Is social or design innovation always a political act?

Posted on 2 September 2010 by Paul Evans

Cameron Tonkinwise is asking … “is social innovation a means of circumventing politics?”

“….what happens if design-based social innovation is not just a way of avoiding conventional, explicit politics, but a way of undermining politics altogether? What if scaling up existing innovations with redesign is not just about helping people temporarily frustrated with the inertial cowardice of elected representatives, but a way to make more or less permanently redundant the need for any government to find a way to negotiate political responses to current crises?”

Do read the whole thing. It raises some of the interesting political questions that are likely to arise during the coming months as we chew over various political innovation that are going to be on offer here. Is it really the case that …

“The rhetoric …..is all about doing services better, but in ways that just happen to also save the government money and, more importantly, withdraw governments irrevocably from such services.”

Is there a cross-cutting community of people who just think that politics can be done better – or does every innovation have its own hidden agenda?

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Political Innovation no 1: Towards Interactive Government

Posted on 1 September 2010 by Tim Davies

The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:

  • It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
  • It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web? When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road? And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?

Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.

There are three things we need to focus on:

  • Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.
  • Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.
  • Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.

The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:

  • Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.
  • Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.
  • Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?

So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…

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Launching ‘Political Innovation’ today

Posted on 31 August 2010 by Mick Fealty

When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics still done like this?’

We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve.

All of our proposers have been asked to ensure that their proposed innovation is one that could realistically garner support from all sides of the political spectrum.

The project is being managed in conjunction with political blogs of all hues. So from the right our largest media partner, The Telegraph will carry each essay which will be also be carried on Slugger O’Toole, Left Foot Forward, Lib-Dem Voice and SNP Tactical Voter.

Tweetminster will be helping us publicise each essay more widely and we’ll be doing some podcasting with The House of Comments. Other bloggers are welcome to get involved.

The essays will touch on a range of questions, including

  • a proposed recasting of the whole FOI-based understanding of open government into something more ‘interactive’,
  • a pop at the political problems that underlie dysfunctional government procurement,
  • a version of ID cards that may suit both supporters and opponents of ‘the database state’,
  • a proposal that could create a serious ‘reputational cost’ to politicians, journalists and campaigners who misuse facts and spin
  • a measure to help bloggers get more influence over public policy in their roles as conversation-convenors

…. and a range of other ideas (let’s not spoil the surprises, eh?)

The (short) essays will start appearing on all of these sites shortly. We plan to follow it up with open gatherings in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin and London in due course – as long as we can find some local partners there who will help us with the get-togethers.

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Political innovations – how to draft an introductory essay

Posted on 28 July 2010 by Paul Evans

We’re looking for short-ish essays on the subject of ‘a political innovation I would like to propose’.

We love open-source thinking

These should not be longer than 450 words. We are looking for innovations that will not be rejected out-of-hand by readers of any of our partner blogs – either Left Foot Forward, Lib-Dem Voice, SNP Tactical Voter or any of the other blogs that get involved with the project. All of these sites will either be carrying the final essays or reviewing them in some way.

We acknowledge that there are important innovations that wouldn’t be accepted by a sizeable part of the political class, but we’re keen to find ideas that will not meet this kind of resistance. Continue reading →

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A politically cross-cutting demand for innovation?

Posted on 26 July 2010 by Paul Evans

We’re taking the political innovation project forward because there are people on all sides of the political dartboard who have a general belief in the positive potential of interactivity.

Max Weber anatomised bureaucracy. Who will map its interactive successor?

This project will demonstrate that there is a community of opinion that cuts across traditional ideological divides that would broadly agree with everything in this post. It’s a cross-cutting point that increased interactivity can, in itself, be a public good – one that helps back politics out of a few of the cul-de-sacs that it has reversed itself into.

Interactivity can enable better thinking, more fairness, higher standards and more inclusion all wrapped up in one neat package. This cross-cutting political constituency would hope to see all – or most – of the following:

  • Libel reform. Jack of Kent blogs regularly – among many others – about the way that corporate or quack-doctor interests abuse the necessity for a law protecting reputations to stifle free comment. The result benefits charlatans of both commercial and ethical varieties at the expense of medical science – and therefore, the public interest. Continue reading →
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Why now?

Posted on 25 July 2010 by Paul Evans

New governments rarely arrive with as many fully-formed ideas as they like to have us believe. Often the early years of a government involves the challenging and testing of theories and the outcomes can be radically different from the early sketches.

Technology is changing what they can do, and how they do it. The UK is a good example of this. Continue reading →

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