The UK e-democracy debate – getting stale?

Its great to see you guys talking about e-democracy, there are certainly some interesting points posted. http://democracy.nationalforum... is the Australian governments e-democracy access point and certainly not stale. It’s funny how more Aussies surf the net rather the watch TV, then again maybe not. The Internet’s many-to-many communication capability is nothing to be messed with. Take into consideration Gen-Y been the first to grow up with an array of interactive communications tools at their fingertips, which they have seized and embraced whole heartedly to fulfill basic needs, e-democracy is a natural progression.

The more we are empowered by interactive media, the less receptive we are to passive experiences and in fact if your anything like me, the Internet plays a key role in filtering out information, making me my very own director, allowing me to completely personalise what I see and hear. I can’t remember the last time I turned the TV on or read a newspaper. This is a phenomenon that is redefining the role of traditional practices, responding to it is inevitable. Political processes will have to adapt, looking and our recent national elections and the current USA presidential race its plain to see what the role of e-democracy plays, just type Barack Obama into a YouTube search, his breaking all kinds of YouTube records. Don’t think for a minute, this will come down to governments and legislation.

Yes, more thorough evaluation that demonstrates what works (and what doesn't) would make a big difference. Despite Stephen C's quite proper distinction between an evaluation and a sales pitch, the evaluation should be the basis for the sales pitch - not a pitch for the latest FaceSpace/VOICE/whatever technology (which won't have been evaluated yet), but for eDemocracy as a principle. If there's some sense of staleness around, perhaps it's because eDemocracy hasn't become an established, routine operational tool, it's still the stuff of pilot projects. And if local authorities generally aren't doing a lot, perhaps that's because pilot projects are not something they do (at least not with their own money, National Project funding is another matter).

SC wrote: "I'm convinced that the methods and concepts exist that allow evaluations to reflect the broadest possible political, technical and cultural factors - but this calls for a commitment on the part of project sponsors to learn from what they are doing."

I'd like to share your (qualified) optimism, but there do seem to be genuine conceptual and methodological difficulties as well. As most (though not all) of the claims for eDemocracy relate to public participation in democracy, a couple of literature reviews on equivalent offline make worrying reading.
Rogers & Robinson (2004), reviewing evidence on community engagement for the Home Office, concluded that "[although] there is a strong common sense case to be made for community engagement, there are real difficulties in the way of establishing reliable measures of community engagement and its benefits."
Warburton et al for Involve (2005), reviewing literature on public participation in policy-making, conclude even more damningly that they have yet to see a single proper analysis of the costs and benefits of participation which adequately deals with intangibles like social capital and improved relationships, or which is able to disaggregate the impact of a project from the 'confounding variables' of its political, economic, social and cultural environment.
Clearly we face the same difficulties in seeking to demonstrate the benefits of eDemocacy, and often we're still left saying, 'we know it worked, and we've got a good idea how it worked, but we can't demonstrate its efectiveness in a way that convinces policy-makers'.
Perhaps we could do so if only the right structure was in place. In the 'What do you want from researchers' thread you said: "researchers need to be supported in conducting long-term studies with a view to drawing major conclusions."
I agree completely, that's the ideal way forward. How depressing, with reference to the local e-democracy national project pilots, that Carol is reduced to wishing: "It would be really interesting to carry out a study on testing whether those [long-term] aims have been met or not". That kind of evaluation should have been inbuilt from the start!

By the way, for those who don't know me, I'm working with Ann in Leeds at the Centre for Digital Democracy, on a study of European eParticipation. It's not a very long-term study, unfortunately, but we are starting by developing what we hope is a robust enough analytical framework to better conceptualise the full benefits of eParticipation and the factors that affect outcomes in the real world.

This is an interesting and lively debate and as one of the early researchers developing eDemocracy tools and also an evaluator for the National Project I’d like to make two main points.

The first one is that I’ve seen this all before...
A new technological application development arrives and those researchers that are at the forefront of the development stay cautious, using words like ‘potentially’ it could do this but noting that nothing is proven. Then along comes some individuals or organisations that want to reap rewards for the new approach and they start preaching how this new technological development can save the human race (democracy in this case) – all we get is hype and more hype, until people believe the hype but get really disappointed when the technology doesn’t deliver and then they start to become very cautious. This is even when the original researchers are saying you need to evaluate, evaluate and do more evaluation to understand the emerging practice.

I believe we are at this stage with eDemocracy. It hasn’t delivered on the hype and nor would we, as researchers, expect it to, but local authorities are being more cautious because of this and this may give an impression of staleness. Like Stephen, I would interpret this sobriety rather than staleness.

At conferences and workshops I have been urging independent evaluation of eDemocracy projects so that we really understand what is happening and also understand what might happen.
We need an honest debate on how projects have progressed not how well the ‘owners’ want them to have progressed.

I totally agree with Carol when she says that most of the pilots in the national project hadn't really got going so it was difficult to see exactly what we had learned and indeed my report stated exactly that constraint. However a number of years later and there are still very few well-documented eDemocracy initiatives. Typically, where there are descriptions, these tend to describe the technology in a one-off project setting and give user feedback. These descriptions of isolated experiments with systems raise more issues and challenges than they currently address. Critically, for evaluation purposes, governments are still relying on questionnaires that deal with user satisfaction levels to assess whether local democracy is being enhanced by eDemocracy.

At Leeds, under the Demo-Net network of excellence we are developing a framework for evaluating projects encompassing a range of methods and perspectives. It would be useful to have a wider discussion.

Let’s really start to understand what is happening rather than assuming the best.

Will the real Stephen Coleman please stand-up!

Unfortunately Stephen, I cannot trace the author of this bogus post, only where their IP address is registered. A reverse IP search tells me that the Coleman impostor is based in central England, possibly in or near Bath… or Derby (IP searching is a bit inconsistent).

I note that the IP address used is the same as the “anon” poster in the previous thread. So they are likely to be one and the same person.

In the spirit of openness I will leave this post (although I have put in a note to say it isn’t you). If it happens again I will be less polite.

It falls to me to respond directly to the question about Campaign Creator, which was a Bristol project funded by Government as part of the round 2 e-innovations programme. These projects were well funded but the down side was the short timescale, which made even the national e-democracy programme look leisurely.

We openly published all project documentation at the time, including the budget. From memory, we spent approximately £40K on the national campaign website, which was developed by a Bristol company called SIFT. We paid a company in Bath called Engino to develop the campaign application, possibly £50-60K. We paid Friends of the Earth and RSE Consulting to research and author a campaign guide and subsequently distributed several thousand copies of this worldwide. We developed a training course with the Scarman Trust and subsequently trained and recruited a dozen or so community campaign coaches. We bought 10 laptops, which we now lend out to community groups, such as Bristol Wireless, for events and training. We held a number of events (including the very scary Activists and Authorities conference). We ran a marketing campaign, paid Gallomanor for project management, design and user-testing, we ran a community campaign stakeholder group…

I remain very unhappy that we have not found a way to keep Campaign Creator going. Scarman Trust tried to obtain Lottery funding to roll the project out nationally but this hasn’t worked out. It is not, of course, very easy to find funding to support this type of grass roots e-democracy campaign activity…

If the pretend Stephen Coleman cares to email me directly, I will pass on whatever documentation s/he feels they need.

Stephen H

I didn't put up the last post. I assume that whoever undertook this underhand action believed that it would embarrass the people hosting this site. In fact, Bristol's Campaign Creator was evaluated (by me and my team) and, as I understand it, it has been taken up by the Scarman Trust as part of its work with local communities. I look forward to hearing in detail about which of the ICELE 'tools' have been taken up by local authorities or NGOs.

But let's not play silly buggers. I assume that if someone's able to put up a post in my name, someone else is able to find out who did it and expose them.

**PLEASE NOTE THIS COMMENT WAS NOT MADE BY STEPHEN COLEMAN. IN THE SPIRIT OF OPENNESS IT HAS BEEN LEFT AND RESPONDED TO BELOW**

What happened to the DCLG funded Bristol Campaign Creator?

http://www.campaigncreator.org...

How many thousands did that cost?

Andy Williams asks whether there should be a collective publication for discussing these issues, which ties in with some thoughts I was having. I am halfway through building a collaborative space at http://lgedem.org/ which hopefully will provide a place for these conversations to continue in more detail.

Stephen (C) is right that the eDemocracy world is very exciting (particularly this week on Twitter ;-) ), but I'm not convinced that the energy being produced by individuals and groups in the field are being picked up by Local Govt. except for a few pioneering types in Bristol, Norfolk and some other areas. I'd also like to ask just how much even Bristol have invested of their own money as opposed to being very good at bidding for European and central govt funding.

My point is that even with energetic and innovative individuals local govt is inherently very cautious. When we've researched the area (for ICELE incidentally) we've found officers spending years devising e-democracy strategies only to have the door shut in their face by risk adverse members and senior officers afraid to "let the floodgates open".

This innovation-wary culture in most local authorities is what is making the local eDemocracy conversation stale. On a positive note perhaps the new participatory budgeting and citizen empowerment strategies to come out of DCLG may re-energise the subject in councils up and down the country.

It would be really interesting to carry out a study on testing whether those aims have been met or not. When the national project evaluation was carried out, most of the pilots hadn't really got going so it was difficult to see exactly what we had learned. Now that things have been going a bit longer, it would be very valuable to learn just how much of an impact they've made.

I'm inclined to agree with Andy that e-democracy doesn't feel like it's advancing. Part of that is down to the cautious uptake of edemocracy by councils across the UK so conferences etc still need to be pitched at those who are still thinking about edemocracy rather than those who are looking for the next challenge. I think there are some interesting things going on but the problem is that it's hard to find out where the innovation is happening so speakers at conferences tend to be the usual suspects (myself included) rather than drawing in new approaches.

Carol says that the Government's e-democracy project had three clear aims:
1) Better decision-making
2) Increased participation
3) Stronger bonds between the citizen, their council and their representatives
Now, call me an academic pedant if you wish, but something suggests to me that the next task the Government (and ICELE, as its creation) should have set themselves was to evaluate rigorously whether all or any of the funded pilots contributed to all or any of these three intended impacts. I've heard speakers for the National Project and ICELE claim that it has achieved such impacts, but this amounts to little more than a sales pitch, however sincerely it might be meant. Evaluating policies - whether we're talking about congestion charges, the war in Iraq or local issue forums - is the only way that in a democracy we can decide what needs to be done next. I'm convinced that the methods and concepts exist that allow evaluations to reflect the broadest possible political, technical and cultural factors - but this calls for a commitment on the part of project sponsors to learn from what they are doing. There is nothing to fear from intelligent scrutiny.

Incidentally, I only came to learn that the evaluation of the national project had been suppressed when a disenchanted former employee of ICELE told me that that's what had been decided. Our immediate response was to circulate the evaluation document to every government, university and NGO we could think of.

Stephen... yes, I agree that there's a number of lively debates but my point was that the over-arching debate wasn't perhaps advancing. Maybe conversations are occurring within smaller groups within a wider community. Perhaps that's a sign of maturity or that there's not enough cross-over. Not sure? As for change in 10 years... totally agree. We need to recognise what has occurred and where the debate has shifted to and will head. Anchor the past as we construct the future. Having just taken over the role you first created, I'd hope I can do something to pull this debate in from the fringes and back to the centre... I think there's more leverage, more potential there.

Perhaps a way to start would be a collective publication of some kind reflecting on what has happened, were expectations met (or otherwise) and thinking about where we might go. It's something that's been on my mind this last couple of months and the Hansard Society would support us pulling together.

Also, Carol, yes, I think that definition still more or less stands. Might change the order/detail/wording but that would be semantic.

Andy - I think that the debate about e-democracy in the UK is actually quite lively. But going to conferences on e-democracy is probably not the place to find it. Look elsewhere. Firstly, there is the MySociety 'space' which has for a long time been filled with focused, usually worthwhile activism. Its open-source culture demonstrates that there really is a different way of making an impact in the digital age. (Let's regard the Number Ten e-petitions as a momentary lapse into gimmickry.) Secondly, there is a great deal of original and informed debate amongst scholars working on old and new media, citizen engagement and civic journalism. The forthcoming London conference on the politics of web 2.0 is set to be a lively gathering of minds. Thirdly, many political activists (some in political parties, more in new social movements) have employed new media in exciting and consequential ways. I think that we really are asking different questions in 2008 than we were asking a decade ago when I set up the Hansard Society's e-Democracy programme. We know much more than we did about how the internet is being used, about institutional responses to online activity and about the consequences of media convergence and fragmentation. Remember: ten years after the popular spread of television into UK homes (the mid-60s) we were still at the beginning of our understanding of the socio-political effects of television. The debate about e-democracy was dominated in the past by too many certainties, often a result of technological determinism. The atmosphere now is perhaps less certain, and certainly less breathless, but I would interpret this as sobriety rather than staleness.

It would depend on what content you propose to introduce to achieve this.

At present the attitude seems to be that if the government does things on the internet it will magically renew democracy.

I can't remember the proper definition we used within the National Project but this seems to cover it:

[edemocracy was aimed at ] improving the breadth, depth and quality of interactions between officers, councillors and members of the community

This will lead to:
Better decision-making
Increased participation
Stronger bonds between the citizen, their council and their representatives

Do other people think this is still valid?

Ah, I see. Gotcha. Anyway, we are taking this away from the main aim of the thread, which is e-dem.

I would be interested to know how people define e-dem and what it is actually trying to achieve. Is it any of the following?

* Greater participation in elections etc through electronic voting etc
* Greater participation in elections etc through better communications
* Better policy through consultation
* More involvement in local politics from previously uninterested citizens

I wonder if e-dem is about improving existing processes or creating something new?

Totally agree, Dave, my point was more about the detail of the conversation and that we too quickly got into the detail of solving the problem rather then discussing the strategic and environmental issues that surround it. Will ICELE becoming effective users of social media transform them? I'm sure it would help and I agree it's a good thing, but if they're set up to fail then they will still fail.

Andy - I can't see how the mention of social media in that conversation was irrelevant when we were talking about an organisation that promotes the use of such technologies whilst not actually using them on their own web presence, as far as we can tell. It also provides the platform for us to told these discussions, whether through this blog, or elsewhere, in a way that wouldn't be possible without it.

One of the joys of the social web is the ability it provides people, whether in local government, the third sector or just interested individuals, to create stuff that make things better. This can be applied to edemocracy as it can anything else. Whether it is just using the web as a platform for debate or as a medium through which stuff can actually be delivered. More harmful in my view is a reitcence to do things in the mistaken belief that it's just a flash in the pan, or today's trendy tool.

It's true that the social web is "just" a tool, but sometimes tools are cool ;-)

Andy - I agree about not just jumping to the next tool, and focussing on strategy.
We currently have an institutional tool for developing/promoting local e-democracy (ICELE) that apparently isn't working.
Maybe that's because "centres of excellence" come from a World 1 view about how to make things happen. In World 2 stuff happens all over and you have to facilitate and steer across many domains (see David Gurteen table here http://tinyurl.com/2na8t7).
So if we want to re-launch local e-democracy, engagement etc, how do we discuss and then co-design what's appropriate? What strategic process and tools do we need, including the open, collaborative space Dave Briggs proposes?

I’ve just argued that the debate around eDemocracy is going stale, particularly so in the local government sector. It’s a perception I have coming from overseas that this is the case. I might be wrong, it may well just be an interpretation of the debate. We’ll see!

This perception may in fact be symptomatic of the changing landscape of UK eDemocracy. It has certainly – and rather oddly – shifted from a national, centre stage focus to a side-show. This is almost a polar extreme to what is happening elsewhere, or as Stephen Clift noted on the UKIE email list, eDemocracy advocates would like to happen elsewhere. And it doesn’t make sense to me at all.

If (making some assumptions) eDemocracy is about transforming democracy to effectively engage then surely it belongs at the centre?

This thread comes out of Stephen Coleman’s posting, ‘what is ICELE for?’ This question of itself highlights the fact that we are, as an eDemocracy community drifting a little rudderless.

When I attend eDemocracy events I play a game of identifying today’s fashion. Last Autumn it was ePetitions. More recently it is social media. Next, I don’t know. I’m not guessing! There’s nothing wrong with this per se, other than it leads to a climate of playing catch-up with the latest fashion or must-have e-accessory.

And I’m not a fan of that. All of my work tells me that effective eDemocracy is about selecting the right tool for the right job at the right time. This is about aligning technology within a social context of what communities and governments (local or national) are trying to achieve. Not the other way around. More dangerously, this mindset creates a tendency to try and identify ‘best practice’ but that’s as irrelevant as it is problematic since it encourages mediocrity and – most critically – stifles innovation. That would be terminal in an emerging field.

This all starts to hint at why we’re not really seeing real debate occurring. Going back to Stephen’s ICELE post, this is an important issue to discuss. If ICELE is charged with leading local eDemocracy then we have a duty as ‘experts’ (I hate that term!) in the field to critically observe, comment and challenge. But by comment 5 in the blog, we were into extolling the virtues of social media again (I’m not saying social media isn’t important, useful or interesting, or in fact denigrating the post as it was interesting – it was just largely irrelevant to a conversation about how we strategically address creeping inertia in local government eDemocracy).

Perhaps the key word is in the last paragraph – strategic. The debate too quickly becomes operational – use this tool or that tool, this technology or that. It’s my gut feel that right now the valuable debate – and the one that hasn’t been occurring – needs to be at the strategic level of what we expect eDemocracy to do for citizens and governments – not how. That’s detail that as we’ve seen constantly changes. So thanks, Stephen, for creating the ICELE thread - in doing so, you may yet convince me that my scepticism on debate is misplaced!

One issue is the question of 'where?'. Where exactly is the local gov edemocracy discussion supposed to take place? We need an open, collaborative space where these issues can be discussed and investigated.