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Our role is just to understand. Hmmmm….

Shakuntala Banaji's brilliant presentation (the only presentation I saw during the event which contextualised itself in terms of the three elements of the event: Youth, Politics & New Technology) raised the question of whether civic society research, and included in this e-democracy researchers, are looking to support a citizenship which believes all (citizen) action oriented to political change is the excercise of Citizenship, or whether we are looking to a vision of citizenship with an implicit of explicit notion of citizenship as 'political action oriented towards an (imagined) public good'?

One reply made the suggestion “The role of the researcher is not to endorse one view or the other, but is to understand.”. Nonsense.

(1) E-democracy research involves looking at projects that take place. It often involves helping set up and pilot those projects.

If asked to pilot a program supporing to support a group of right-wing campaigners in political co-ordination that could realisitically lead to success – would you?

And

(2) No e-democracy tool is entirely neutral. There is no view from nowhere.

If designing/piloting a re-purposable e-democracy tool that could either have a functional bias towards generating 'public good' outcomes, or that could be functionally designed to leave equally open morraly abhorent outcomes (or, more mildly for example, was designed to prioritise generating conflict without providing the means for its resolution) – could you be neutral with respect to which it is preferable to create?

The researcher has to implcity endorse one approach or another when the researcher is involved in pilots. And surely, in the interest of integrity – that implicit endorsement is better off in the open and subject to exploration itself.

(Caveat: (2) needs a bit more development / explication – although I think it contains a solid enough argument to warrant being included. Do not let it distract from the intuition between (1) though.)

Costs of entry and consequences of committment

Stephen Coleman's questions during Q&A sessions at the Young People, New Technology and Political Engagement conference have probably sparked more posts here than any other inputs.

This time, after a presentation on a web forum in Slovenia that achieved 100 contributions, "Why should a Member of Parliament care if 100 self-selecting people, quite possibly many of them friends of the person running the consultation – have posted on a message board?".

The simple answer seems to me to be: exactly the same reason they should care that 100 self-selecting people, quite possibly many of them friends of the person convening the meeting, turned up to the local town hall meeting and had their say.

But – this raises a more interesting question. Should (excepting the empirical aside that there are not many public meetings where 100 people get to speak – even if 100 may attend) the 100 online voices count for as much as the 100 in-person voices? After all – those who have turned out in person, we may argue, have put in more effort to participate – and so must have a stronger preference for the issue.

Members of Parliament responding to large letter-writting campaigns often comment that the hand written letter means more, and has a stronger impact on their decision making, than does the form-letter simply signed by a campaign supporter. The higher the 'cost of entry', in terms of time and committment, to a political act – the greater weight, it seems, it will have with decision makers.

Oh no! Surely this then means that our efforts to make democracy more accessible just make the views shared through low-cost-of-entry political acts easier to ignore.

Unless perhaps:

a) We think e-democracy is about more than having a say – and should really be about deliberation and making better policy. In that case, if there are voices not represented in policy making, our e-democracy efforts are about making sure these voices can input into deliberation – and that may mean lowering the costs of participation for a particular group. However, we must ensure these voices can carry weight in deliberations – and that the dillution that seems to occur from lower costs of entry in lobbying is not matched in deliberation.

b) We focus on using e-democracy to equalise costs of entry – and make sure that those being lobbied understand the effort that has gone into a political act. Young people are excluded from many forms of local democracy. They are not voters. They have often not had the opportunities to develop the skills to input into a structured political process (especially when youth is combined with disadvantaged backgrounds). So where it might be very easy for me to participate in an online forum – and slightly more challenging to input into the local strategy through a town meeting. For a group of disadvantaged young people, inputting into an online forum is very challenging – and that they successfully do so should make their input worth as much as my input at the town hall.

This said, we still need to make sure the 'quality' of input, in terms of its functional applicability in addressing a topic within the political remit of the authority it is directed to, is equal in both cases if we want to talk of them being given equal weight – but this, of course, is a big further question…

Knowing what workers need to know – and when they need to just get out the way…

Just been in a fantastic keynote by Brian Loader on 'Cultural displacement or Disaffection? Reassessing Young Citizens, New Media and Civic Engagement' (which I believe is the topic of his chapter in his recent edited collection). I think for a sense of the presentation – it's probably best to point to the book – as I'd be hard pushed to capture everything in notes.

However, an interesting discussion emerged in Q&A. Stephen Coleman related experiences of how the 'operating at a distance' enabled by internet technology (e.g. in online contributions to select committees and online MPs surgeries) supports those who might not be confident to contribute in person to input into the political process. I asked afterwards if this applied to young people – with a positive answer. What is most interesting, however, is to look at whether 'operating at a distance' changes the need for worker support. We know young people often identify their desire for youth worker or adult suport in order to input into decision making when we're looking at in-person participatoin. But do some groups who want support in person find they don't need or want it 'operating at a distance'? In Stephen's example of women contributing to a select committee on domestic violence – it was found that some women were only confident to use the 'at a distance' methods with their refuge support workers and trusted others. I imagine the picture may be the same for some groups of young people – but more exploration would certainly be of interest.

This gets me thinking. Identifying:

what skills workers and adults need to support young people in taking advantage of the opportunities created by online interaction,
and
when workers and adults should just get out of the way

seems key to making sure e-democracy leaves no-one behind, and allows all groups to make the most of the opportunities potentially opened up…

Gaming in e-democracy

A presentation by Ben Whitnail of Delib on games and narrative in e-democracy:

Just because young people are on the internet and you are on the internet – doesn't mean you're going to meet.
The big question: why would anyone want your content?
Online is about choice, driven by search, people find what their looking for – not what you want to present to them.
Casual games act as a motivation for people to come and visit your content.
Games are growing as a marketting tool. Branded games. Viral games.
Games are great communication tools
- Incentive and reward
- Structure and narrative
- Interaction and exploration (for education / informing)
- Inputs and information capture (for consultation)
- Personalised, shareable experience (for peer-to-peer collaboration)
"You could learn a lot about someone from watching the way they play the Sims"

Types of games:

One-to-many: Demgames – simple narrative but sophisticated ideas are shared.
Many-to-one: Budget Simulator – priority setting mechanisms for budget consultations – with feedback about the impact of choices
Many-to-many: Pimp my Party – game for the a conservative think tank that introduces serious questions mixed in with 'fun' questions
Sharing – MyAbodo

Key elements

Every game has a clear proposition at the start. E.g. captain campaign – "this game is about winning public support for your issue"
Inputs and interactions – feedback tools

Q&A:

Q: Can we take what is said in a game and use it to inform policy.

"You said you wanted more Parks in your game – That's where we've spent the money…" "But I only said that in the game!"

You have to frame the tool in context. If you tell people their views will feed into decision making – then the users have to be accountable for their views.

Reflections

In games you provide input, and you see the consequences. In consultation, you provide input…. and you don't get to see the consequences for a long time. What about in-person games with young people and councillors looking at local planning? Participative simulation games?

Is the feedback about choices made in budget simulator democratising or giving too much power to councils to decided what the impact of certain budget decisions will be? Budget simulator is a mixture of consultation and educating citizens. Do we need consultation pure? Or can we have this mixture…

Are we starting from youth…

I'm at a conference on Young People, New Technologies and Political Engagement.

The title of the conference is the right way round – but most of the parallel papers I've listened to have been presented back to front. They seem to have started from Politics and Technology – with only a passing reference too or understanding of young people.

Unless we start exploring e-democracy for youth engagement from an understanding of the 'objective' processes of youth development, from young peoples subjective experiences and from the perspective of the political issues facing young people – we're going to keep on missing the point.

We need to define the population we're talking about. We need to understand if anything makes this group different. What are the features of this population, either as a generation cohort, or as a stage of life – that makes their engagement with democracy or with democracy through technology different from that of any other population?

Afternoon papers….

Three presentations at the Young People, New Technologies and Political Enagement conference looking at different ways of engaging citizens and young people online:

Google turns up over a billion online forums – and there has been a lot of rhetoric in the past about using online forums to support e-democracy deliberation – but Kerill Duanne's research seems to show online forums are not working to help political deliberation online. They're inactive or inneffective. So do we need better designed spaces?

Sophia Collins told us about the more structured, time limited and fascilitated 'I'm a Councillor'. Can this engage young people in democracy? What about beyond the time when I'm a Councillor is running? It seems to have been successful at engaging 'the greys' – those who wouldn't otherwise be getting involved. It seems that the 'big brother' time-limited vote-one-person-out-a-week interaction of I'm a Councillor engages young people and meets a need young people feel in getting to know and trust political representatives – but should we always be having to manufacture these opportunities to build trust? How can they be made an organic part of the political process? How can we build on the positive experience of I'm a Councillor?
Also look at: http://www.bigvote.org.uk/outcomes

Anna McDermott from Brisol shared information about Bristol's 'Viewfinder' video consultation project (drupal based by the look of it..) where video was used to launch an online consultation process. Responses to a consultation can be sent in by text, through the online forum, or as video. The project team seeded the site with content gathered through outreach work creating video interviews (it would be interesting to know how many videos were directly submitted to the site…). The site hosted an discussion on the Bristol young people's manifesto which fed into the Bristol young people's select committee. Some reflections on video below.

From the discussion that followed:

We can move away from a defecit model – 'this technology is the panacea for engaging this particular group' – and can simply admit we all have different access preferences – and we need multiple-channels of communication to be able to engage people with different communication preferences. (And we need these to be integrated – with different pathways into the same process.)
Video inputs might be used to 'back up decisions that are made' – rather than influencing the decisions. It's a equivelent the the 'free text' option on a survey. But is the free-text analysed well enough? Is it consultation-lite without the substative element? How can we make sure people going down the video input route still get the option and are encouraged to contribute to consulation-stats after inputting via video/free-text discussion?

Short reflections:

There's a lot of looking at the role of citizenship in promoting e-democracy – but there seems to be a lack of looking at spaces where young people should have power and a right to input. The way to build in e-democracy seems to me to be to build it around Setion 6 rights of young people to influence Local Offer provision, and other local activities. Where power is given, it's harder for it to be taken away.
Video can carry a lot of information – but I wonder if its not too much. I can't process 15 video inputs as quickly as I can 15 text-inputs to a consultation or a dialougue – and so the risk is I can hear less views… Do we need better technology to allow analysis of video? Or is video mainly a red-herring technology in consultation and e-engagement – useful only in a limited range of situations? It certainly seems useful to give information – but how is it for gathering information? Bristol transcribe video inputs into text reports – but also make the videos available for decision makers to watch to understand an issue on a deeper level.
The design of tools matters. In the same way physical space affects the way interaction works – the 'public digital architecture' (by which I mean how it works for the user, not back-end systems architecture) really matters. But the power matters as well (if not most of all…)

Stephen Coleman on The Policy Challenges of E-Citizenship

Professor Stephen Coleman has written widely on e-democracy, and has looked a lot of young people and e-democracy.

In his opening keynote, Stephen proposed dealing with the anxiety both manfest and latent in our fears about politics being in decline and crisis, and just not working right – by opening up spaces online for young people to engage not just in talking to young people and being heard – but in gaining power and influence.

Stephen's focus appeared to be on encouraging government to lead in creating spaces for young people to participate in real, relatively unconstrained and politically effective discussions, disagreements and deliberations. His vision sounded, on some levels, a radical one – calling on government to allow space for young people to question the very foundations of citizensip – and for government to accept that a legitimate outcome of the discussions that take place could be civil disobedience and a rejection of legal frameworks – and thus discussions leading in these directions should not be supressed and the space should be maintained. However, it seems to me that this is driving not at the creation of government owned spaces – but a recreation of the commons and a creation of a digital dialogical commons – space 'owned' by civil society and not government. Governments role is not to supress this – but as a bureaucracy and with its bureaucratic logic – government is surely not best placed to provide it?

A couple of other reflections jotted in the margins of my notes:

>Drawing on a recent dialogue on Big Brother, Stephen identified that young people might be turned off by the 'symbolic practise of politics' – the grey suited Question Time debates – but that young people are not a-political or apathetic because of that. There seems to be an interesting question in this about why other groups are not turned off by the 'symbolic practise' – and that is perhaps because other groups see that participation in those symbolic practises in a means of accessing power – but for young people, either they cannot see that this would be the case – or the power is not available to be accessed.

>In questions, the issue of how to ensure the already engaged, or those with an axe to grind do not dominate the discussion. Stephen's reply seemed to suggest that we should take this as a separate issue from opening up the spaces. Opening up the spaces is one issue. Making them emancipatory for the excluded is another. This seems a very Schumpetarian understanding of democracy – and not one I'm overly comfortable with. I would argue we cannot disagregate opening spaces up from considering their emancipatory aspects. We may find we have to sequence to create spaces before we make them emancipatory -but this must be a decison reflectivly arrived at with considerations of building a free and fair democracy in mind.

I hope I've not misinterpretted Stephen anywhere. As mentioned, I'm almost-live blogging – so I'll return and fill in links / tidy up posts later this week.

Young People, New Technologies and Poltical Engagement

I'm at a conference on Young People, New Technologies and Poltical Engagement for the next few days and I'm going to hopefully be experimenting with blogging as a way of distilling insights gathered and making sense of the wealth of ideas, learning and input I'm expecting. (battery power and WiFi permitting).

I'll probably be posting without links at first, and I'll come back to posts later in the week to tag and link – as the blogging client I'm using seems not to like tagging posts properly…

Also experimenting with twittering short nuggets that I'm not going to be able to turn into blog posts…

A knowledge jam session

I've just spent a very interesting two days taking part in a online Global Knowledge Jam around 'Collaborative Technology Requirements for Social Change'.

What's a jam?

The online knowledge jam formula (the name parallels a musicians 'jam session') is something along the lines of:

Bring together a group of interested / relevant participants and set aside a time-window when participants will regularly drop into an online 'jamming space' to contribute to discussion space on a specified topic.

In this case, the Jam consisted of around 150 participants from 40 countries with a diverse range of backgrounds but shared interests in online community and its role in social change. The time window was 48 hours. And the discussion space was a moodle forum. And the outcome was fascinating. I'm not sure that discussions stuck that closely to the core questions posed, and it was at times a little tricky to keep track of what was going on (the version of moodle we were using seems to lack a way of just looking at posts updated since you last visited) – but the content was both challenging and inspiring.

To jam again?

The time-limit and narrow nominal focus of the jam (coupled with the fantastic participant list it recruited) meant it was able to generate an impressive breadth and depth of content in a short time. The jam model is certainly one I'm going to explore more – particularly for brining together practioners and other actors in developing further thematic spaces on the Participation Works youth involvement portal.

Arising from the Jam?

That breadth of content generated means I'm going to need more time to fully digest all I've seen in the discussions – but a few headlines arising:

Shifting frames of reference
- Users: My 'frame of reference' for thinking about users of online community and interaction is someone at a desk in an office / home office using their own computer on a broadband internet connection. I'm not thinking about the internet cafe user in Akra in Ghana, or the library user in the UK, the shared computer in a family home, the NGO office where there is just one computer or the remote vilage where the mobile phone is the communication tool, not the computer.
- Tools: Following on from thinking about the role of mobile phones – near the end of the Jam someone commented about how 'keyboard and screen' focussed the discussions had been. Yet we need to be thinking beyond our online interaction with the online world being QWERTY and 800×600 or above.
Drupal for Communities of Practice: There was interest in the Jam in exploring how Drupal Installation Profiles could be used to support Communities of Practice. I'm hoping there are going to be some opportunities to explore this more with some action towards a flexible toolset Jam members and others may feel comfortable using.
Requirements for online community: I was suprised by how few of the tools I'm coming to think of as essential were on the radar. I found that perhaps I am coming at online community with a stronger focus on the 'data' than I found in others… which leads me to be really interested in tools for managing the data (visualisation tools / re-mixable content feeds / adding as much semantic data to posts as possible without burdening users). I need to focus some more reflection on whether a focus on the data can be fully compatible with a focus on the relationships mediated through online community – and whether there is a map for making sure they don't come into tension.
Technology stewarship: All of which leads me to needing to reflect more on how my work is taking me more and more into the role of (or the 'cult of'…) technology stewardship.

More reflections will no doubt unfold soon. But for now I have to head off and make a cheese sauce for a Lasange for visiting parents… (hmm… not sure I'm so good at these informal notes in blogging… but perhaps something else I need to explore more…)

Consultation responses: putting some backbone into it

One of the joys I find in blogging is that just when I'm strugging to find a way to express an idea, I stumble across an idea with similar roots elsewhere that can, hopefully, help make sense of what I was thinking about.

Just such a thing occured with this post from Annecdote about 'Story Spines'. As Shawn explains:

I asked the groups to grab an issue and tell a story explaining what happened. People busily jumped into the activity but I noticed they were just writing dot points detailing their opinions about what had happened. No one wrote a story.

It seems that they didn't know what to do to write a story. I had just assumed that everyone else thinks about stories like I do and has a sense what one looks like. Big mistake!

My next opportunity was at another knowledge strategy workshop but this time with a government department in Canberra. I had remembered Andrew introducing us to story spines so I dug out the blog post. Here is the simple story spine (Viv's example is more elaborate).

Once upon a time…
Everyday…
But one day…
Because of that… (repeat three times or as often as necessary) Until finally…
Ever since then…
And the moral of the story is…(optional)

The Story Spine helps groups to structure their responses to a question or request into the format that is needed to move things forward.

What has this got to do with consultation you might ask? Well, as I was working with colleagues to analyse the notes from flipcharts created at the 3D Dialogues we came to realise that a lot of responses lacked verbs.

'What is good about this?' 'Youth Workers'.

But youth workers what? 'Youth workers helping us'? 'Youth workers being there but staying out the way unless we need them'? 'The particular youth workers we know'? 'Any youth workers'?.

The form of answer illicited by the standard flip-chart recording isn't really what we need to make sense of the dialogue and discussion that has taken place. And that is where some sort of 'spine' for consultation responses might come in handy. A mechanism for encouraging statments with enough specificity to be able to feed meaningfully into future decision making.

So what should the spine for a consultation response look like?

When we were looking at the 3D response we discussed preparing a series of cards with a range of verbs on, and then asking those recording on flip-charts to make sure everything written up includes at least one of these cards – but I fear that a manageable set of verb-cards might be too limiting.

Perhaps instead simply providing some sentence starters like:

“We would like it if…”

“We need…”

“Things are better when…”

Would encourage the more complete sorts of responses we need.

I'll certianly be looking to try something along these lines for the next consultation I'm involved in… and I'll be sure to report back with how it works…