If there was one sound bite that stood out for me at the last Translation Layer event, it was Steph Gray’s ‘policy is written by those who show up’. If that’s the case (and it’s hard to argue against it) then the job for all of us concerned with democracy and engagement is simple… get more people to show up!

Unfortunately there are significant, multi-layered barriers to democratic access for many people: digital exclusion increasingly creates a sub-class of citizens who lack access to many engagement platforms and are limited in their access to others; lack of information literacy limits or prevents those who are online from participating effectively; and lack of political literacy means that many citizens do not have the knowledge, skills or confidence to navigate and participate in public policy environments.

This disaffection isn’t new, it’s part of a long standing decline (starting in the 1950s) in political participation and trust. Some might of course argue that this suits policy makers as there is little public awareness of (read: interference in) much of that they do. To overcome the current deficits we have to re-build levels of interest in policy and politics, but doing so is neither quick and or easy. Nor is increasing levels of political and information literacy. So alongside strategies to build long-term capacity through education (both formal and life-long learning), we need to build up, harness and connect networks of intermediaries – people with the pre-requisite skills and knowledge – and then connect them up with communities that need support.

This will work because the power of new media lies in the power of the networks it facilitates. There is the potential to overcome the power of strong ties through networks of association. In this new landscape the strong ties that count are the mavens who connect vast networks of issues-based citizens, who in turn are best place to nudge the latent nodes within their networks into action.

On the other side, government, both politicians and policy makers, need to do their bit and step out of broadcast mode. Engagement cycles need to go through the key stages of listening, response, action and reporting on action right around to more listening.

Listening too must occur outside the engagement framework, new social networks provide rich seams of data that, through tools such as sentiment analysis, can help to understand public opinions. In effect, we need to shift from passive policy cycles to active policy cycles. This method can be helped by a willingness on the part of those who host the engagement to step out from their normal domains. In the physical world, this means going out to engage with stakeholders where they live, work and play.

Online, it requires the virtual equivalent, instead of engagement sitting passively on gov.uk or parliament.uk websites, push it out to third party blogs, websites and social media – go where the people who will really be affected already are: don’t expect them to come to you.

Such a strategy can be unpopular and for a very good reason; the impact on resources can be significant. However, this is, I believe, manageable, what is really required is a new set of processes and tools and above all a new mind-set. If we are to look at making more grounded collective decisions then we need tools that are collective and collaborative. We need to match the technology to people, the engineering to the design.

Whilst there are numerous good digital engagement platforms around, innovation in this field is remarkably slow and many engagement exercises are simply shoe-horning offline tools into digital settings or copying what was done elsewhere, often with limited results. Ticking the engagement box is very easy, creating effective valued-added engagement, less so.

I’m arguing here for a move towards a common centre. I don’t believe that governments own the systems of democracy and engagement. Nor do I believe that civic society does either. Both are polarisations. Both demonstrate tensions and fractures, particularly along their borders. Whilst good things can occur, too often they leave both sides feeling unsatisfied. For effective engagement, we need to build more consensus driven approaches that inhabit shared spaces that are neither public sector or privately run but partnership-led with independent brokers and information gardeners able to facilitate a meeting of minds.

Ultimately what I’m advocating is for the democratisation of knowledge gathering and a more transparent, less ideological approach to informing policy development. This is about trust, not power.

The second in the 2012 Political Innovation ‘Translation Layer’ series - Co-Design & Policymaking - is happening tomorrow evening at 6.30pm. I hope to see you there.

In a separate post here, I’ve outlined some of the more interesting examples of collaborative authoring that I’ve noticed in recent years and Steph Gray will be elaborating on this theme.

The format for the evening will be similar (with a few modifications based on what we learned a few weeks ago) and you can see what to expect here.

Matt Ridley – The Rational Optimist – outlines why the ability exchange ideas is more important than the quality of brains in any policymaking circle – and why it’s important to have as wide a circle of people as you can. Have a look at his Ted Talk – it’s well worth a look if you have time.

We have five ‘Translation Layer’ events planned between 24th January and the 3rd April 2012. Full details can be seen here.

At each event, there will be a short-ish talk followed by a discussion among participants. Personal networking is at least as important as the talks and we will be asking everyone to provide a short introduction, saying who they are and why they are here.

We have a way of making this a little more efficient (these are political events, speechmakers may be present!), so we will be asking everyone in the room to prepare a tweet-sized introduction to themselves and their work.

Everyone will be given a slip of paper to compose this on – one that looks something like this:

Click to enlarge

We’ve got a good mix of people coming along – politicos, entrepreneurs, bloggers, campaigners etc. We asked all attendees to complete a survey as part of their signup – here are the results:

Click to enlarge

The main event should be finished by about 8.15pm but we hope you will be able to join us for dinner afterwards as well!

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen just how powerful a concept collaborative authoring is. Using little more than standard blogging tools and a creative use of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, campaigners Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin started an avalanche opposing proposed reforms to the UK’s Disability Living Allowance (DLA).

Event Sponsors: Repknight.com

You can read a fuller account (with links) of how they did this here. But, for the purposes of the second 2012 Political Innovation event in London – Co-Design & Policymaking (Tues 7th Feb) – perhaps the most interesting thing (aside from the strength of the arguments and the political victory that flowed from it) about this initiative was the way that it was received.

This was not a pressure-group funded mixture of ‘research’ and spin. It had received little attention from elected politicians and the media were largely indifferent to it until it came to dominate Twitter prior to a key vote in the House of Lords.

No-one could ignore the thousands who collaborated to examine the ignored responses to government consultations, adding their own arguments and research to create a report. Many of the participants were people who may have struggled to participate in conventional political campaigning because of the very nature of their disabilities. None of the cynicism that could apply to corporate spin or demagogic journalistic grandstanding could be applied to this. As Sue Marsh put it:

“We did everything possible to engage with politicians, lobbying MPs and Peers, writing articles, attending conferences, but at every turn we were brushed aside.

Despite serious concerns from campaigners, charities and disabled people themselves, the Government’s the recent Impact Assessment (October 2011) into the proposed reform of Disability Living Allowance is almost identical to the original. Nothing has changed, almost none of our concerns have been addressed and as the House of Lords return to vote on the final stages of the welfare reform bill, we felt that it was vital we presented our own evidence.

This is the Spartacus Report. We all own it, we all created it. It is yours, use it in any way you wish.”

The perceived legitimacy of this response can explained from this request from Sue to her collaborators:

“Do what we do best and make our case honestly. Re-post articles, write short statements, blog, contact friendly journalists and see if they will drop a little of the DWP spin angles. Contact supporters and let them know we won and what it means. Own the internet. It’s all we have.

… Trust in our case, trust in the evidence we have presented, but most of all trust yourselves. Governments are not defeated often in the way ours was yesterday and you did it. Without the TV news, without much of the printed news, without an opposition, whatever Labour MPs claim today.”

I hope you can come to the second Political Innovation event examining how collaborative authoring can enrich policymaking and overcome many of the problems with our think-tank driven model of policymaking.

At this event, Steph Gray will share his experiences of grappling with this problem from both within and without government, creating and using collaborative tools.

The Spartacus Report may have relied upon an ad-hoc use of free standard applications, but there are also significant possibilities open to collaborators who know how to design a web-interface to encourage participation.

Wikipedia, after all, is a huge collaborative document. The standard ‘Google Doc’ application now allows a number of users to work on the same document simultaneously. My personal favourite collaborative document is Writeboard, but there are plenty more on offer.

In the past, I’ve covered some of my favourite tools elsewhere, including Debategraph and Mixed Ink, both of which promote different game-based approaches to this problem.

And finally, there is another twist. Over recent years, I’ve had the privilege of working with Mick Fealty of Northern Ireland’s cross-communal political weblog Slugger O’Toole.

Mick has forgotten more than most people have learned about keeping a useful conversation going, and his site hosts civil – even genial – conversations between protagonists who may have been less gentle towards each other in his absence.

I’m hoping that a few bloggers will be on hand to reflect back at the end of the evening upon the ‘it’s not just about tools’ aspect of this argument.

All five events intend to cram the following features into them:

To be a translation layer. I pinched that idea from a speech by Ben Hammersley in which he identified the need to explain innovation more widely. Having worked for some time in the overlap between politics and innovative media, a breakdown in communication has always been evident. Innovators are often impatient with incumbents. They’re bed-blockers. They just don’t get it, man! On the other hand, the incumbents often have a very clear idea as to why the bright ideas of innovators just won’t work. Or sometimes, they adopt a very simplistic version of what innovators urge upon them (see e-petitions). These events are intended to open a discussion between those urging innovation upon politicos, and the politicos who already know what ideas just won’t work.

Brevity. These are evening events. We’re planning to have only one speaker at them, and we’re asking the speakers to prepare a short, high-impact talk. The aim is not to provide anything that is absolutely cutting-edge in terms of innovation. Instead, we’re looking for something that explains why the matter in hand could be more interesting to politicos than they may think.

A thought experiment. These five events will look at how some innovative concepts could change the way we use and see think tanks. Think tanks are problematic. Dr Andy Williamson has written a number of short posts here explaining why. They’ve not (yet) been hit by the demands for transparency that politicians, the media and government in general have had to to endure. But they may do so soon. Being more familiar with the concepts that these talks will cover may help to shape the next generation of think tanks.

A networking opportunity. Adam St is a great venue for networking events. We are aiming to attract an eclectic mix of people along, and we’re working with Elwood & Atfield to promote these evenings. Elwood & Atfield are very active in the CIPR Public Affairs Group and have a great database of people who work at the top of the politics and public affairs professions.

Along with the geeks, gamers and bloggers that have been to previous political innovation events, we’re aiming for a few politicians, policy-wonks and campaigners. Everyone should come away with the kind of contacts that they won’t meet anywhere else.

All events will feature a short session in which everyone in the room will be able to see who else is listening.

I’m looking forward to the ‘Crowdsourcing Analysis for Policymakers‘ event next week, with Andrew Stott kicking the evening off with some of his experiences working on the Government’s Open Data and Transparency Programme. We’re expecting a packed house but there are still a handful of tickets left – get yours now and maybe join us for dinner afterwards?

One issue that I hope will come up is the democratic problem presented by all transparency initiatives, including this one. Transparency is, after all, A Good Thing, we are told. It’s a very fine political horse to ride, as Steve Bell observed a while ago.

But what can possibly go wrong? I’d suggest that, before the Internet was thought off, politicians privately had the same thoughts about the pressures that they face to consult as they do today. The perennial problem of the hard to reach and the hard to avoids. The two demographics that help to justify representative government so effectively.

There are all kinds of problems with self-appointed participants – too many to list, so I’ll just adapt my favourite one from something I wrote about referendums a while ago:

“Doubt and equivocation are a good thing. Instinctive certainty often isn’t. As Darwin put it, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Doubters and equivocators are more likely to [not grasp opportunities to participate] and – following the logic of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that’s a bad thing.”

There are plenty more reasons to worry about this and conventional wisdom has generally concluded that it’s better to elect people to do this for us most of the time.

Crowdsourcing, however, creates a chink in the solid armour of the arguments for representative democracy. Sure, if you value participation at £zero, you may only attract people with a stake in the game. If you find a way of making it easy to do, and converting quick light responses from a wide range of participants, then you can attract more of a counterweight to self-interested pressure groups or the social classes that are over-represented in public discourse already. and micro-participation offer a way of reducing the problems of participation.

Another approach is to find people who don’t have the kind of prejudices that self-appointed participants often have and see if you can find ways of encouraging them to do some of your analysis for you. This is one of the attractions of trying to capture what Clay Shirky calls The Cognitive Surplus.

The thing is, gamifying decisionmaking is, in itself, hard work. If you have the resources and creative capacity to do it, then that’s fantastic. But as a half-way house, I’m currently working on a project to encourage school pupils to start playing with data to see what they can find.

I hope to see you next Tuesday – I’m sure you have your own issues with ‘ Crowdsourcing Analysis for Policymakers’.

Just a quick short post to highlight the 2012 ‘Translation Layer’ events. All speakers and dates have now been finalised – full details here.

I’ve already written up a more detailed outline of the first event – Crowdsourcing Analysis for Policymakers – here.

Crowdsourcing Analysis for Policymakers is the first of five planned Political Innovation Translation Layer evening events in the new year. These free events are taking place and the Adam Street Club just off The Strand in London. Get your tickets now – places are limited. You may also decide to stick around for dinner afterwards?

We’ve got the perfect speaker for the first event: Andrew Stott retired recently from the post of Director of Digital Engagement. During his time at The Cabinet Office, Andrew oversaw the launch of Data.gov.uk – a pioneering project intended to create a new level of transparency and intellectual capital around government.

By making raw information widely available, all kinds of possibilities have been opened up to change the way policymaking is done. No-one working in politics can afford not to understand how this will happen.

All five events intend to cram the following features into them:

To be a translation layer. I pinched that idea from a speech by Ben Hammersley in which he identified the need to explain innovation more widely. Having worked for some time in the overlap between politics and innovative media, a breakdown in communication has always been evident. Innovators are often impatient with incumbents. They’re bed-blockers. They just don’t get it, man! On the other hand, the incumbents often have a very clear idea as to why the bright ideas of innovators just won’t work. Or sometimes, they adopt a very simplistic version of what innovators urge upon them (see e-petitions). These events are intended to open a discussion between those urging innovation upon politicos, and the politicos who already know what ideas just won’t work.

Brevity. These are evening events. We’re planning to have only one speaker at them, and we’re asking the speakers to prepare a short, high-impact talk. The aim is not to provide anything that is absolutely cutting-edge in terms of innovation. Instead, we’re looking for something that explains why the matter in hand could be more interesting to politicos than they may think.

A thought experiment. These five events will look at how some innovative concepts could change the way we use and see think tanks. Think tanks are problematic. Dr Andy Williamson has written a number of short posts here explaining why. They’ve not (yet) been hit by the demands for transparency that politicians, the media and government in general have had to to endure. But they may do so soon. Being more familiar with the concepts that these talks will cover may help to shape the next generation of think tanks.

A networking opportunity. Adam St is a great venue for networking events. We are aiming to attract an eclectic mix of people along, and we’re working with Elwood & Atfield to promote these evenings. Elwood & Atfield are very active in the CIPR Public Affairs Group and have a great database of people who work at the top of the politics and public affairs professions.

Along with the geeks, gamers and bloggers that have been to previous political innovation events, we’re aiming for a few politicians, policy-wonks and campaigners. Everyone should come away with the kind of contacts that they won’t meet anywhere else.

All events will feature a short session in which everyone in the room will be able to see who else is listening.

There’s not too much to add to the comprehensive write-ups of the Edinburgh and Belfast events that Mick has posted on Slugger O’Toole apart from a remark about how good it was to meet so many new people that share the mild sense of desperation about the hole that traditional politics has allowed itself to slip into – along with the willingness to look at gamechanging new ideas to break this stalemate.

Edinburgh event slideshow from Snook

Because the events were organised by Slugger O’Toole – a site with a heavy footprint in Northern Ireland, predictably, the Belfast event got down to the conversations around sectarianism, dealing with the past, and the institutional questions that dog he unorthadox array of political parties that exist in the sixlet.

The Edinburgh event, by contrast, had more sessions that raised concerns that would come up almost anywhere in the UK – with the possible exception of a good session on the problems that Scottish Nationalism has with the mainstream media.

So what’s next? Well, we’re keen to do a few more events if we can rustle up a few invitations to do them. We’re also going to be resuming the essays shortly – we aim to have at least ten of them on the site at the end of the year. And then there’s going to be an ‘incubator’ event in the new year where we bring the essayists together with movers and shakers of the governmental, political and entrepreneurial varieties. Watch this space for more detail!

We had over eighty people along for the Political Innovation event in Edinburgh on Saturday. Slugger O’Toole has a write up here, and Bruno Panara has pulled together a good timeline using Storify here.So, what’s going to happen on Saturday at NICVA’s HQ?

Well, firstly, the subject matter is largely in your hands. We’ll have a Plenary session straight after lunch (detail to follow), but aside from that, the attendees are in the driving seat. There are already twenty ideas for sessions on the Uservoice site – here.

And the day itself? Here’s all the info you’ll need:

And lastly, here’s a Slideshow that was put together by We Are Snook that, I hope, captures a bit of the buzz that we got at the Edinburgh event last Saturday:

We asked people registering to tick a few boxes.

Those questions aren’t that easy to read and some are cut off on Eventbrite’s reporting display, so here are the questions in full from the registration system:

It’s about as good a mix as we could have hoped for. See you there!

• last few tickets available here
• you can add a bit more shape to the agenda here (and if you want, revisit and re-allocate your existing votes)
• see a quick slideshow that tells you what to expect from the day here