What is clear is that democracy may be the best we have but it could certainly do with increasing representation and the tools we are developing may assist, if only they were used by the politicians.

Coincidentally, the UK Government published the summary of the feedback on its open data consultation on the 30 January 2011. The consultees include Socitm which was rather critical of the proposals. A key point that was made in the response was that “Socitm believes that open data issues need to be treated within a broader approach to information management and evidence-based decision-making”, unfortunately this general (and very important) point does not appear to be captured in the report.

So, we’ll see what comes next…

I hope something comes of it. It’s not the only Ning community I’m a member of but like many such places they have a tendency to become talking shops with little practical resulting. It’s OK if you wish to spend your time looking into a computer rather than delivering practical change or if the suggestions made actually are implemented in some fashion, but how many times does that happen?

The operators, implementors or whatever need to consider the suggestions that were made following the discussions earlier about participating in a democracy i.e. for a start, how will the outcomes be measured, implemented or reported?

According to Heather Niven who is one of those behind it, the “main criteria are sustainable, scale able to other places, good for everyone involved, viable with resources we’ve got. Pilot length can be as long as it needs to be but a range of short-long term solutions would be good. We are flexible and open to all ideas and our forum section has a section on all things innovative. For other suggestions if people want to raise other ideas. Outcomes we want are 1. A culture change in the way the city solves its problems and develops/evolves through introducing a channel to communicate and develop relationships with the motivated creative problem solvers in our world who want to make a difference. 2. To use a series of challenges to focus our efforts and show ourselves how much better we can change things through working together and to try the process out. 3. To record and share the whole project including what didn’t work for others to learn from. All of that will be shared here too.”

My personal challenge to them is to rationalise the dark magic that is government bean-counting – if we could do away with all this cross-charging, recharging, offcharging and focus on customers, particularly where they aren’t able to deal with such bureaucracy the better! Avaunt thee CIPFA and all thy complications…

In the PB study “half of respondents (50%) prefer to respond to communications through the post and a third (33%) opt for email when replying. In third place came web-based responses with 8 per cent of the vote, followed by phone (7%) and text (1%)”, which may not be surprising depending upon how the question was phrased.

In the Australian report it should first be noted that the telephone is still considered a part of e-government (Section 5 – “Two in five (38%) people contacted government by telephone in 2011″), much in the way it was used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card in the UK 2005 targets – but I think it’s time that approach to defining e-government was dropped, it makes comparisons very difficult. Other than that the document identifies little change since 2009 – not really much to crow about then…

From the Canadian Public Policy Forum comes “Rescuing Public Policy – the case for Public Engagement” (PDF 1.58 MB, 188 pages) by Dan Lenihan. The book is based upon Dan’s practical experience in the Public Engagement Project carried out in a number of Canadian provinces, territories and organizations, and is the final report of that work.

Lenihan takes to task what he describes as the ‘consumer model of politics’, something we should all recognise, where the politicians focus on the small vote-catching issues to the detriment of the big problems faced by nations and economies. He then proceeds to offer an alternative approach to engagement. The document is not about e-participation, or even social media, for as he so clearly recognises, this would be putting the cart before the horse, and there is a need to gain trust through proper participative methods before introducing additional tools.

At the outset Lenihan clearly identifies central government politicians failure to realise the complexity involved in any delivery due to the existing structures and layers within government. He also recognises that the public require a level of consultation and transparency, that is nothing to do with transparency after the event, which seems to be a UK government trend, the citizen wants to be consulted at the outset, even if its to provide their support!

On page 37 Lenihan states “real solutions to complex issues not only require that stakeholders, citizens and communities be fully involved in the policy process; they require genuine collaboration between governments and the public”, unfortunately as he describes earlier Clinton (in his second term), and Blair were only interested in winning and so employed the marketeers to drive their ‘consumer model’ of politics.

At page 52 he describes his “Golden Rule of Public Engagement. It says that, if governments really want citizens and stakeholders to take some ownership of the issues, it is not enough simply to ask them for their views on the solutions. Governments must engage the public in a real dialogue where all parties work through the issues and arrive at the action plan together”. How I wish so many politicians and ‘public servants’ would learn this.

The third chapter is given over to Lenihan comparing some alternative approaches to engagement leading up to the fourth chapter that focuses on joining up services and how a participative approach can assist (co-design). Chapter five then examines some of the difficulties put in the way of the employing participation, particularly by the politicians or policy makers. The remainder of the book carries on to summarise the work, explain how politics might be reclaimed as a result of implementing the approaches outlined. There’s also a brief history of work carried out in New Brunswick. The work concludes with an appendix including an evaluation framework for collaboration with benchmarks outlined.

Given the recent dialogue around participation it will be interesting to see how the worldwide community sees Lenihan’s proposals and whether these can be further developed. However I remain skeptical about politicians and policymakers being truly willing to dilute their own control to the masses, but maybe I’m wrong?