What we have here is a failure to communicate

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a politician bemoan the apathy of the electorate, and it’s lack of engagement in the political process.

Political opponents accuse each other of being out of touch, campaigners resort to direct action in desperate attempts to grab the media agenda for an instant, and all those in between - those who don’t see themselves as ‘involved’ on one side or another - simply write the whole exercise of democracy off as a useless waste of time.

“No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.”

In the midst of a high-tech communications revolution, with 24 hour political coverage, the electorate are becoming ever more isolated from those in power. Does anyone actually know if “The Big Conversation” is still going on? Was it ever?

In fact, there are thousands of conversations going on every day about politics - the trouble is, it is a rare event for a politician to be engaged with them. These conversations happen in pubs, clubs, homes, businesses and - online.

Back in the late 90s, Downing Street set up a collection of online discussion forums - a bold move, and one whose consequences they were ill-equipped to handle. At the time a piece of tax legislation affecting the IT and Engineering small business community was in the process of implementation and those affected (being fairly Internet-savvy) descended en mass on what was perceived as a direct channel to the very pinnacle of power to air their concerns.

The Downing Street forum moderators’ reaction to the hundreds of messages posted in the ‘Tax’ forum on the subject was to create an entirely separate ‘IR35’ forum, and impose a strict policy that any IR35-related messages were disallowed in the Tax forum itself. The anti-IR35 lobby were effectively neutered, being unable to make any points about the proposed new tax rules in the Tax forum.

At no point did any politician or other representative of the Government engage in the highly focused discussion with this strongly motivated constituency. yet here was an opportunity for the Government to engage directly with a section of the population about a piece of legislation that was - at the time - supposedly still in the consultation phase.

While I can only speculate as to the reasons behind the absence of engagement on the part of the Government, the course of events demonstrate clearly that there is a mechanism by which direct discourse with an interested electorate can take place.

“If you build it, they will come.”

The Hansard Society post mortem into the subsequent UK Online CitizenSpace experiment makes the following telling point:

“For most users, it held out the promise of interaction with Government, but proved to be a one-way street leading nowhere.”

An ideal government would provide funding for a central online discussion system through which any member of the electorate could raise any matter for discussion. If a subject attracted particular interest, the creation of a separate area to focus upon it would be warranted - one of the benefits of holding such debates online is that there are no constraints on the number of ‘rooms’ a building can have. There is no reason why individual participants could not create and host their own forums within the system on topics they were particularly interested in discussing.

Crucially, an ideal government will desire to participate directly in the online discussion - and it is at this last hurdle that the Downing Street forums fell. Equally crucially, the overall moderatorial control of such a system needs to be in the hands of an independent, non-Governmental agency.

Right now, there exists at http://www.consultations.gov.uk an index of all Government consultations currently underway - however, there is no mechanism for discussion online or for the submission of responses.

To the skeptical, it might appear that actual meaningful engagement with the public is the last thing that’s wanted.

Finally, it should be remembered that there is nothing to stop the politicians themselves going out and becoming members of the online communities that already exist and engaging with the e-enabled electorate in their own space. In all probability, they could even create accounts in their own names - after all, who would believe that the person discussing the finer points of tax credits was in reality that Gordon Brown? To paraphrase that old adage:

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a politician.”

Published by Simon Banton on 26/09/04 at 2:00pm

Comments

I think STAND had a similarly frustrating experience when over 5000 comments on ID cards were treated as a single protest (even though some comments via Stand were pro ID cards).

And FIPR gave signs of frustration about the consultation process in what seemed to me its excellent and thoroughly constructive response on NHS confidentiality (I’d better dig that out and cross post it here).

What we seem to be seeing is that when on line consultation really starts to work as a medium, politicians and policymaking officials (with rare and noble exceptions) cant cope with unattenuated messages. They aren’t ready for it and give little sign of wanting it.

Well, that’s a problem in real life but not a problem for this “ideal government” exercise. Because what we’re trying to do here is simply to state what we want. And the further the present state is from what common sense people suggest is ideal, the stronger the case we can make on 4 Nov.

One part of what we need to articulate is “what do we want from an e-enabled process of political engagement?”

Accurate and thorough information behind policy decisions (and where are the limits eg about nuclear safety, preparations for terrorism)?

Considered answers to hard one-on-one questions?

Results of online consultations or lobbying exercises to be visibly taken into account?

Ways to be sure that “Gordon Brown” is *the* Gordon Brown?

There’s so much activity in this area - iCan, directgov, Hansard Society, MPs blogs, Parliament Live TV, theyworkforyou and faxyourmp....but can we get a wish list of *what we want* from e-enabled political engagement, based on practical situations where possible?

Reply by on 09/26/04 at 6:33 pm
Interesting that you write that “the electorate are becoming ever more isolated from those in power”, when you could equally say that those in power are becoming ever more isolated from the electorate. Fog in Channel: Continent cut off.

A

Reply by on 09/27/04 at 1:06 pm
Th *genuine* engagement of civil servants in online fora was what I argued was most important in FIPR’s response to the government’s e-democracy consultation in 2002: http://www.fipr.org/eDemocracy/FIPR.html

There are a small number of really good examples. Simon Watkin from the Home Office and Nigel Hickson from the DTI both must have spent many man-months engaging with the ukcrypto mailing list, as frustrating as that can sometimes be! And I hope both would agree that government policy actually was improved as a result (although not nearly as far as we would have liked).

You can see their hundreds of posts in the ukcrypto archive:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:chiark.greenend.org.uk+"Simon+Watkin"&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=site:chiark.greenend.org.uk+"Nigel+Hickson"&btnG=Search

Reply by Ian Brown on 09/27/04 at 1:31 pm
Hi,

I created this site http://www.consultationprocess.org/ to post documents such as the ID card consultation process as a blog, making it commentable and linkable down to the paragraph level.

In itself it acts as nothing more than a source for the document, i wanted to monitor the online conversation around the document using comments/trackback and blogs.

At the moment this is very small and quiet, but if we can encourage more people to move the dialog into linkable, searchable online spaces and source the documents from a single, linkable and accessible source then we might help create a better overall conversation.

mark.

Reply by Mark Simpkins on 09/27/04 at 4:03 pm
I totally agree with the point William made about the ID card debacle. I purposely emailed a personal submission separate from STAND because I felt it would be given more consideration that way.

Since then we have discovered that the consultation probably made little or no difference to the end result. This attitude of not seeming to listen still persists today if there is any truth in the stories I have heard about the participant questionnaire for those who tried the pilot.

I think a moderated blog-like system would have be en better for getting more qualitive comments but does little to gauge quantitive matters like how many people agree/disagree with a position.

Certainly I feel that there needs to be both types of feedback when it comes to consultations.

However it doesn’t matter what systems are in place if people end up with the impression that the consultation was just PR and did not have any effect on the results.

Reply by AndyL on 10/05/04 at 5:10 pm
Just following up I have had a look at <URL:http://www.consultations.gov.uk> and found out that it is a broken (as designed?) site - it doesn’t work with my browser of choice (Firefox). I get the first page of consultations but no matter how much I click that “Next 20” link I still get back the first page.

Reply by AndyL on 10/05/04 at 5:40 pm
Local Democracy Week in Warwickshire actually implements a key element of what I proposed in my initial post - a generic ‘Ask an Question’ forum.

Sadly, the week in question was two weeks ago and they aren’t now accepting any more questions.

I guess that amounts to a glass that was half full, but kicked over.

Reply by Simon Banton on 11/01/04 at 10:41 am

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