Members – Demsoc needs you!

This is the first in a series of posts setting out our initial thoughts about Demsoc’s membership arrangements and governance.

Our membership is growing, and we want to make sure that we are practising what we preach and being the flexible, networked, and democratic organisation we tell government to be. We’ll be sharing our ideas here but we will be ensuring that our thinking fits with the Demsoc principles of democratic involvement, openness and transparency.

We are broadly looking at four areas:

  1. Membership types: At the moment there’s just a single paid Demsoc membership, and we are investigating introducing a free ‘friend of Demsoc’ option for those who agree with Demsoc principles and want to know a bit more about what we do – while doing more for our existing members and giving greater opportunities for project working to those who are committed to the vision of the organisation and want to be more involved.
  2. Demsoc at the centre: we are considering what we could offer our membership by email and on the web. Ideas like weekly news updates, monthly briefings and analysis, networking opportunities, events and online participation tools including cross-posting of member blogs on the Demsoc website.
  3. Demsoc near you: we are exploring what support and guidance is required for members that want to set up a local deme or an issue network, and what different forms this could take. We have two examples currently live, in Lewes and on Open Policy Making, and we have more in the pipeline.
  4. Governance: we are examining how to revamp governance in the way that we tell government to change – moving from traditional structures to an open, networked and participative oversight arrangement.

We’ll be working up our plans in the next few weeks so look out for more blog posts.

If you have any thoughts on any of the above areas and want to share your views please reply to this post or email Katie Nurcombe at krn10@demsoc.org.

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Why are there so many e-petition platforms?

This post by Rich Watts originally appeared on his blog Arbitrary Constant.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noted what I think are pretty interesting examples of markets developing in the public services space – one in social care comparison sites, another in crowdfunding platforms.

To these two examples there’s a third to add: platforms for e-petitions. A traipse through the tweets of the Generally Annoyed of Twitter quickly reveals the different petition platforms that people use, as follows:

I’ve been pretty selective in what e-petition sites are included above. For example, they don’t include US petition sites (such as MoveOn.org orCauses.com); nor does the list include businesses that offer petition platforms for public bodies, or the dedicated petition sites that local councils and others themselves have.

Of course, I haven’t just discovered that such “competition” exists, but I do find it fascinating there are so many e-petition platforms.

When it comes to an e-petition, I’d have thought the point would be to (a) get as many signatures as possible; and (b) have something happen as a result of the amount of support. To increase the number of e-petition platforms people can use is to potentially divide the number of signatures any one e-petition could get by the number of platforms. And to not use the e-petition platform which guarantees debate by elected politicians if an e-petition does get the required number of signatures seems bizarre.

So why are there so many e-petition platforms? Here are 3 reasons to start the discussion:

  1. Ego: someone or some organisation sets up a new e-petition platform because they think they can do it better (see also the amount of duplication generally in the voluntary and community sector)
  2. Money: someone or some organisation spots a business opportunity to make some cash, and so pursues it
  3. Conspiracy: why would any government promote their e-petition platform when people do such a good job and dividing and conquering themselves?

*This post isn’t intended to worry about the effectiveness of online petitions. I modestly direct you to some recent analysis on this to draw your own conclusion.

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Robert Halfon on #openpolicy in the Guardian

Good article by Robert Halfon of the Public Administration Select Committee on their new report, in today’s Guardian:

Another week, another lobbying scandal. But what if the government found a way to really listen to all its citizens, to genuinely involve the public in policy making? So that it would no longer be an issue of who has the government’s ear – because everyone would?

A report published by the Public Administration Select Committee, which I sit on, calls on government to adopt an open, “wiki” style approach to policy making, where public opinion, ideas and contributions are sought and welcome at any and all stages of the policy cycle. This kind of genuine public engagement would contrast sharply with the status quo: tokenistic exercises in phoney consultation about issues that have already been decided.

Read the rest here.

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Skin in the game

Interesting little Gallup poll today (a year out from the 2014 EU Parliament elections) showing that:

Lots of Europeans aren’t happy with the direction the EU is going in, and

Other than the Brits, they want to stay in the EU.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that they should get involved in the European Parliament elections and make their voices heard. We’ll be launching a new project in the next few weeks that will help with that.

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Digital leadership or just leadership?

I have spoken at a lot of events recently and by accident or design I keep coming back to the theme of digital leadership skills and I wanted to unpack this a bit here. Part of my preoccupation with the topic is a personal need to reconnect with my own leadership practice – in the finish frenzy with the PHD I don’t think I have been as communicative or as open with my thinking as I could be with my own team (sorry folks – and thank you again) and I think focusing on it again makes me realise its importance. But enough about me….

But the main reason is a logical extension of the kind of conversation that I facilitated at Comms Camp which explored the real blocks in social media use within organisations – we need leaders who ‘get’ this stuff if we are going to move forward. It also links to the discussion at UKGovcamp about ‘what next’ which turned into a discussion about leadership.

I would also argue that we need to audit relevant skills throughout the whole organisation – but I have framed this post in terms of what resources leaders need access to to lead in a digital and networked context. Leadership is a topic which I think risks being more talked about that actually practiced and this is not intended as a wider debate of the literature around this. My own view is that we need to be developing relevant skills to lead through networked rather than hierarchal power and I’ve written about that elsewhere.

I have spent the last few years (at least at weekends!) immersed in ideas about Digital Civic Space – the online equivalent of our offline public realm. I’ve been thinking about the gap between the commercial spaces that ‘the market’ builds and the needs of civic and democratic society. Having emerged from this I am now looking for the people who are going to build it (this research is ALL about the action) and as I start to talk about these themes more widely I have started to come up against a skills gap. The first part of addressing this is in getting people to discuss that gap.

I use the term ‘Digital’ to refer to a set of behaviours as well as technologies and if this were a more academic article I would probably be talking about the shift to the network society and a participatory culture – both of which are enabled but not defined by the technology. However – in a less academic way this is about the ability of digital tools and behaviours to be a major driver of organisational and process change.

This is increasingly understood by Government (just look at what Carl Haggerty is cooking up in Devon) but this post is specifically aimed at people (elected or un-elected) in leadership positions. How many times have you heard someone senior claiming not to understand technology? The passive put down in terms of referring to twitter in terms of ‘twittering’? Or simply referring the whole digital ‘thing’ to someone else, more junior, in the organisation? My point, frequently stated to a sharp intake of breath, is that if you are not expecting to retire in the next 12 months then this kind of disconnection from such a significant subject area is not only poor judgement but also irresponsible. I believe that every senior team needs at least one person who understands the potential of digital networked technologies to transform their organisational model and practice and this person may or may not also be the person responsible for ICT.

This is a presentation I have been using recently (or variants of) to describe what I mean by digital civic space:

This presentation tends to trigger a variety of responses (including the need for a cup of tea and a lie down) but it does tend to connect the aspiration to create digital civic spaces with a discussion about the skills needed to do this.

The list below outlines some of the areas where I think we should be developing in future (and current leaders), based on the earlier definition of digital. Not all of these are needed directly – I am not an accountant but that doesn’t mean I can’t work fluently with my Financial Director. We need the skills to lead/manage these new areas of expertise not necessarily adopt them all ourselves.

  • An understanding of networked power: One of the defining features of a changing workplace, and society, is the erosion of hierarchical power. Understanding how networked power operates in your own environment will be essential
  • Collaboration skills: This is a natural corollary to networked power, while government has been taking about partnership and collaboration for a long time it has been against a backdrop of hierarchical power. Real collaboration requires a different set of skills.
  • Co-design skills: In the networked councillor work (and other places) I have talked about the need for a more co-productive relationship with the public but to realise this we need to see more co-design skills, applied internally and externally, within organisations.
  • Social media ‘social’ skills: This is not a matter of telling everyone to start tweeting but instead an acknowledgment of the fact that the way in which we create and consume information has changed and leaders need to have a contemporary view of what this change means.
  • An adequate understanding of the basic lexicon of digital: Somewhere in your head is a fuzzy picture of how the Internet works, or your own organisational network, or the cloud, how accurate is that mental model? You will inevitably be managing people with this kind of lexicon and you may be spending millions of pounds of this technology.  In the same way I need to be able to talk balance sheets with my FD, leaders will need to be able to relate to discussions about technology.
  • Horizon scanning and research: The wonder, and concern, of technology is its rate of change. Who is horizon scanning for you not in terms of what’s shiny but in terms of what’s useful? Don’t you need domain specialists who are able to do this?
  • Data skills: Data is the byproduct of digitisation as well as the main ‘fuel’ for our online lives. Open data is a central part of any agenda of open government and something which is an established element of any discussion of ‘future government’. Organisations should benefit from the data that they are creating and in the case of open data be exploring ways in which local data could not only inform better decision making but also be driving local economic growth. Data and data sharing is also an important underpinning to any form of organisational collaboration. Do you have someone in your organisation who is thinking about how your data can work more effectively to meet your strategic objectives?
  • Digital commissioning: Government has been very poor at procuring ICT solutions – we have to get better at this. Enough said.
  • Agile project management: I have written about this elsewhere – but the ability to plan and manage projects in a more agile way is important both in terms of technological ‘fit’ but also with respect to working within complex and chaotic environments.

Many of these may, in the future, be embedded within the standard skill-set of different professions in the way that communications specialists are considering how to integrate social media into their practice. One question to ask of all of the professions is how they are managing their own skills renewal as this is not a technologists manifesto – organisational leadership may come from a variety of professional backgrounds but my point is that that team, however its made up will need access to these skills.

There is of course a link to the work on the Networked Councillor here as in a democratic leadership is also needed – but until our town planners are thinking about the augmented reality embedded in the high street and the senior team is able to reference technologies which barely exist today and might be transformative in 2 years time then there is a lot of work still to do.

As ever – comments and challenge are very welcome.

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Whatever happened to open government and open policy? A scorecard

From the Open Policy Blog:

After being elected Prime Minister in 2010 David Cameron committed the UK to having “the most open and transparent government in the world.” Alongside this, the Government’s civil service reform plan published last year promised to “make open policymaking the default”, recognising that Whitehall itself does not have a monopoly on expertise. Here’s a brief – inevitably partial and contestable – ‘scorecard’ on the Government’s progress on open government and open policy.

A couple of weeks ago we discussed some of the main initiatives under open policy. This week, we put forward a simple scorecard to measure the Government’s progress. Points have been awarded for each move towards open policy and open government – and points deducted for each step in the other direction.

Plus

The Government’s engagement in the Open Government Partnership, including the drafting of the National Action Plan with the extensive involvement of civil society organisations. +1

The Contestable Policy Fund to source policy development from outside Whitehall. +1

The Red Tape Challenge+1

The new network of ‘what works’ evidence centres+1

E-petitions+1

The ongoing development of the ‘Matrix‘ by the Government Digital Service, a repository of tools, techniques and case studies that will help policymakers to do open policy making. +1

Open data – including greater transparency on central and local government spending, the establishment of Data.gov.uk, and the Open Government Licence. +1

Greater encouragement for civil servants using social media+1

The Major Projects Authority’s ‘traffic light’ performance report on major projects. +1

The Payment by Results agenda – that public services are commissioned and funded according to what they achieve against clear outcome measures, at least in theory. +1

The localism agenda – from reducing the ringfencing of budgets to neighbourhood planning. +1

The redesign of government websites in a clearer common format and the work of the Government Digital Service generally. +1

Digital by Default. +1

Minus

The Contestable Policy Fund – only one project has been commissioned through so far, from a ‘usual suspect’ organisation. -1

The Government’s new ‘principles’ on consultations, the continuing poor practice in some consultations, and the less than user-friendly consultation ‘hub’ on the Gov.UK site. -1

Refusing to publish the NHS risk register, among others. -1

Inhibiting Freedom of Information – via new more restrictive guidanceslow responses to requests, resisting specific requests for example over businesses and charities involved in workfare placements and Prince Charles’ lobbying of ministers, and the continued exemption of outsourced providers of public services. -1.

The reality of senior civil servants’ use of social media-1

The Government’s recurring mis-representation of official statistics-1

Denigrating and refusing to meet grassroots campaign groups such as Spartacus. -1

Some ministers’ determinedly closed approach to policymaking – most notably Michael Gove-1

The Payment by Results agenda – in practice-1

The localism agenda – undermined by government centralism. -1

Lack of (promised) lobbying reform – principally a lobbying register, despite lobbying being the “next big scandal waiting to happen” according to David Cameron.

Lack of transparency on taxation arrangements between HMRC and large firms. -1

Lack of up-to-date information on government websites, for example on special advisers-1

Digital by Default - given that may people still don’t have (reliable) internet access and that technology doesn’t always work. -1

Total score: -1

Clearly, the scoring is somewhat arbitrary – there are no doubt measures I’ve missed (on both sides), and it’s entirely arguable that different initiatives should be weighted more heavily than others. Further, open government and open policy are ambitious agendas, and the Government is to be praised for making these markers against which it can be evaluated. But judging the Government on what it is actually doing – not just what it says – suggests that while significant progress has been made in some areas, the Government is undermining its own efforts by resisting greater openness, particularly when this would be uncomfortable for ministers. In short, there’s still some way to go until we have the ‘most open and transparent government in the world’.

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More immigrants than for 900 years? (Is @willhutton misquoting @david_goodhart?)

I’m not sure whether there is some misunderstanding here, but this is a startling line in Will Hutton’s Observer article on immigration:

David Goodhart is alarmed by the sheer scale of recent immigration. In his recent book The British Dream, Goodhart writes that since 2004 half a million non-British people have arrived each year in Britain – “more in a single year than in the entire period from 1066 to 1950″.

Now, I’ve not read the book Hutton quotes, but surely the idea that between 1066 and 1950 fewer than half a million immigrants arrived in the UK is utter rubbish. For starters:

1. Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, where 200,000 Poles, including my Dad, were given citizenship in a single year.

2. Huguenot immigration after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, where 50,000 French protestants arrived in the UK.

3. Jewish immigration from eastern Europe in the Victorian era, where 140,000 Jews arrived in the East End.

That’s 390,000 people just from three waves of immigration. Let’s leave aside the self-evident proportion issue (there are more of us these days, so 50,000 Huguenots was more significant immigration than 140,000 Jews).

Is Goodhart really claiming that in nine hundred years only 110,000 people came to live in the modern UK other than those three waves of immigration. No Irish (who are non-British, for modern statistics)? No French? No Dutch?

Because that’s obviously nonsense.

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Beyond the chamber – a challenge from @Puffles2010

It’s been Council Annual Meeting week, with lots of councils starting their new municipal years, appointing mayors and so on. Puffles (the ex-Whitehall dragon fairy) has been up in Cambridge watching the city council go about its business, and at the end of his piece, he comes up with an important challenge:

In the grand scheme of things, there are a number of similarities with Westminster – both good and bad. The good being that on issues that deal with people in real need (such as today), there was a debate on how to tackle a problem. The bad being some of the conventions that, to outsiders not familiar with local councils would find as time-wastingly bizarre.

This for me is one of the biggest challenges for local public bodies in Cambridge. There’s something that ‘feels’ very insular about structures and systems – one that doesn’t make reaching out to wider communities as easy as it could be. I’m thinking in particular those that could improve and enrich our city & surrounding areas. The two I’m most familiar with are the hordes of commuters that travel from Cambridge to London, and the growing public policy community. One that I’m becoming more familiar with as a result of being a school governor and also a volunteer for Cambridge Online’s social media surgeries are those hyperlocal-community groups, perhaps those whose day-to-day world is the one that exists within their neighbourhood. There is a wealth of knowledge within those small community groups just as there is within the rail commuting community and the academic community. How can we unlock this knowledge and bring what can sometimes feel like disparate communities together? (In particular, bringing them together on equal terms).

Really good questions, and as relevant here in Sussex as in the Fens.

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Building an open government movement – why it matters for public participation

From the Open Policy BlogThis post by Tim Hughes originally appeared on Involve’s blog.

A presentation I gave to Involve’s board of trustees last week prompted me to collect together these thoughts on why I think open government matters to public participation, and the opportunity and challenge of building an open government movement.

Why open government matters to public participation

Starting at the most basic level, public participation would, of course, be meaningless without the presence of other core elements of open government. For participation to be meaningful and effective, it requires the policy process, systems of governance, accountability and scrutiny, the evidence base, and the engagement process and outcomes to be transparent to citizens. For this reason, any advocate of involving citizens in decision making should also be an advocate of transparent decision-making processes.

This is a fairly obvious point to make. However, not enough attention is paid to the context in which public participation sits, and what changes in that context mean for the practice of participation. For example, what does the data deluge mean for how citizens engage with government? And, what is the likely consequence for public participation of the Government’s plans to weaken FoI legislation and not to extend it to private providers of public services?

At a more conceptual level, open government is arguably the first reform narrative in which citizens are not just the beneficiaries of the transformation of the workings of government, but are integral to bringing it about. The dominant conceptual models of organising the State in the twentieth century – from traditional public administration through New Public Management – almost completely ignored the role of citizens, or at least had an extremely partial understanding of citizenship. To put it crudely, consumers were lauded, voters tolerated and citizens considered an inconvenient distraction from the day-to-day business of governing. Public participation from time to time has caught a wave of political interest, but it has never been considered an integral part of attempts to make government work better.

Open government has the potential to change that. It can move us from a place where public participation is considered a nice-to-have, to one where it is seen as essential not only to good governance, but also to effecting broader cultural and institutional change within government.

The opportunity and challenge of building an open government movement

If a coherent and compelling narrative can be established for open government – that links together its constituent elements and establishes both an intuitive and well evidenced story of its benefits to the lives of citizens – then it should be the case that the open government movement is stronger together. But this will require an open government movement, rather than a set of disparate groups packaged as one.

There are a number of challenges to this – a couple of which I will mention here. The first is creating the space within our own organisational agendas to be able to devote time and effort to collaboration. This is of course the perennial challenge of collaboration: there’s an upfront cost, and the benefits can take longer to accrue and be harder to identify.

The second is that governments are often quite keen to adopt some aspects of openness, but not others. Open government often appears to be seen by governments as a menu from which to choose the most easily digestible dish, rather than a dish itself requiring all of its constituent ingredients. This goes some way to explain how the UK Government can declare it wants to be the most open and transparent government in the world (based on its admirable work on open data), yet be moving in the wrong direction on FoI, and dragging its feet in a number of other key areas. The inevitable question then is how an open government “movement” should engage with government when there is prospect for progress on some issues, but not others? This is a question occupying the UK Open Government Partnership civil society network at the moment.

Eight months into coordinating the UK Open Government Partnership civil society network have left me with no illusions, if I had any before, that overcoming these challenges and others will be easy. But the prize of a broad coalition of reformers (both inside and outside government) working together to make the principles of open government a reality, might just be worth it.

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How can technology improve public policy? Come and find out in Dublin!

This post is by Anthony, Giulio Quaggiotto of the UNDP and David Osimo of the Crossover projectJoin them and other policymaking 2.0 experts in Dublin on 17 and 18 June

This June, policymakers and techies from around Europe will come together in Dublin to discuss how technology can be used to improve the policymaking process.

The challenge

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have supported decision-making processes for many years.

Whether used for analyzing datasets, managing processes, or monitoring expenditure, governments have been a traditional large user of technology.

Today’s ICTs are well-suited to dealing with predictable, traditional problems that can be cracked with brute computing force, or a simple linear process.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is not linear, and definitely not simple. Poor policy decisions have flowed from the use of tools ill fitted to anticipate either the problems or impacts of policy decisions. The financial crisis is just one example, enabled by a reliance on models and algorithms based on untested assumptions.

As a policy maker during the crisis, I found the available models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools.”

Jean-Claude Trichet, former Head of the European Central Bank

At the same time, social media have accustomed citizens to voice their opinions, but have not yet provided the tools to genuinely improve policy.

The opportunities

The rise of social media and networked tools provide opportunities to take ICTs in government out of the engine room and put them into the public space.

In recent years, we have seen the emergence of an ecosystem of “policy applications” which use technology to improve the quality of policy making:

  • Linked, open, big data help making sense of big data, for instance to monitor government performance (as in TopBraid )
  • Visualization tools help us better understand the nature of public policy issues, such as demographic problems (see Gapminder)
  • Collaborative tools such as Co-ment.com help analyze public policy documents in detail through collective intelligence and collaborative commenting
  • Opinion mining solutions such as Discovertext helped to analyze and make sense of thousand of public comments to regulation proposals
  • Serious games and persuasive technologies such as Glowcaps induce behavioural change, such as exercising more or sticking to medication, by enhancing feedback and peer pressure
  • Systems modeling and simulation such as Gleam help anticipate the impact of policy decisions, taking into account the complexity of human behaviour and feedback systems

The discourse around government 2.0 and open government has focused mainly on open data and collaborative public services.

New models of open, networked governance take these conversations wider and make them richer.

“Open” in this context does not mean passively open like a door, but actively open like a shop, seeking out people to come and join in.

As web 2.0 turned the web into an environment that was experienced and moulded through social action, policymaking 2.0 should turn government into a more social, flexible and participatory experience.

For us to make the case for policy making that fits this century (rather than the last), we have to champion, advance and experiment with models that recognize human beings for what they are: complex, connected and diverse.

More than that, we have to make the case in public for these new approaches, and give credit to those who are leading in the direction we want others to follow.

Time to make it happen!

It is now time to bring together this dispersed community, create links between different experiences and raise the awareness of policy-makers.

For this reason, the Crossover project, UNDP, the Democratic Society and Euractiv are launching the first conference on policy-making 2.0, which will bring together researchers and practitioners from the global community.

The conference will be held at Trinity College, Dublin, on 17 and 18 June, 2013 (alongside the Digital Agenda Assembly 2013).

At the same time, we’re launching the Policy Applications Prize, designed to reward the most impactful and innovative software solutions for policy making.

Register for the conference

Submit your policy idea and win a prize

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