickly.  But I want democracy and government to have a much more active part in shaping how our society functions within this new age.  I find the idea of a culture where the underpinning design principles are those of something like facebook profoundly troubling and I want to see democratic processes and collaborative decision making taking a far more central role in the way in which we build our online spaces.

Without more active involvement from non-commercial interests the social web will be built on foundations which need an ROI to support them.  If we rely on commerce to build our online spaces they will look like shopping centres and not like town halls.

I am attempting to get my research proposal into shape which is proving a challenge as I can’t seem to get the literature review to work at all. Below is an attempt to try and give it an outline that I can then build on:

The decline in democratic participation throughout the western world is a well documented phenomena and with it are many suggestions as to how this could be addressed. As a researcher interested in developing possible solutions to this issue I need first to decide the route by which I want to address the democratic deficit and then argue why my proposed solution is a valid one for testing.

I have chosen to use a social capital analysis of this democratic deficit as I believe that the creation of vibrant communities is vital for any debate and my research is located within the framework of the network society which provides a structure and language for discussion of the societal changes wrought by the emergence of an information age . Manuel Castell’s work discussing the information age provide central ideas around this as does the work of Jurgen Habermas and his description of the Public Sphere.

I am intending to use an approach of mass collaboration and participatory design (co-creation) in order to create a project design which will use these techniques to effect democratic activity. The parallel for doing this is provided by citizen engagement literature which uses co-creation as a method for engaging citizens in shared decision making. While these approaches have been used to garner social or technology design effects this research is unique in that it uses this approach to bring about political outcomes.

I have been talking for some time about a split between formal and informal participation in democracy.  I draw this distinction in order to show the difference which acts which are politically aware but not linked to a formal decision making process (ie informal participation) and formal acts which are in some way connected to the rule of law and mandated in some way.  This is my own distinction and one which I have looking for an external reference for as it seems to me to be a useful distinction – especially when talking about social networking sites.  Increasing user participation online has the potential to bring with it increased informal democratic participation and this has been evidenced by many successful online campaigns by lobbying groups.  What is not yet clear is where this participation can be linked into the formal decision making process and it is this link which is missing should you want to try and use an increase in informal participation to improve formal democratic activity.

One of the many difficulties in doing this is in addressing the inherent bias towards direct democracy that this informal participation brings and a need to address the role of the representative in this model.  While it is tempting to get on with work that strengthens any kind of democratic activity to do so without taking into account our representative democratic structure is storing up trouble for the future where effective informal participation becomes a stronger voice than the formal democratic structures and these are either required to evolve or to be made irrelevant.

This is one of the points that Manuel Castells is making in this article “Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society” where he talks about the need for new democratic structures to evolve.  He is discussing this in relation to the rise of mass media but this is a point which is also well made with respect of the social web.

The warning here is the idea that at some point working outside of formal democratic spaces is a short route to mob rule.

I have just got back from a trip to Slovakia for our latest CitzenScape project meeting.  As ever on these trips the hospitality was amazing and we got a lot done – we also seemed to drink rather a lot but that’s also typical of these trips!  Some general observations are below.

The first thing we discussed was the fact that we are running behind schedule according to the project plan and we spent some time discussing why this is.  There seem to be a number of reasons:

• The technology build has been slower than we hoped and though things are now close to completion (at least in a beta kind of way) this has obviously held us up
• The pilot sites have found it hard to pull together groups of participants to work at each site as moderators or facilitators.  This is partly because we underestimated how much the project team needed to learn before they felt confident in setting up these meetings but also because of the low level of current online participation in all but one of the sites.  Bristol, with a long track record of online engagement, are substantially ahead of the other sites and are close to being properly operational.  It will be necessary therefore for amend the starting stages of the CitizenScape approach and assume zero pre-existing participation.  That way if it is there we can use it but the process will not be reliant on finding these people.  One concern I have with this fact is that it makes it less likely that we will be able to bring in much content from existing websites / social networks and this concerns me as to the extent this will effect the co-creation impact – ie will people still feel this is a shared space as this was one of the ways in which we were going to establish this.  Only research will tell!!!
• Poor project management – we have not been structured enough or built enough milestones into the project to keep momentum going.  This is going to change with a new project manager on board who will be working with each of the sites to do a marketing and engagement plan which will help structure activity at each of the sites in more detail
• There is some real difficulties within Council’s at the idea of the community moderators – and I am seeing this at other sites that we work with.  Though everyone we talk to sees the sense of this approach and we are finding people who are keen to try this there is a general concern about the risks.  To counter this I have been working on more details guidance around setting ‘rules of engagement’ and also will put together a risk management piece that people can use to identify real risks as compared to general anxiety!!!

Generally however it was encouraging to see that the team have a stronger sense of the underlying idea and are keen to get CitizenScape out in the world so we can test it.

Jurgen Habermas a pre-eminent social and political theorist whose ideas around the “Public Sphere” have influenced much  of the contemporary thinking around the information or network society.  Habermas describes the public sphere as a shared public conversation which encapsulates political, social and cultural debate.  He argues that this public sphere is essential to the functioning of a society as it provides the guidance and identity needed in order for a society to function.  It is an informal instrument of debate but supports the political process.  To some extent the public sphere is an ideology in that belief in its importance is one of the conditions for its existence and Habermas does describe it as such – as well as his passionate belief in its importance.  However it can also be considered to as an idea in isolation which describes the social interactions which transcend social interactions but are not yet formally political.

Access to information is one of the cornerstones of the public sphere and it is for this fact that it can be linked to information or network society thinking as the pervasive nature of information in a network society should mean that the public sphere will be able to thrive online – and in many ways it does.

Habermas and others voice their concern about the health of the public sphere with direct reference to current trends in mass media towards a simplification of ideas and a drive towards the use of mass communication techniques for advertising rather than debate concern anyone who has a belief in the importance of a vibrant public sphere as an essential element in a functioning democracy.

In my research I am arguing that the public sphere is an essential part of democracy and that the Internet is an important location for these debates.  I will also argue that one of the reasons that it is threatened is because of the increasingly fractionated nature of the Internet and the growth of self-publishing and social networking tools which do not make it possible to connect the elements of debate which could constitute a public sphere.  The CitizenScape research is looking at whether the development of technical and socially co-created online spaces can rejuvinate this public sphere and enable it to support the formal decision making process.