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

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2012

An imaginary open letter: To those who would ‘engage’ us…, August 9, 2012 By Mike realisedevelopment.net

Exposing the lie, 26th July 2012, by John Houghton, cles.org.uk

2011

Westminster World Heritage Site and Parliament Square a national disgrace, Hansard Society, October 25 ^[1] New vision putting citizen and visitor at its heart needed. place, topic

High Speed 2 consultation "a train wreck", say CPRE, 28 February ^[2]

Councils and hyperlocal ‘bloggers’: It’s the council system which needs changing, not how people are allowed to cover them, David Higgerson, February 23 ^[3]

Eric Pickles: Citizen journalists and bloggers should be let in to public council meetings, 23 February ^[4]

"If nothing else the transparency that the social web embodies and that government says it wants to deliver with #opendata means that we will no longer be able to hide our policy programmes in big black boxes that we only open up on launch day" Catherine Howe, January 23 ^[5]

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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)

draft reply for posting to UkGovWeb and davepress.net

I suggest being very careful about concluding too much from stats like "55% of the public simply do not want to be involved in national decision-making." ("Lies, damned lies, and statistics"?) (1)

It reminds me a bit of arguments that were made a few years ago about selling organic or fairtrade goods, that there's simply no demand for them. At a time when very few people are supplying these goods it isn't easy for consumers to vote with their feet or their cash. Change that and then you can see how sales subsequently grow.

If, to put it bluntly, citizens' experience of involvement with government has been either a little bit toxic, or at least not very citizen friendly, it's hardly surprising if a slight majority aren't goint to vote for more of the same.

What maybe is more surprising, is that even though only 18% of citizens feel able to influence decisions affecting Britain (Citizenship Survey: April - June 2009, England, Communities and Local Government, 29 October 2009) 43% of those who feel that they do not, in practice, have any influence over decision-making are still up for it!

Governments, institutions and bureaucracies may have in the past been reasonably successful at designing participation that works well enough for the purposes and benefits of governments, institutions and bureaucracies. If on the other hand in the future we're able to design participation which is more citizen centred, then maybe after some time winning back trust in government, the figures could begin to look very different.

Some stats about local decision making:

29 per cent felt they could influence decisions in their local area
27 per cent would like to be more involved in decisions affecting their community (again likely to be influenced by what historically has been on offer)
45 per cent were, taking everything into account, satisfied with the way their local council runs things (2)

(1) The myth of engaging with everyone, DavePress http://davepress.net/2009/10/15/the-myth-of-engaging-with-everyone/ , October 15, 2009

(2) Place Survey, Communities and Local Government, June 2009

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

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