Forum:Participation and countering the 'it isn't representative' argument

Post Ukgc10 event comment - draft for posting to UkGovWeb

Participation in a democracy doesn't have to be seen as a threat to representative democracy. The two co-exist and have done for a long time. Those who seek to be defensive of the status quo may wish to frame it as an either / or question but it doesn't have to be seen this way. Participation and representative democracy can be seen as mutually enriching.

Online participation brings new opportunities, but there's a kind of almost automatic questioning that every new avenue of online particpation being explored isn't or won't be representative. Participation of course isn't the same thing as representative democracy. It isn't meant to be. But it can be seen as something that opens up a myriad of possibilities of complementing representative democracy. It can be seen as part of a mix.

And yet the question persists. If you're designing participation will you miss out on those traditionally labelled 'hard to reach', or have the discussion dominated by those traditionally labelled the 'usual suspects' or the 'hard to avoid'? The 'hard to reach' are hard to reach because those who tend to use this label are often themselves virtually impossible to reach. The 'hard to avoid' are hard to avoid because the people who tend to use this label are keen to keep on avoiding them. The hard to avoid should not be avoided, but welcomed. Deal with their stuff, however difficult, and they melt back into the crowd. If you're really lucky they hang around to help deal with any more deeply ingrained attempts at control freakery, including from those who might be described as the 'hard to budge'.

Then there's the question "What wrong with aiming for participation that's representative?" Maybe nothing in theory, but in practice, and especially in a more resource contrained future, what resources are actually available? This is not just about what traditionally gets viewed as resources, but looking openly at resources which may have been undervalued in the past, the wisdom of crowds, a richer mix of skills than any bureaucracy, and local knowledge. It's also about being open to ideas of building on what already exists, which may involve going to where the conversations are already happening.

The people who turn up to unconferences, open space events, and events like UKGovCamp 2010 get to set the agenda, shape what happens at the event and understand why the event happens the way it does. The people who turn up to online particpation are the people who set the agenda and shape what follows. Yes, if you're involved in designing participation, you may want to do more, but is it really necessary to try and fit everything, every strand within a wider mix, into the representative mould? Wikipedia contains content on a vast range topics. Because of the general pattern of wiki edits, it might be possible to argue that for the vast majority of topics, for all but the most popular, co-creation is in practice by a group of people actually fairly unrepresentative of those who might be said in someway or other to be stakeholders. Presumably few of us would argue from this that we should consider going back to a world without Wikipedia?

The trouble with trying to engineer involvement, or answering the question "who should be involved" is it tends to be a top down process. It's really quite easy for prominent stakeholders to engineer involvement that only really includes or invites those they are comfortable with. It's less to do with what any 'central' agency may choose to invite and more about ensuring an openness that doesn't exclude. If a group or community decides in the spirit of co design to try and crowd source the answer to the question of who should be invited, fine, but again it comes back to being realistic about resources. You can invite involvement, nurture it even, but you can't engineer it.

None of this may answer the more involved and detailed question of how to actually blend participation and representative democracy for policy making and decision taking. But the answer is perhaps relatively simple. Let us in and we can discuss it. In this context the growing interest in ideas of co design and co production is encouraging.

Philralph @ sca21 18:56, January 27, 2010 (UTC)