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The following all reminds me a little of www.neighborland.org (more here) – and just goes to show how innovative the US can be.

I guess “downtown” and “inner-city” don’t have exactly the same connotations – but even so, and despite the common language which all too often separates us, I think this article from Government in the Lab today fairly describes the virtues of a long-running American experience we could – and should – learn from here in Britain. Especially in the light of the recent rioting and looting.

Not only is it not too long a read, it’s also very revealing. So highly recommended to you all – and please don’t pass up the opportunity!

The closing paragraphs in particular grabbed my attention, as they cover off the importance of including both the involved and the disinterested when analysing the future needs of a community (the bold is mine):

How important is open source to local economic development efforts?

It’s huge. Because one of the biggest challenges (in terms of attracting companies to downtown) is lack of good information. The more transparent we are with a prospect interest in attracting a new business, the more successful we tend to be. When we don’t share information, they’ll find out later. There is a perception of urban areas being more dangerous, and our data helps to prove otherwise.

[...]

The people that were most passionate had the hardest time stepping away from it and couldn’t give us the insights that we eventually uncovered. The person with a loose association [to downtown] gave us better insight. This was an ah-ha moment. If you only involve the advocates, you don’t get the broader view. Participation from all made the information better.

This is surely something Ed Miliband’s plea for a “national conversation” post-English riots could contemplate in its remit. As well as any government response which might emerge from the whole affair.

At their best, open source principles aim to apply the eyes of an observant and intelligent million to making better and continually improving products, services – and now even neighbourhoods.

Learning from other experiences – and the experiences of others – is one of the greatest skills humankind exhibits.

Let’s, then, try and see if we can do so in the aftermath of all this civil disturbance in England. And do so from the most expansive and inclusive examples we can find – that is to say, from those very virtual and online sectors which have led the way in community collaboration for a more than startling decade.

If politicians expect to get paid for participating in the democratic process, how can they possibly expect the rest of us to do it for free? Yet, that is precisely what modern governments seem to want of us – as citizens are required to play a greater part in what is supposedly a democratic process.

And I ask the question as I muse, yet again, on the subject of the Big Society. And it’s an important question if the aim of modern governance is not only to be far less hierarchical than it used to be but also to go beyond simply implementing the rather easier first two parts of what current models have managed to achieve to date:

According to Don Lenihan’s public engagement framework, Rethinking the Public Policy Process, citizens participate with government in three processes: consultation, deliberation, and public engagement.

The consultation process is when citizens are consulted and public opinion is collected in wikis, blogs, Facebook pages, public hearings, telephone interviews, or online surveys, to give some examples. Then, government makes a decision based on that information. Although sometimes productive, this process is not effective when we are considering highly contentious and/or complex issues.

The deliberation process is when citizens contribute to the discussion on how to proceed with what is discovered in consultation process. Participants address issues, negotiate, seek synergies and/or compromises, and arrive at strategies to proceed in light of differing opinions. Government then makes the final decision.

The public engagement process is when citizens contribute to (or even lead/facilitate) the consultation process, deliberation process, policy and legislation decisions, and/or actions to address the issue. The public and government are partners throughout the entire public engagement process.

But if the third is ever to happen, the very fact that one of the parties gets paid to get involved whilst the other has to do it out of the goodness of its socially-engaged heart is, surely, always going to distort the outcomes reached – as well as, inevitably, maintain the continuing self-interested professionalisation of what should be a democracy of equals.

If professional politicians only ever were facilitators of the democratic process. But it’s not going to happen whilst their livelihoods depend on such outcomes – and whilst we as voters and citizens have to use our leisure time to achieve such engagement. If modern systems of governance contemplate involving citizens to the degree some of the above suggests, then modern systems of governance should contemplate splitting the oversight of technical issues from the representative side of politics. In this brave new world, we won’t need our political representatives to be paid for their political activities: rather, we will expect them – as unpaid-citizen-facilitating politicos – to be in receipt only of financial state-provided resources and access to the intelligence they need to fulfil their obligations as bridges between technocratic duties and representative responsibilities.

Not paid to do a job but in receipt of resources to enable a process.

That is to say, they should engage and work with the rest of us, as equally unremunerated folk in the business of politics – on equal terms and with a coinciding objective: the truly democratic administration of society.

This, and only this, will allow anything approaching the Big Society to take off.

Anything else will be mere whitewash.

I’ve just read a brilliant piece of synthesis by Alberto Cottica from Government in the Lab on some conclusions to be be drawn from this year’s municipal elections in Milan. Essentially, he argues that campaigning for votes is a very different matter to the ecosystem required to nurture constructive and supportive policy-making processes between governors and governed. As he points out:

Collaboration between citizens and public authorities is very different from competition for votes, and the analogy with purchase of consumption goods does not carry through.Designing and enacting policies is a high-cost, prolonged activity; it requires rational argument, data, competence. In this context the marketing profession’s seduction techniques don’t work well; what’s more, they risk doing damage. In particular, they risk creating participation bubbles: initially luring into signing up people that later, faced with the exhausting wrangle of designing policy, get disheartened and defect en masse – leaving themselves with a bad experience and others with the chore of reorganizing the whole process. Enacting the wiki government is not about attracting large crowds, but about enabling each and every citizen to choose whether to engage, and just what with, while giving her honest information about the difficulties, the hard work, the high risk of failure associated with participation. Indicators, too, have different meaning than in marketing: in the advertising world attracting more people is always better, whereas in the wiki government there is such a thing as too much participation (it entails duplication of information, with many people making the same point, and reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, with low-quality contributions swamping high-quality ones).

This might explain why so many popular election campaigns create massive expectations in their voting publics and then proceed to fail miserably at delivering their promises. The problem is not really a question of a lack of political will in those running the political parties in question – nor, even, a tendency for the leaders of such parties to say one thing when looking to get elected and then do another once in power. No. The reality may actually be quite different – and possibly much simpler. Whilst those who are capable of capturing the essence of an epoch in those short snappy bite-sized marketable messages we know so well go on to convince swathes of voters to vote for them – basically as a result of the fact that:

The marketing-derived approach makes sense for election campaigns, because voting has near-zero cost; low thresholds for access; and above all is often driven by non-rational, gut feeling motivations.

- when it then comes to the post-election process of creating spaces which would allow amateur voters and professional politicians to come together in a didactic dialogue of equals, the professionals we mention simply don’t have the tools to hand. They don’t have the ability to think appropriately. They can’t adjust to the need to nurture instead of campaign. Apart from anything else, the timeframes – both legislative and psychological – work against them. But I think, to be honest, that is the least of it. So used as they become to pressing those gut-reaction buttons, the longer haul of working with people at a grassroots level becomes not only highly undesirable (lacking as it does the glamour of marketing) but also ends up being pretty nigh impossible for them to engineer. As Chris Dillow remarks more generally on the subject of the trajectories of leftist politicians:

I fear that this problem might also affect leftist politicians. Yes, they might start out by merely pretending to bash the poor. But as with Graeme and Xin, the pretence ends up becoming reality. Similarly, they might start out by trying merely to play a role by climbing up a hierarchy, but they end up supporting that hierarchy. As I’ve said, office determines character more than character determines office. The result is that leftist politicians so often disappoint their more radical supporters.

So it is that Cottica concludes his beautiful piece thus (the bold is mine):

[...] I hope that the leaders of Italian authorities – starting from the new mayor of Milan Giuliano Pisapia, the leader who best synbolizes the current phase – resist the temptation to frame collaboration as a campaign, citizens as voters, rational conversation as hidden persuasion. Yielding to it would mean shooting themselves in the foot, and wasting an opportunity that the country cannot afford to miss.

“Collaboration versus campaigning, citizens versus voters, rational conversation versus hidden persuasion.” The miserable realities and disappointments of modern politics are herein encompassed in their awful fullness in a phrase of less than a dozen words.

Something so easy to synthesise surely can’t be that difficult to resolve …