The document discusses challenges with current policymaking processes and how eParticipation could help address some of these challenges. It outlines perspectives from both "e-Democrats" and policymakers. Policymakers want help understanding public views, highlighting tradeoffs, challenging vested interests, and providing objective information. The document proposes improving consultation through social media, widgets, and transparency around stakeholder input, citizen input, and real-time co-produced policy resources. However, acknowledging citizen impact and changes of mind remains difficult for governments. Overall eParticipation tools should improve policy debate quality rather than encourage simplistic views of complex issues.
Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen: Status and Requirements to Optimise Future Benefits
Can eParticipation take over the world? Paul Johnston keynote at the PEP-NET Summit
1. Can eParticipation take over the World? Paul Johnston Head of European Public Sector Team Internet Business Solutions Group Cisco
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11. The Big Challenge: Acknowledging Impact Citizens Need to Know They Made a Difference Hard for Government to Admit its Changed its Mind
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Notas del editor
Good afternoon. My name is Paul Johnston. I am head of the European Public Sector Team in Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. During the course of the day we have heard about a lot of great e-participation projects, but I want to talk to you about an area that e-participation has found very difficult to crack – central government policy-making. Let me start by making a confession. I have a rather split perspective on this issue. I have worked for Cisco for the last six years and I am genuinely enthusiastic about the power of technology to transform the public sector. A lot of that is about efficiency, effectiveness and service delivery, but where it really gets interesting is when it is about changing the relationship between the citizen and the state. For me, empowering citizens has always been the most interesting aspect of e-government. So that’s one half of my character. The good me if you like. But before I joined Cisco, I was a UK civil servant and for most of that time I was a policymaker. And funnily enough I did want to make things happen and if you want to know how hard it is to make things happen, I suggest you go and work for a bit at the heart of the central government of a reasonably-sized country. The yes minister stereotype is of a brilliant civil servant whose job is to prevent any real change and it is true that civil servants spend a lot of time spotting pitfalls and arguing against policies, but I can tell you that nothing brings a greater smile to a civil servants face than the thought that they might just be able to get a policy through the policy process and into the real world. So that’s the other half of me. Unfortunately, when it comes to e-participation these two perspective often seem to be in radical conflict.
The e-democrat tends to see policy as being made in an ivory tower by an out-of-touch clique. It produces outputs people don’t really want, that are delivered in poorly thought-out ways and in ways that are not joined up across government. In short, everything would be much better, if only citizens were more involved! The policymaker’s view is somewhat different.
For him, the process involves an endless stream of demands and suggestions with constant media and ministerial pressure for exciting big ideas. Citizens ask for something and then complain when they get. They have unrealistic expectations of loser-less solutions and anyway vested interests can block most changes. Finally, unexpected events are constantly throwing everything off track. In short, everything would be better if only it were less complicated! These two rather different perspectives don’t make dialogue easy. Imagine how the e-democrat’s offer sounds to the policymaker.
So what does the policymaker actually want?
Obviously I am exaggerating the gap between the e-democrat and the policymaker, but I want to highlight three points: We need to put a lot more thought into how we sell e-participation to public sector decision-makers – how is e-participation going to make their job easier and help them do it better? We need to recognise that policy-making involves a masses of activities and processes that e-participation needs to link to and improve rather than seek to replace We need to look to provide a wider and different range of tools. Before we explore those points in more detail, lets look at how consultation normally works in government and what we have so far managed to do to improve it.
The standard central government approach is what I have called here “consult and sell”. Basically, the consultation document sets out the government’s argument in a particular area and every now and then ask: “Do you agree? If not, please explain why”. A few weeks ago I read a consultation document of this kind and the most striking thing about it was that it would have been very difficult to find a single statement in the document to disagree with. Now that might seem great, but it is also a bit strange. Surely the policymakers who developed the strategy must have faced some hard choices? Surely there must have been options they ruled out? But the consultation document made every effort to hide these decisions. Why? Well, the point of the consultation document was to take things forward, so of course it didn’t want to encourage people to re-open all the options that policymakers had with great difficulty managed to close down in internal discussions and pre-consultation talks with stakeholders. But then of course the consultation looks very false and it naturally generates anger at the fact that the government is setting the agenda and only allowing views on questions the government is able carefully to define. One way central government tries to get out of this dilemma is by taking a very different approach and having what I call a “blank sheet of paper” consultation. It flags up an issue, claims to have no defined views on the issue and ask the most open questions possible – tell us what you think about how we could improve our democracy or move towards a low carbon economy or whatever. This seems great because the people are being allowed to set the agenda, but it is not really much more helpful for the citizen because the questions are usually so big and open that it is hard to know how to respond to them. And it is very hard to know how to be relevant, since it is clearly never really the case that the government has a blank sheet of paper. There are always going to be a lot of constraints – issues that are up for grabs and issues that aren’t up. Ignoring all of that makes it easier to have a broad debate, but means that most of that debate is likely to be ignored when the government actually starts talking about what it might do.
So what have we done so far to improve the situation? Well, we have done some pretty good things and there is a lot in the UK that I think we have can be very proud of. We have moved away from staid and very boring consultation papers to consultations that include lots of video contributions to the debate and reach out to people via Facebook and Twitter and other social media. We’ve created consultation widgets, so that the people can embed the consultation questions in their own website and allow people to get involved without going to a government website. We have also done quite a lot of work with freely commentable documents, so people can challenge or comment on anything they want, not just a limited number of pre-set questions. Now all of that is good and important, but it is all about generating more input rather than relating that input to the rest of the policy process. From the citizen’s point of view, he gets a brief opportunity to get involved, but the engagement is not very fulfilling because it is not clear what impact it has. And from the civil servant’s point of view, he gets a burst of extra input which he is not very sure what to do with. The latest UK initiatives in this area illustrate these points rather well. As I am sure you all know, the UK got a new government in May and like most new governments part of their aim was to change the way government works. So they were keen to do some e-participation and undertook two initiatives using the same platform. The government had promised to repeal any unnecessary laws and regulations, so they created a site where citizens could suggest rules that should be abolished and rate the suggestions of others.
The UK government is also very committed to tackling the UK budget deficit, so they gave citizens (and public sector workers) the chance to contribute ideas on how to cut waste. These platforms got a lot of publicity and generated a lot of activity. Technical Problems. Moderation Issues. Mixed publicity. Does this exercise really make sense? In fact, they got quite a lot of frivolous responses. Here is one of my favourites.
Now of course you are always going to get this kind of thing, but this exercise seems almost designed to provoke it. From the citizen’s point of view, the platform was certainly very easy to use, but was it worth putting much effort into coming up with an idea? If you did submit an idea, how likely was it that your carefully-thought out suggestion would get anywhere? In any event, no feedback was promised, so there was no way of finding out what happened to your idea. So it was actually quite hard for the citizen to take these initiatives seriously and if they did, there was a strong chance that they would find the process disillusioning. From the government’s point of view, they certainly got plenty of suggestions – 14,000 for the Your Freedom site and over 44,000 for the Public Spending Challenge – butt most of them were low quality or very predictable. And even though the government did not go to the effort of responding to each suggestion, it still had to devote a fair amount of resources to processing all this input. And what has come out seems look pretty meagre. Three ideas have been identified from the Spending Challenge exercise – one is about not requiring junior doctors to be cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau when they change hospital every six months as part of their training, another is about no longer printing plastic National Insurance Cards and instead simply informing people of their National Insurance Number, and the last one involves putting more effort into selling off government surplus equipment. Finally, for the government even the publicity was not particularly good – with most people seeing the initatives as a fairly meaningless PR exercise. So what needs to change? I think we have focussed to much on e-enabling the consultation element; what we really need to be do is to transform the whole policy-making process. And for that what is needed is a lot more transparency. So where do we go from here?
We need to recognise that the traditional consultation period is the tip of an iceberg and that 90% of the policy-making work takes place before and after it. So we need first of all to make as much as possible of that transparent and then we need to create opportunities to input into it. That means making public who is meeting our public decision-makers and what they are discussing. It means publishing any material they send to a department arguing for or against a particular policy. Once you do that, you can then give citizens a role in rating or discussing this input and the policymakers might actually find that quite helpful. Ultimately I think the same thing should apply to citizen input – letters, emails and faxes that argue for a particular policy as opposed to raising an individual case. I also think we need a much better map of what is going on in the policy process. What policy issues are currently being looked at? Where have they got to in the policy process and what are the likely next steps? This is potentially a lot of work, but if you really want to involve people it needs to be done and perhaps the best way of doing it is to rope in citizen volunteers. Of course, the government would want safeguards, but it would not be difficult to create systems that gave people more authority on the basis of the previous contributions they have made. We also need to move away from just textual input. Textual comments generate a lot of work for the policymaker and it is almost impossible to show what impact they had. By contrast, aggregated impact is more likely to be taken seriously and it is much easier to see whether or not it was acted upon. And we need to do more on deliberative eparticiption – tools that help people see the tradeoffs and understand how their view relates to the views of others. Again, this can really help the policymaker, since it is about trying to raise the level of the debate rather than encouraging the idea that if you involve enough people, so one will come up with a magical solution. Finally, we need to think about tools for long-term engagement. To some extent opening up the whole of the policy process itself means that the scope for engagement is long term rather than time-limited. However, we probably also need to explore citizen sounding boards that brings together virtually groups of citizens for a prolonged period to give their feedback in a transparent way on the policies a particular department is developing. That’s a big agenda. But there is one more huge challenge.
On the one hand, if they are to participate, citizens need to know they have made a difference. On the other hand, governments find it hard to admit they have changed their minds. This is a big issue, but it would be wrong to see it as a problem for government, its also our problem. We need to encourage the government to do consultation and participation in ways that makes it easier for them to acknowledge that they have changed their view. And we need to build eParticipation tools that have feedback loops built into them.
Conclusion – I think we can transform even government policy-making. But the solution is not just about encouraging citizen input. It is about working with policymakers to create tools that capture the complexities and difficulties of policymaking and give citizens the chance to understand the issues more deeply and contribute to the policy process all the way through rather than in short, irregular intervals. I have focused very strongly on government policy-making because it is the difficult case, but I would argue that many of the points I have made also apply to eParticipation in other contexts. I do think eParticipation can take over the world, but to do that it needs to focus not just on input but on opening up the whole of the public decision-making process.
![Policy-Making: The e-Democrat’s View ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],If only citizens were more involved!](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)