Post in Gathering input from one million people

Mar 06 15:16 UTC

I thought folks might be interested in this post from the UK about a possible
large scale online engagement effort - so assuming something real might happen,
what advice does the world's largest collection of e-participation experts
have?

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

From:
http://www.designingforcivilsociety.org/2008/02/government-plan.html

Government plans major discussion about British Statement of Values

Thanks to the Our Kingdom for noting that Justice Minister Michael Wills has
now confirmed in a recent speech there will be a programme of events and online
discussions leading up to a Citizens Summit about a proposed British Statement
of Values later this year. This is one of three strands to implement the Green
Paper Governance of Britain proposals I wrote about here.
The speech is interesting both for the details it give of this process, and
asides on the balance of representative and participatory democracy.

After speaking about the Constitutional Renewal Bill - which will "surrender or
limit a wide range of powers currently exercised by the executive, transferring
them to Parliament" and the British Bill of Rights and Duties, Michael Wills
said:

    The final strand of the programme is the formulation of a British Statement
of Values. Our national identity matters. Most advanced democracies have
developed ways to express formally their view of who they are as a nation. This
country has throughout much of its history vigorously discussed what it meant
to be British. It was only in the years after the Second World War that we went
through a period of introspection, lacking in self-confidence when such
discussions were often regarded with embarrassment. We are now far more
successful and self-confident as a country and the government believes the time
is right to find a way to express who we believe ourselves to be in a way that
is inclusive and commands broad support.

    If we don't do this, others will. National identity matters to people. If
there isn't a national process to discuss it, in ways that are inclusive of
everyone on these islands, then there is a risk that this territory will be
colonised by sectarian and sometimes even poisonous views.

    For us, here the process of discussion and deliberation is as important as
the outcome. That's why we are doing this through an innovative constitutional
process. Shortly, we will start a series of discussions up and down the
country, accompanied by print material and online forums, on what it means to
be British, what's best about it, what best expresses what's best about it.
This will all be fed into a citizens summit - a representative sample of
perhaps 500 people, selected randomly, for example, from the electoral
register, but filtered, in much the same ways as opinion polls filter their
samples, to ensure it is demographically representative. And informed by these
consultations and by presentations directly to them, they will deliberate - and
we hope decide - on four main questions: should there be such a statement of
values, if so what it should be, how it should be expressed and finally what it
should be used for.
    Their decision will then go to Parliament for a final decision.

Writing at Our Kingdom, Guy Aitchison highlights the Minister's caution about
the benefits of edemocracy:

    Wills discusses the transformational role of the web, but with a mixture of
enthusiasm and apprehension. He celebrates the ease with which constituents can
now contact their MP, but is uneasy that new forms of technology and
communication might challenge the representative principles upon which our
democracy is based. The electronic plebiscite, he warns, is just a click or two
away and we should be very careful about embarking on a slippery slope towards
plebiscitary democracy. He imagines what might happen if an unscrupulous
billionaire wanted a policy change and set about a nationwide campaign of mass
emails and advertising to convince voters to support it online. Could MPs be
trusted in such a situation to meet Burkes ideal of the representative, using
their unbiassed opinion, mature judgement and enlightened conscience?
    Willss misgivings, Id suggest, reflect a much broader anxiety on the part
of government towards the power of the web - something memorably brought home
to them last year with the huge success of the anti-road charge e-petition. For
government, the challenge is to use new technologies for deliberation and
engagement between elections, whilst ensuring that, what has been called, the
mainframe remains intact. Is this possible given that the mainframe belongs to
a previous age?

However, Michael Wills does end with a general commitment to great engagement
with citizens, saying:

    In these circumstances of the changing societal base for our democracy and
the advent of new technologies which, indeed can be a benign force enhancing
democracy, this government is convinced that we need to work more vigorously to
re-engage citizens in the representative democracy we all share - and from
which we all benefit.
    Hence the surrendering or limiting of the power of the executive, the
development of new mechanisms to make policy development a collaborative
venture between government and citizens, instead of a top-down exercise which
can only be accepted or rejected at elections with no in-between options, and
giving citizens greater opportunity directly to monitor and scrutinise the
delivery of policy.

See my original post for references to Gordon Brown's ideas on engagement,
including citizens juries.
The Ministry of Justice has rather a good Governance of Britain web site with
news feeds that you can add to your own site, and a what others are saying
section  fed by del.icio.us bookmarks. If you tag your blog posts
"for:governanceofbritain" you may get included on the site. You can read here
how that was developed using Wordpress by Simon Dickson, working with the MoJ's
own blogger and UKGovwebBarcamp organiser Jeremy Gould.

It's comforting to know that when the Ministry does start to roll out online
discussion it has some in-house expertise.
Declaration: I did done some early work for MoJ with Drew Mackie, running a
workshop with staff to help design the programme. We used a game like this to
simulate the process, and I think it helped wok through how the mix of online
and events might work.