Premise

Art

I have never talked about the arts on this blog before, but two things I've seen today demand comparison.

The first is a classical music afficionado blowing both his own feet off in an attempt to try and defend his precious music. It is so infrequent that one gets the pleasure of reading a genuine article which reads SO much like a straw-man caricature of a target belief. Years ago when hunting through hundreds of old Sun editorials I was sorry to find how little thoughtless bigotry they actually contain - really stereotyped opinion givers are few are far between.

But this is a doozy. Every aspect of the cliche is there - the celebration of an ill-thought-out concept of elitism, incredibly high self-regard for the academic prowess of the author, class as proxy for intelligence, obligatory references to down-dumbing, careless and avoidable self contradiction, smidgens of old-scrumpy-home-brew armchair anthropology, appeals to the self-evidential nature of unsubstantiated arguments, and a recommendation to use pedagogy as a form of indoctrination. A full house! Strike 3! Jackpot!

Which leads me on to the comparason, this recent article by Robert Hughes the famous art critic. His retreading of the classic Shock of the New got a real pasting in both Private Eye and the Times. I didn't see the broadcast, but given what he writes about it here, I can't think what he can have done to deserve the attacks. His writing and broadcasting on art has always been everything I aspire to when it comes to making arguments - perfect, minimalist scene setting, a pre-emptive avoidance of the obvious & stupid questions, witht he majority of the time spent dwelling on the core of why issues really matter to people. It ain't the essence of good journalism, but it is to my mind the core of great written arguments. It'd be truly sad if this great writer was attacked just because he'd dared to suggest that many of the biggest name modern artists simply didn't really matter.

Why run consultations?

What sexy questions this blog dares to pose! I've been mulling this question since an encounter with some pollsters made me see how different government and public perceptions of the purpose of consulting are.

It seems that as a government, you can consult for two purposes. The first is to find out the balance of public opinion about an issue. The second is to try and find better ways of doing things - building a better mousetrap. The very unoriginal bolt from the blue I experienced was the realisation that most people in government (bar the politicians) think that consultations are mostly about the latter, whilst most of the public think they're all about the former. Perhaps we need two different words.

Opening up the problem of democratic deliberation on the net

Over the last couple of months I've been asked several times for my thoughts about deliberative democracy on the internet. The subtext has been clear in each case, "What should we be doing?". The timing of these requests has not been coincidental either; most people are asking these questions for the same few reasons:

1. Government faces even lower levels of trust than even the habitual norm - is there anything that can be done?
2. The increasing consumerisation of society suggests that people want government to listen to them more intently, more often.
3. The scope for politically realistic innovation in both direct democracy and normal elections seems limited and unexciting.

So, the idea that deliberative democracy is the most rewarding channel for investment in public engagement has popped simultaneously into the minds of government officials, pollsters, entrepreneurs, techno pundits, and academics.

Which leaves the original question: what is to be done? My answer is as follows.

Before building anything, we need to see that deliberative democracy is not a one-size-fits-all problem. Only once we have a map of how the terrain undulates can we start building robust democratic bridges.

One simple way of making this map is to identify which factors will most heavily influence the type of approaches which can be used. My guess here is that these are 1) the number of people consulted, and 2) the complexity of the issue discussed.

On the first issue, the main cleavage which must exist within any analysis of deliberation is the issue of scale. Quite simply it will take very different tools and approaches to consult with large numbers of people, and just a few dozen.

The second issue is the complexity of the subject of the consultation. Is the issue simple and highly tangible (speed bumps in your road) or huge and abstruse (an act of parliament)? Totally different approaches will be needed for different ends of this scale.

Now that we have two factors, they can be mapped on one of those predictable two by two grids that social scientists love so much. As always, the key question here is whether the axes themselves are truly the significant delineators for different design approaches. I can't really defend my axes as empirical absolutes, but lets call this a starter for ten. I've put letters in each corner so that I can discuss the types of problems and software which might tackle them without actually having to think up names.

A) Complex issues & few people. This is currently classic government consultation stuff, and the main challenge here is how to make the task as pleasant as possible for those people who are most likely to be involved anyway. Paragraph by paragraph annotation seems like the most likely immediate innovation here.

B) Complex issues & many people. This is stepping into newer territory, and is undoubtedly the most difficult of the options. On the bright side, these types of issues are normally the highest profile media stories. One blessing here is that the scale of the issues can be used to dilute the raw amount of traffic, although there will be greater need here for Slashdot and ebay style reputation and rating systems to help the most valuable contributions to bubble up.

C) Simple issues & few people. Most probably local, revolving around differences of opinion about the desirability of clear outcomes (i.e. road humps). In these situations the users will need tools that let them ‘build’ the issues around which they are arguing themselves – setting the terms of the debate themselves, rather than responding to some kind of official document.

D) Simple issues & many people. These are the issues most likely to become screaming matches, and clever moderation will be the must here.

I know that these are hardly incredibly detailed software specifications, but that isn't the point of this post. Rather, this is my opening gambit in what I hope is a discussion which will still be live many years from now.

The geolocation paradox

Several months ago I was able to have a go on the Urban Tapestries trial. It was great to finally hold in my hand a device of a kind that we've all known for some time is going to become pretty much universal. In simple terms, it contains a map of where you are, and you leave data in certain geographical locations for other people to discover, read and discuss.

In the intervening months I've thought a great deal about how this experience radically changed my expectations of what mobile, user created layers of geographic data would be like. Here are my conclusions:

1) In a day-to-day city context, people are very rarely going to leave data about their locations when they are actually there - it is much more comfortable, easy and safe to leave data about places you know about from elsewhere, probably home. The only exception is when people are bored and stationary, at bus stops, cashpoint queues, in traffic jams, cafes etc.

2) When on walks the incentives to read and leave data will be much higher - more time, more safety, more desire to know about the environment you are in.

3) As soon as layers are open to all through open standards, accessible via all types of devices, they're going to get spammed. This means that fully public layers where anyone can read and post are likely to have a very short lifespan as viable services. Accreditation systems, karma, reputation systems, and layers that only certain people can post to or read will all have to be introduced very quickly indeed. We should also expect voluntary segregation of layers - what teenagers want to know or leave about a rural village is very different from what ramblers will be interested in. First mover advantage in creating these layers and their first-iteration governance systems is currently there for the taking. And it hardly has to be said that whoever makes their layers more open to different users win this battle - walled gardens are going to be suicide.

Anyone interested?

Two things everyone should know

The Daily Mail have set up online discussion forums. Here's their reader's take on the Momart warehouse fire.

The Sun Brothers' eponymous album is out. Get a load of this.

NotCon Politics Sessions

You may be aware of the recent announcement of NotCon, the UK's hippest, most cutting edge and least expensive technology conference of 2004. I'm part of the management (hoho), and I have the responsibility for organising two subtly different sessions, The Politics of the Net and Politics on the Net. I'm delighted to be able to do this because I've sat through so many terribly panel sessions on similar topics in my life that I think I must have seen all the mistakes it is possible to make. The most common of these is not having any really interesting, meaty-but-tacklable questions, and that is why I'm posting today.

We already have some ideas about what we'd like some of the core topics of discussion to be, but there is plenty of scope for new angles, new topics, new problems. I thought I'd post this just to encourage people to ponder what questions they do and desperately don't want to see asked. And if you feel you should be on the panel, not in front of it, please submit your proposal.

NB I think it is only fair to warn people in advance that anyone heard using the phrase 'I think it is absolutely key that we understand that' in one of my sessions will be forceably removed from the room before they can finish their unstructured, contentless non-question. Looking forward to seeing you there!

ConConUK Speech

The following is a version of the talk which I gave to ConConUK on February 23rd 2004. I've left it pretty much in the form of a speech, but cut out some of the queues for myself. I've also added in some extra little bits of info which are useful, but which could not be squeezed into the original five minute slot.

The other alteration I'd like to say is that this talk is not 'anti digital democracy'. By working full time on mySociety I hope that I have done all necessary to prove that I believe passionately that the net has an important a rapidly evolving civic and democratic roll. But at the same time, if we are to learn from our mistakes, we must admit and analyse them.

Geographic constituencies = Consensual Politics?

Along with Chris, I've been mulling over the question of why we have geographic constituencies. There are lots of voting systems that don't use geography- think of any university or shareholder voting system. So why does mainstream politics take them for granted?

Political constituencies are, at base, ways of allowing citizens to exert power in the decision making processes. But they are not the only way - people could vote directly in policies, or have non geographically determined constituencies.

I have already discussed previously the killer flaw of direct democratic systems - the tendancy for small, passionate groups to to upset, then hijack and joyride the less passionate majority's applecart. From the perspective of someone trying to build a democratic system to prevent this, geographic constituencies are a powerful and effective solution. Mainly because of their large size and almost random population, no MP will ever have a totally clear, widely agreed on extreme agenda from all their constituents. And I say 'almost random' because, as Chris argued, the clustering around cities and industries has important side-effects in further stifling the power of minorities. Consequently, such ideas rarely even make it to Westminster, let alone in to legislation.

So - geographic constituencies are a good way of ensuring that there is sufficient randomness to prevent minority hijacking, and they've thrived as such. But I wonder - are they the only way of doing this, and are they the optimum way? Because every time that we build another layer of anti-direct-democracy defence we also alienate people who feel like they can have no impact on the governance of their own lives. Can anyone propose and defend a form of constituency that might have a better balance?

More on representation

Elected representatives are called as much because they represent something. But what? If representative democracy is different from direct democracy, then what is represented cannot be the same as a a direct record of the will of a group of people as manifested through a vote on a certain issue.

In fact elected representatives allow representation only of whole packages of beliefs, not single issues. The packages are voted for at special 'package' votes, which we call General elections. In this way voters are forced by the institutions of the state to accept some degree of tradeoff or difficult connection between different beliefs. The historical rationale for this is straightforward - if you did not insist on people voting for packages then different groups with passionate beliefs would vote for lots of self-interested but mutually conflicting policies. Sooner or later this would bring down the whole edifice of govenment in a screaming heap.

So we have representation to force packages and compromises on our greedy ways. But just because we need representation, does that mean we necessarily need representatives? Representatives do two things:
1) Ensure that the whole population gets a fair say.
2) Represent packages to vote for.

The first of these needs has in many cases been replaced by representative polling, with all their skews, weights, sample sizes and other trendy tools. And the second is already done more by parties than individuals.

None of this means that we should get rid of MPs. It just means that in the quest for innovation in representation we should start to ask what new combinations of tools, rules and technologies might be able to carry out the function of representation in a more demanding and consumerist era.

Representation

There is an inverse correlation between the passion felt for a policy issue and the ability of direct democratic tools to deal with it.

So all this 'Pop Idol & Big Brother show us the way to reinvigorate politics' is just as specious as we thought. It's all just about building a better direct democracy.

This points to the world's biggest unasked democratic question - where is the innovation in representation?