Too late!

The prize has already been claimed. By Simon Jenkins. In the Guardian:

I claim one million pounds. The Conservatives are offering that sum to the person who designs a mechanism for effectively harnessing the wisdom of crowds in order to make better government. My scheme lets every citizen directly control how his and her schools, hospitals, police and other public services are doing. It enables them not just to ask questions. It enables them actually to be in charge.

It is called the vote …

… Cameron thinks, like Tony Blair, that a website is an adequate substitute for democratic accountability.

Like all British parties, the Tories fear democracy. But the remedy is easy. The Athenians invented it and most countries practise it. It is called voting. A million pounds please.

so unradical it hurts. get them off the bandwagon before they embarrass themselves

FB and twitter would do fine as teh solution they are looking for. They havent considered what it would actually take to run a website.

The netflix example is completely different to what they are proposing and the analogies they draw are just wrong. Optimising an equation is completely different to building, running and supporting a large website.

Theres a big difference between Wisdom of the Crowds and having an individual from a crowd creating a solution, which they seem to have missed

A copy of the following email was sent to me, presumably by mistake:

From: CabSec
To: SecStateDTI
Copy: Chris.Galley@homeoffice.x.gsi.gov.uk]
Date: 31 December 2009
Subject: The wisdom of civil servants

Pete

You know perfectly well I can’t advise you on how to undermine the Conservative proposal for a sort of eParliament. That would be political.

Don’t want to undermine it anyway. It’s a marvellous idea. Positively heart-warming. Best stocking present the Cabinet Office could possibly have been given.

All blogs need moderators, otherwise they fall apart. I’ve already drafted the recruitment ads for 1,000 moderators to join CabOff and invigilate British democracy. Give the little man his say.

His Grace* has already done a marvellous job, producing the first editorial guidelines for wikiPol. CabOff will remain in sole charge of what issues are aired, how they are worded, and how the contributions of the public are ignored.

Only really one cloud on the horizon. That Jenkins article suggesting everyone should vote for everything, and control should all be local. If you’d like any help rebutting his flagrant attempt to wrest control from central government, I think I can safely say that that wouldn’t be political.

Best
GOD

———-

* Believed to be a reference to Liam Byrne MP

[…] Tories announce £1m competition for large-scale crowdsourcing platform – "Cripes. HM’s Loyal Opposition has announced – if elected – a £1m prize for an online platform for large-scale crowdsourcing." […]

I disagree with those that have been deriding this idea. It’s encouraging to think that the Conservative government is willing to ‘think out of the box’ – just what this country needs at a time like this.

I believe the idea has legs, but only if the details are worked through carefully. There’s a fine line between a system that allows wild and loony ideas to propagate and a system that truly refines ideas through the wisdom of crowds.

[…] to the press release (quoted on the IdealGovernment from an email), the end goal here is to create a citizen participation […]

Manual trackback: http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/01/03/crowdsourcing-and-public-participation-ii/

Its a wonderfull idea, but one hard to pull of.
They need to look at sites such as;
http://vark.com/ask (lets you find someone who has skills/knowledge to help you answer your question…works well, but no system in place for checking validation of answers or collaboration)

http://a.freshbrain.com/solvr/ (collaborative problem solving,simple yet good structured method to divide problems into sub-problems and to point out problems with proposed solutions….however, no way to collect people of a skillset needed to problem solve what you need, and no security in place for the results to be unbiased).

http://moderator.appspot.com/ (Googles method for suggestion/voting and question preposal, works well, and use’s accounts to be secure…however, no real methods for people to collaborate or to actively find help you need)

Ideally, we need a hybrid of the above.
Something that lets people with the skills and knowledge look for areas they can help in, and provide a structured environment for them to propose and evaluate solutions.

Dont correctly, this would have quite a huge impact on society and our democracy. Rather then expecting the few in power to lead the many, instead they just become the organisers and guides to the suggestions and ideas the rest of mankind come up with.

I quite agree with William Heath above with his excellent analogy.
5 year votes are not enough to reflect on the ideas and believes of the population at large. We live in a very “low level” of democracy, this will help raise it up.

In preparing for his first 100 days in office as President of the United States, Barack Obama’s transition team launched a website to do something very like what the Conservatives have proposed here. That site, a part of the larger Change.gov website, allowed citizens to propose, review, vote for or against, and comment on ideas for changes to public policy. Those ideas were consolidated into a “Citizens Briefing Book” for Obama upon his innauguration.

That site was launched in under three weeks using commercially available technology from salesforce.com. You can read more about that initiative on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Briefing_Book.

“Many of the ideas you offer, from improving light rail transit to modernizing our energy grid to creating a new service corps, have been embraced by my administration,” said President Obama in a video released along with the briefing book.

This same salesforce.com technology has been deployed by many commercial firms to harness the ideas of customers. Notable examples include Starbucks: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ and Dell http://www.ideastorm.com/

One issue with Google Moderator, Salesforce Ideas, UserVoice and others is that they are strongly biased towards those questions or ideas that make it onto the “leader board” in the initial stages of a project. At least that was the case during Change.gov (at a scale of thousands of ideas and comments). These early leaders then received a disproportionate amount of the participants’ overall attention (in terms of views, votes and comments).

This is usually ok for a company but may not be acceptable for a government-sponsored site with a requirement to treat citizens’ input more fairly.

No-one can object to the notion of an interactive suggestions box any more than they can object to motherhood and apple pie. No-one sensible.

Sometimes you have to be sceptical, though. This is one of those occasions.

Consider:

Launching the competition, Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said:

“Conservatives believe that the collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts. And new technology now allows us to harness that wisdom like never before. So at this time of year, when families and friends are getting together, we’re announcing a new idea to help the British people get together to help solve the problems that matter to them.

“There are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by Government – this prize is a good and cost-effective way of getting one.

“Too often policy has been ill thought through with disastrous consequences. When formulating and implementing policy why should we not listen to the hundreds of thousands of experts out there?”

There’s a dash of flattery — “the collective wisdom of the British people”.

There’s a dash of false modesty — “a bunch of politicians or so-called experts”. But not just false modesty. Vindictive populism, as well.Take a look at Martyn Thomas’s contribution, response #15 to Time to say what we want from government IT. Is Professor Thomas one of these so-called experts? No, he’s a real expert. They do exist. But Mr Hunt runs the risk of turning them into the object of ridicule.

There’s a dash of confusion — “new technology now allows us to harness that wisdom like never before” and yet “There are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by Government” and yet we know from Woodson Martin’s response above and others that these platforms do exist.

There’s a dash of patronisation — “at this time of year, when families and friends are getting together, we’re announcing a new idea …” The communication of Mr Hunt’s Christmas bounty is more important than checking to see if the product already exists. We already have this Christmas present. And the civil service already know how to smother it.

And there’s a dash of disingenuous mock openness — “When formulating and implementing policy why should we not listen to the hundreds of thousands of experts out there?”. Good question Mr Hunt. As Marina Hyde asked in her Guardian article last Saturday, why didn’t the Conservatives listen to the wisdom of the millions who marched against the Iraq war?

We know the answer to that. It’s because the Conservatives, like Labour, like all politicians surely, think they know better. That is not surmise. They have said so. Oliver Letwin, Chairman of the Policy Review and of the Conservative Research Department, wrote in the Times:

Cameron Conservatism puts no faith in central direction and control. Instead, it seeks to identify social and environmental responsibilities that participants in the free market are likely to neglect, and then establish frameworks that will lead people and organisations to act of their own volition in ways that will improve society by increasing general wellbeing.

The crowd is so unwise that it doesn’t even know what’s good for it. The crowd needs to have its will manipulated/nudged by a responsibility neglect tsar, who will fool/brainwash the crowd into believing that it is acting of its own free will. So says Oliver Letwin. They are quite incapable of achieving that, of course. It remains distasteful that they should try.

In the circumstances, it would be irresponsible not to be sceptical.

William old man, as you may imagine, I disagree with everything you say in response #14 except the 2nd sentence of the 2nd paragraph.

In particular, it is clear from my comments that control of the crowdsourcing facility is an issue. If the politicians and/or civil servants retain control of what issues are consulted on, how the issues are worded and what happens with the suggestions submitted, then the initiative is likely to be smothered, the status quo will be retained. That is a WIBBI, isn’t it. WIBBI some power over the process was relinquished by the politicians and civil servants, and handed over to … someone else. House rules therefore observed.

I would suggest also that debate will be facilitated if we take an example. No-one can possibly disagree that “our” proposals should be “wise and inventive“.

But we need more flesh on the bones. I suggest that we take the Abdulmuttalab case as our example.

What would the public suggest is the proper response to the 25 December 2009 pantybomber?

It’s the public who will have to queue up for hours in airports and be patted down and “X-Rayed” (actually, it’s wireless technology, not X-Ray). It’s the public who won’t be able to go to the lavatory for the final hour of a US flight or even read a book on their lap. That’s if the new security measures being suggested are implemented. What alternative would the public propose?

With that as our example, how do we get the issue onto the public consultation platform? How do we publicise the availability of the platform? How long should the debate continue? Who will word the description of the issue? Who will decide which public suggestions are worth pursuing? Will the authorities just proceed with what they planned anyway and ignore the crowd’s suggestions? Etc …

I think a crowdsourcing platform for public policy is an excellent idea. The vote does not capture collective wisdom in the same way as a platform would allow. But I prefer the non-partisan and appointed (rather than competition) approach of expert labs (http://www.crowdmanage.com/government/public-policy-crowdsourcing/).

I’ve been working on crowdsourcing as a way to solve public problems and boost public participation for some time now. If you’re interested, see two of my papers on the topic:

One from the journal Planning Theory: http://www.darenbrabham.com/files/brabhamplanning.pdf

And one from the journal Convergence:
http://www.darenbrabham.com/files/brabhamconvergence.pdf

My dissertation focuses on this topic, with an investigation of Next Stop Design (www.nextstopdesign.com), a crowdsourced bus stop design competition I headed up that was funded by a grant from the US Federal Transit Administration.

In fact, a Conservative Party official interviewed me about this topic a few months ago.

db

This is a cracking idea from the Tories and should be applauded and supported. The success or failure lies in the criteria that need to be met to claim the prize – more here: http://wp.me/pHMG9-2y

There are several solutions in the works, but they have one issue which the Tories might not be happy with: they tend to castrate political parties in favor of direct citizen empowerment.
Here they are: http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Main_Page

[…] attempts that politics is being merged into new technologies through organizations, crowdsourcing (the Tories are offering £1million on a large-scale  platform) and games (The UK Parliament has created an ‘MP for a Week’ online role playing […]

Bruce Schneier’s monthly newsletter has just arrived. It seems that Slate magazine, like response #15 above, has also suggested a public competition how to improve airport security. That gives us a hook to hang our ideas on. It concentrates the mind, it provides focus. So come on — what are the design features of a crowdsourcing system that will elicit sensible solutions to the problems of airport security?

In Mr Woody Allen’s film Bananas:

[The rebel leader] Esposito announces that he is the ruler of San Marcos, and orders that the country’s official language will be Swedish and that citizens must now change their underwear every half hour, wearing it outside their clothing so that it can easily be checked.

How, for example, would your design deal with suggestions like Mr Allen’s? How would you stop other contributors flaming him? Will your system accept contributions in Swedish? What would you do if the US Transport Security Administration implemented this idea without giving Mr Allen the credit for it? Having got into the habit of handing out million pound baubles, should the government pay for ideas? Etc …

[…] “Tories announce £1m competition for large-scale crowdsourcing platform” by William Hea…; category Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Save Time and Money, What do we want? – Cripes. HM’s Loyal Opposition has announced — if elected — a £1m prize for an online platform for large-scale crowdsourcing. […]

[…] to make a firm commitment to take the wisdom of online crowds on board (and there’s still the prospect of the £1m prize for a suitable online platform which makes it possible, maybe). Likelihood of happening: […]