A friend forwarded this me, an interesting TED presentation by David Cameron, the head of Britain’s Conservative Party. It’s brief, but thematically I think it’s on point, and things like behavioral economics have even much deeper potential for political design.
Posts Tagged ‘participation’
The Active Citizen Challenge
In Governance on January 6, 2010 at 8:51 amLast month’s The Economist had an article ostensibly about direct democracy, which was in fact about the voter-initiative industry. While I have issues with identifying mass voter initiatives with actual democratic governance, the article itself did highlight how regular use of voter-initiative to side step the representative legislatures (charged with crafting law) can lead to an even crazier patchwork of rules and expenses. This, however, points out the really interesting issue for us to look at whenever we approach the issue of real democratic governance: what constitutes an adequately educated and informed citizenry?
One of the issues that we recognize in governance today is the increasingly complexity of the societal issues that traditional governments are being tasked with addressing. It is oft-lamented in the US that our representatives in government are themselves overwhelmed by the scope and complexity of the issues being pushed before them, and that they often lack the personal expertise or professional time to deal with them as effectively as we might like. And this for individuals whose full-time job is, ostensibly, to govern. How then does this translate to the broader citizenry when we start to contemplate true democratic systems or systems with more truly democratic elements?
What would you really want of your neighbors if they were to now become more active governors in your mutual affairs? Better critical thinking? Deeper knowledge of specific issues? Broader grasp of interrelated issues? More empathy and compassion?
Civics is one of those low priority subjects for most schools, probably somewhere below physical education, yet it, along with other knowledge bases and competencies become much more important to society overall as we push for more citizen participation in governance, whether through local civil society, “gov 2.0,” or voter initiatives. Much of the current discussion around education in the US tend to relate to economics and work, yet homo politicus (please excuse my made-up Latin) becomes increasingly important relative to homo economicus if we truly start moving towards more democratic societies.
Constitution-Making via SMS
In Civic Media, Constitution-Making on September 10, 2009 at 8:29 amWith the Gov 2.0 Summit going on right now (yeah, I wish I was there too!), all attention among US bloggers/posters is on gov 2.0 issues and applications and American-style civic media. While I am absolutely interested in the evolution of civic media in established and stable political communities, I am also very interested in what kinds of civic media and underlying civic infrastructure we can create and deploy in other parts of the world where they are actively involved in basic political design (aka “constitution-making”).
A few recent examples, which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, keep me very hopeful that in more and more places people will be able to deploy easy-to-use technology to enable new levels and forms of public participation in the process of designing government. The idea of constitution-making through SMS might sound laughable to traditional advisors to constitution-writing bodies, but the convergence of a variety of technologies takes the idea from laughable to plausible. It should at least give us pause long enough to consider some new combinations and process.
Across the developing world people have for many years leapfrogged certain technologies that are foundational pieces of infrastructure in the developed world, and cellular technology is foremost among those. From disaster response to mHealth, a variety of researchers and organizations have been developing and successfully deploying mobile phone applications for rural and dispersed populations in many countries. Relying on a wide variety of combinations of SMS and webtools, these systems make real-time public education and collection of information not only possible but increasingly valuable sources of information and response.
A few recent examples of SMS applications, civic media, and visualization tools point the way towards how innovative supporters of constitution-making can, in the field, deploy unique and tailored systems to alter the role (and level of participation) of the public in the process of designing new governance.
To start with, the recent Afghanistan presidential election was tracked by people in the field and updated throughout through a mapping and visualization tool that included both voter turnout but also relative levels of violence. The service was produced in partnership with the Global Development Commons by US AID.
GeoCommons
Because of the data layers loaded, the GeoCommons application allows users to select and overlay a variety of interesting and relevant data, such as threat assessments, demographics, and poppy cultivation. Those of us here in the US could certainly use these kinds of tools for our own frequent elections (and one has to wonder about the interesting data that people would load and the new connections and questions that people would start to ask as a result of the information). Deployed in other countries for presenting important and relevant information, such as the real-time voting results and violence data, such tools would be very useful during a constitution-making process, and would give viewers (both the public as well as participants in a constituent assembly) a potentially different understanding of where and how things are playing out, in real time.
Another application that draws on existing SMS technology (along with Web and email) to gather and visualize various distributed data is Ushahidi. Their cool tagline is “Crowdsourcing Crisis Information,” and indeed it’s designed for individuals to report and pull down crisis information. The data submitted by individuals is mapped geographically but also temporally, allowing users to see both maps and timelines of events.
Ushahidi.com
We can easily see this application being redeployed during the several months of a constitution-making process, capturing and visualizing the priorities and suggestions submitted by individuals across a country, shown by by region and locality, but also revealing any trends or shifts in the public consciousness across the course of the process. Rather than a relative handful of “representatives” sitting in a constituent assembly being the only ones debating the interests of their constituencies, such discussion could be augmented in real-time by direct data from across the country.
Another interesting civic media application is NationBuilder by Jim Gilliam, demonstrated by White House 2. The site enables people to collaborate on priorities, policy, and talking points, and in the case of White House 2, allows Americans the opportunity to see what executive branch policy might be like if it were a true democratic system of governance rather than an individual, executive function.
The potential with a site like this is obvious: a space for a dispersed population to assemble in a virtual forum to collaborate on creating and debating/voting on constitutional principles, establishing local and national priorities, and collaborating on political design options and preferences. Whether used just as dynamic input to the constitution-making process and the debates of the constituent assembly or as a major component of actually identifying and selecting design options, the potential for this kind of civic media to change the nature of citizen responsibility for a new constitutional order is clear.
www.sokwanele.com
The fourth app that I want to highlight, and which I’ve highlighted in a previous post on Zimbabwe, is the ZIG Watch portion of the Sokwanele.com site. This site includes a variety of useful and interesting information and apps to keep individuals informed about the background political agreements and the changing state of affairs in terms of things like reports of abuse and transgression against the agreements (tracking and displaying news reports).
Looking across just these four examples of civic media, mobile applications, and data visualization, we can easily imagine combinations of these used to draw directly on the interests, ideas, and preferences of a large distributed population to provide entirely new input to constitution-making processes and in the process provide very valuable real-time data and information about participation and evolving preferences to members of a constituent assembly, other agencies, and other observing / supporting organizations, to say nothing of creating an incredibly rich informational feedback to the constituents themselves.
A constitution-making process in places like Zimbabwe or perhaps Nepal, armed with information-rich sites with up-to-date background information and useful visualization tools like ZIG Watch, augmented with collaboration, mapping, and visualization sites that enable citizens to collectively create and endorse priorities and political design options, layered with data on demographics, opinions, participation, and violence, would enable an entirely new discourse and experience. Such a process with those civic media tools and built on the specific local civic infrastructure could create, especially in “developing” countries, a whole new dynamic in terms of participation, innovative thinking, and grass-roots buy-in to both the process of designing a government as well as the resulting design itself.
On-Demand Democracy
In Civic Media, Governance on September 8, 2009 at 11:11 amThe recent piece “Diplomacy in the Age of No Secrets” by Gordon Crovitz in the WSJ was another look at how modern ICT, notably the combination of the Web and pervasive access to it, seems to be putting pressure on the traditional 20th century political calculus of making and implementing decisions in government. It goes without saying that across most aspects of modern life, people in heavily connected parts of the world like the US have come to expect an Amazon/Dell/Google/Twitter/Facebook/Blackberry/iPhone experience with whomever and whatever they’re dealing. This of course puts adaptive pressures on the social, business, and political systems in which we all live, and which, naturally for institutions, do not experience systemic overhauls very often or very quickly.
Rather than a fundamental overhaul of the existing, established institution of American government, I suspect that the rise of civic media, combined of course with a citizen population very different in education, individual power, and expectations than the original American generations, will continue to play to the democratic mythology (fallacy) on which most of us were raised, enabling the expectations we had about government from grade school and further fueling the expectations we’ve come to expect through ICT. I suspect that the new political tools we are experimenting with and the new interest in exercising political power to demand and require transparency and accountability from the government, will spur the development of a new set of governing relationships woven through the existing institution of government, but not fundamentally changing the constitutional order.
While we like to talk about democracy and democratization, the reality is, as I think most everyone would agree, that people don’t and can’t pay equal attention to every issue of collective interest. What we see instead is what I’ve called in another post “reactive democracy” but what, in a more contemporary vernacular, we might call “on-demand” democracy. Individuals pay attention to a few things that they come to care about, and take political action (read: participate) in the fewer issues that they are truly passionate about. People really don’t want to be governors on every issue that comes up; they want to participate on the few they are passionate about. Civic media is enabling individuals to alter the governance process “on-demand,” quickly rising up from the passive citizen body to temporarily become active participants. What amount of influence this routinely has on decision making processes in government is certainly open to debate, but as the Diplomacy article points out, the citizens are coming to expect this kind of access, transparency, and participation.
So what does this mean? While I certainly would love to facilitate a new set of discussions on how civic media can be used in the basic architecture of modern governance systems, if we are not here (i.e., within the gov 2.0 movement) talking about a fundamental constitutional reordering, then we should be talking about how our basic representative government can be augmented to formally and meaningfully engage citizens in an evolving on-demand democracy. We need to start engaging politicians (those we elect to govern us), citizens, and even youth in discussions on what it means to a society with a representative form of government to have a citizenry that can help govern that society. We don’t want civic media to become just stronger levers of pressure to apply to government officials; we want it to become technology that enables us to govern society better by involving citizens in actual governance.
New Political Philosophy
In Governance on August 25, 2009 at 1:48 pmHistory shows us that broad changes in political philosophy are generated in response to political stasis (see the original Greek). Whether it was the Greeks (particularly in Athens) or the British in the 17th and 18th centuries, the philosophies that come to frame political discourse are born out of the tensions and struggles by people to deal with real political challenges. They do not in the initial instance precede dramatic political reconceptualization (unfortunately for those of us who love “philosophizing”).
Right now, with the clamor of gov 2.0 discussions and the impressive experiments in using social media and other ICT to create new “civic media,” we’re are participating in a push by citizens and advocacy groups for greater transparency, accountability, and responsiveness on the part of government. Not anything new, but the thanks to the new ICT being employed, the effort is empowering citizens in entirely new ways. Individuals can now organize themselves and others, access and share incredible amounts and slices of data, reach government officials, and act as their own media outlets to rally and bring visible pressure on government officials and agencies. Demonstrations in front of town hall have nothing on the cacophony that today can be almost instantly pumped through countless channels to focus official attention on issues of importance to motivated citizens.
writingonthewalls.com
The older terms created to label the application of ICT to government, such as e-government, and the electronic-born hopes for real democracy (e-democracy) have fast given way to new terms that may have similar foundations, but are driven by a new sense of the possible. “Gov 2.0,” “civic media,” and “participatory-n” are the new terms of the day, and they are animated by legions of citizens who are no longer just “on-line,” they are now shaping and designing their daily experiences, as enabled by the Web and web-based tools. So it’s very interesting to wonder at what this most recent and widespread push for reform in government (for that is what it really amounts to) will yield in terms of both new governance architectures but also the new political philosophies that will emerge to justify and celebrate them.
Citizens are not globally interested in all policy issues of collective importance. They can only really focus on one thing at a time, and they are only individually passionate about a very small number of issues. Thus, they are naturally “episodic participants” in governance. While this may pose a challenge to general democratic theories and designs, the new civic media applications being developed, and the increasingly explicit concept of governance over just the institution of government, may be well-suited to accommodate this aspect of human political behavior.
The combination of emerging civic media tools on top of what we will come to recognize as a robust civic infrastructure, potentially enables a form of governance architecture I will call reactive democracy. In such a form, society is not constantly steered by the entire assembled (organized) political community. Rather, citizens have the right to choose their moments for full participation, and when they choose not to, they accede to other more motivated citizens and to other elements of government.
In such a form, government remains a critical institution, but other, formal and valid governing arrangements are nested throughout society. Citizens are able to participate in governance when they are motivated to do so. Government, on the other hand, always participates, being the “last line” ensuring security and stability. But new governing relationships, new “receptor sites” are designed across the institution of government to provide constitutionally legitimate interactions for joint government/citizen governing.
The issue of constitutional validity is important. In this emerging age, where, as demonstrated continually in just the recent gov 2.0 discussion, citizens are networked individuals, maintaining multiple identities and interests that often have little to do with spatial dimensions. Whereas once civil society might have referred simply to the very local, geographic neighborhood governance conducted by citizens rather than the “government,” now citizens are active on issues of collective interest that not only cross geographic boundaries but also impact people all over the country. In such a complex, networked age, accountability and transparency will apply not only to “government” but to all the other new governing actions as well. Constitutional legitimacy, or the authority to exercise judgment and participate in decisions of collective interest that will affect lives beyond one’s own neighborhood, will be even more important in the decades ahead.
Considering these things, I wonder if the push for more participation now, even perhaps the emergence of a from of reactive democracy, is an intermediate step between classic representative government and genuine democracy. Is it a new political plateau, an end state for this age, or is it merely one of may adaptive experiments to come? How will political philosophy change to account for the new tensions, experiences, and solutions (whatever they may end up being)? What will become the new norms, the new assumptions about the nature of citizenship and the design of governance?
Whether it was the Greeks, the Romans, the British, or the Americans, individuals and groups throughout history implemented new governmental innovations (often termed “reforms” at the time) as attempts to address practical issues facing them, and only later did the “successful” experiments come to reframe political discourse.
It’s going to be an interesting future history.
O’Reilly’s “Gov 2.0″ is “Governance”
In Civic Media, Governance on August 21, 2009 at 8:02 amI took a look this morning at a couple of recent pieces going around now on Tim O’Reilly and his push for “gov 2.0,” one on Forbes and one a profile on ReadWriteWeb. In them he talks about the government as a “platform for innovation.” The basic concept is that the government provides the data and support for private-sector entities to create innovative applications for specific or local needs.
O’Reilly’s concept is certainly “web 2.0,” and it is definitely steps beyond the traditional definition of egovernment or even some of the current gov 2.0 conversations. What I like about his vision is that, whether or not he intended it or not, it actually comes a lot closer to the recent intellectual discourse on government vs. governance. Pierre and Peters (among many others) have both written some very useful treatments of the difference between the two concepts and how, in the emerging era, we are globally seeing a need for societies to look at how to improve governance and how traditional central government is no longer best adapted to respond effectively to many of the governance challenges that have and are continuing to emerge.
Looking at the idea that O’Reilly proposes, that government be but one, albeit critical, actor (institution) in the web of governance activities, we can see not only a potential version of Pierre and Peters “Dutch governance school” model, we can also see forward to a future version of the “civic infrastructure” I mentioned in an earlier post. Combined with civic media (which is all software), here we see civic infrastructure referring to the basic systems and access to information and energy flows necessary to use civic media and to essentially participate as citizens in governance activities. In either the more advanced and distributed governance models or in O’Reilly’s vision pushed to its logical conclusion, civic infrastructure (along with the ability to generate and collaborate through civic media apps) would become critical to making the “government as platform” model work for the general population. The discussion on what is necessary, what is a “right”, to enable citizens to make effective use of government-as-platform will be very interesting to watch.
And again, we want to add this (government-as-platform) model to our growing political “Design Box,” that growing inventory of components and possible governance architectures which future political designers, from local to national levels, can use for inspiration and experimentation.
At the same, it was interesting to pick up a post by @participatory on the change in people searching for the terms “e-democracy” vs “gov 2.0.”
Mapping Politics
In Constitution-Making on August 20, 2009 at 11:05 amThanks to Ines Mergel and her Government 2.0 blog post this morning, I caught the GeoCommons-hosted (geographic) map of today’s Afghanistan presidential election (for those interested, Thomas Barnett, one of my favorite strategic thinkers, has an Esquire article today on why the Afghanistan election may not be that important). The map presents geographic data on the ‘04 election, along with data for today’s election and violence in Afghanistan that’s being uploaded today. USAID’s Global Development Commons has background on the collaboration that is making the election map available today.
Using wireless technologies, handsets, and SMS to upload real-time data from diverse locations in developing areas is nothing new (check out all the “mhealth” mobile health applications and systems that have been deployed around the world in recent years), nor is mapping data onto geography to visualize information. But what I like about these continually evolving fusions of mobile applications is what they can come to mean for the act of political design. While we tend to use them as we do today, to report election participation and violence in developing countries (the Gap, in Barnett’s framework) or to collect and monitor health issues and infectious disease outbreaks, there is clearly the potential for much more in these collections of web-tools, cheap wireless technologies, and visualizations.
I very much like the notion, which we begin to imagine now, of employing these ad hoc systems to alter the nature and flow of political design in the developing world, in places like Africa, where the extant “civic infrastructure” can be minimal at best, and where, not incidentally, there has been and will continue to be the greatest need for creating new governance systems. Rather than simply augmenting classic (contemporary) constitution-making to track citizen participation at the polls (and violence there as well) or to keep “pushing” public service-type information about a constitution-making process out to widely dispersed rural populations, these mobile information collecting, reporting, and visualization systems could be creatively employed as part of the design process.
Imagine a year-long political design process having connected applications so that citizens, using their mobile phones and/or mobile devices of support agencies, could at various stages upload statements (votes) on the governance issues and/or arrangements that were most critical to them, suggesting both governance priorities as well as governance structures. Visualizing this through (geo)mapping applications, aligned with various other population, stability, economic, environment data, etc…, a coordinating/synthesizing body (what would classically have been some form of constituent assembly or early special constitutional commission) would then have an entirely new set of data with which to both understand the desires of “the People” and preferred governing arrangements suggested by localities as well as other definable communities (which in many cases are nonspatial). Armed with such information, a coordinating body could conceivably create highly nuanced and very customized political systems, tailored to the needs and preferences of different yet interrelated communities.
Such information, being continually produced, integrated, and visualized for the public throughout the year-long process would have interesting recursive influences on the shape and nature of an ongoing public constitutional discourse. The process could conceivably cause very unexpected but innovative discussions and transformation of public understanding and participation in a constitution-making process. Such a technology-enabled process would be far more justified in calling itself “democratic” than any other historical example of political design.
Civic Media for Nation-Building
In Civic Media on August 17, 2009 at 11:39 amI just got through checking out the cool White House 2 site by Jim Gilliam. The site is focused on US national priorities and enabling American citizens to post and weigh in on particular policy options. The site “is a multi-partisan network of 9137 citizens imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet. It’s free and all U.S. citizens can join.”
At first the site, which allows members to propose a policy priority and also endorse or oppose priorities already on the “board,” reminded me of the venerable Hollywood Stock Exchange, with which it does share certain similarities. But I quickly came to see it as a much more interactive and potentially valuable cousin to the legislative idea sites that popped up in a few states a couple of years ago (see the 100 Ideas Foundation for the popular origins).
In the words of the site, “We’re setting priorities, collaborating on policy, and creating a massive database of 2705 talking points covering all sides of every important issue facing our country” and “The more people who endorse a priority, the higher it rises in the charts. The more people who join the network, the more clout we will have with the President and the media.”
It’s a very cool piece of civic media, one that simultaneously experiments with what would be applications for genuine democratic political systems and creates a platform for aggregating public interest and opinion to explicitly apply pressure to America’s current republican system. In its potential for tracking large samples of public opinions, it has the potential to be more useful than periodic and proprietary polling data, and certainly something that evolves in real-time. In its potential to structure and collect priorities and policy options suggested by the citizenry, it could turn out to be one of several useful experiments in “crowdsourcing” solutions to public issues.
I like this both for its potential as an example of civic media able to create new structural bridges between the governors and the governed in the representative systems that dominate the world today, as well as for its example as a component of future political designs. Anyone actually involved in political design today (yes, that’s you, constitutional lawyers advising constitution-making processes around the world today) needs to seriously consider these new civic media tools and applications as potentially fundamental components of new governance systems.
Additionally, in this current wave of political design, in which many scholars and experts are promoting the idea that the process is as important as the outcome, and for which experts are encouraging broader citizen participation, tools like Gilliam’s NationBuilder might be useful platforms for expanding useful (i.e., structured) mass citizen participation in the actual design of constitutions.
Mobile Government Apps Added to the Design Box
In Governance on August 12, 2009 at 8:39 amI was quickly checking out a World Bank page on Mobile Transformation this morning, specifically on mobile or m-government. They go over a basic background for m-government: purpose, potential, some case studies, etc… Here is their Definition of m-government:
“m-Government is part of a broader phenomenon of mobile-enabled development (m-development) or transformation by leveraging the mobile revolution to enable development impact. It takes electronic services and makes them available via mobile technologies using devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. These services bypass the need for traditional physical networks for communications and collaboration.”
Pretty straight forward and reassuringly bureaucratic-sounding. As would be expected, they go on to briefly review m-government development and potential as essentially government services delivered through handhelds and wireless devices rather than through physical locations and networks. I don’t think there’s anything radical here (at least as far as 21st century political designers are concerned), but it is time we start identifying and inventorying all of these components to include as wide an array as possible of potential arrangements and tools for new governance systems.
Certainly such a growing inventory of new design options would at the very least include:
- m-government apps
- e-government apps (here defined as internet and web-based tech to improve traditional govt service delivery and back-office operations)
- civic media apps (various web-based, collaborative, and social-media tools to increase or change the nature of citizen participation in governance)
- GPS and other wireless technologies (Wi-Max, etc…) as elements of new foundational “civic infrastructure”
- and we should certainly go on, and on…
Crowdsourcing is another application of some of the above technologies that also comes to mind, one of a number of possible arrangements that could be seen as a building block of a political order rather than an add-on to it.
In any event, it’s time we start see the full array of new families of apps that can and should be seen as options for designing or redesigning political systems. Rather than addressing them only in their own “silos” we should start contemplating all of them together in order to see the full range of potential systemic design alternatives.
Tracking Political Breaches
In Constitution-Making on August 4, 2009 at 11:05 amAs part of my growing interest in Zimbabwe’s current constitution-making process, I caught a post today from Sokwanele.com, covering what they call their ZIG Watch (Zimbabwe Inclusive Government Watch). This section of their news site offers some interesting information and visualization tools to track the “breaches” of the current Global Political Agreement (GPA) that unites the three major political parties: Zanu-PF, MDC-T, and MDC-M. Within the GPA is also the agreements on the constitution-making process that we’re following.
The new ZIG Watch tools appear to allow users to very easily select specific Articles within the GPA and see who has been “breaching” agreements within those articles. Users can see visualization on which parties are responsible for beaches, and the user can drill down to see specific news articles that identify the actual accused breaches, as well as see the specific sub-items for each Article that were violated.
www.sokwanele.com
Users can also look at overviews of breaches and violations and see relative numbers of violations by the parties over time. The page also provides a copy of the GPA that users can look through to see the full language of the agreement and all of its components.
In all, I think this is a very cool set of apps that Sokwanele has put together. I’m differently interested in how these kinds of apps could be put to more widespread use during other constitution-making processes in other countries, and in fact I’m wondering how they might be deployed more specifically to improve the constitution-making process in Zimbabwe itself.
Now, if they could wrap around this or weave through it interactive elements, building on other social networking and social media tools to support conversation and creative work, then a whole new level in citizen involvement might be achieved. These tools are definitely important for information, education, and political monitoring, but they’re not quite the new civic media so many are trying to build.