Conservatives need to be careful with their crowd-sourcing
I picked up this story earlier from Rory Cellan-Jones about the Conservatives running a policy crowd-sourcing project on the “Making IT better“.
Things I like about this are:
- It’s nice to see someone close to government finally using the words “policy crowd-sourcing”
- It’s nice to see someone attempting it
- It’s also nice to see that people are taking part (and it looks like some of the feedback is genuinely useful).
Things I don’t like about it are:
- The hijacking a leaked government policy seems a bit too underhand and political for my liking
- There’s no mention of where the people’s ideas will go, and no sense of policy ownership (i.e. no shadow-minister attached the policy dialogue)
- There’s a sense that the Conservatives are using this as a comm’s campaign to show that they get it rather than a genuine piece of policy crowd-sourcing.
And it’s this final point that I fear. As if the Conservative Party start doing what the Labour Party did with it’s “Big Debates” (or whatever they were called) and use crowd-sourcing / consultation / debate (whatever you want to call it) for political communications ends rather than actual useful policy development then they’re going to wreck any future chance of ever running a successful and meaningful participative policy making exercise again.
As if you start abusing people’s will to give ideas then they’ll stop giving you ideas. And if they stop sharing ideas, the whole concept of participative governance will break.
I think the Conservatives (and the existing government) have a lot to learn from the US about crowd-sourcing specifically about how to frame it in a policy process, structure the process well and how to make full use of the results. The kinds of stuff we’ve been doing over in DC with NAPA and the Obama Administration.
The final – and main thing – the Conservatives should consider is the conceptually the idea of crowd-sourcing. When it comes to policy-development, maybe the Conservatives (and Government) should be looking at a “Dialogue” process – as in a dialogue both sides are giving something to process, however “crowd-sourcing” in its purest sense comes from a “take culture” – which is definitely not the kind of relationship you want with your participative citizens . . .
Hi Chris, I’m Adrian and I work in New Media team at Conservative HQ. Thanks for your comments on http://www.makeITbetter.org.uk... a few points in response, if I may.
Firstly, it’s being headed up by our Shadow Chief Sec to the Treasury, Philip Hammond, so it does have real policy ownership at the highest level. Also, you seem to immediately take the sceptical view of our motives in doing this… as someone who’s advocated political parties crowdsourcing more, it does seem like a case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’.
And finally, I think you overplay the US example slightly – yes, they certainly have shinier crowdsourcing websites, but how much actual legislation has been passed as a direct result of online participation? I don’t think they’re as far off the starting gun as we assume they are.
Hope you don’t mind that feedback – at the end of the day, we all want to make politics more open and I hope you agree we’ve got to start somewhere…
01 Dec 2009 at 10:03 pm
Thanks for the note Adrian – I like a good debate on these issues.
So – in response to your points:
re: Policy ownership + framing: I see you’ve now added up a video from Philip Hammond, introducing the crowd-sourcing initiative. This a v.good move + something you didn’t have up live on the site yesterday on launch, so was why I made this point. In fact on launch – the introduction / policy-contextualisation / policy ownership of this initiative was completely missing – so it’s nice to see this has now be addressed.
re: Skepticism: I’m not skeptical about your participative policy making aspirations – I think it’s a great idea, and you should do more of it. What I am skeptical of is the whole “leaked document” thing. It’s got overtones of “trying to get one over on the opposition” and is far too political for my (and I guess the wider public’s) liking.
re: The US: I think you’re way off the mark about how deep participative governance goes throughout US government (from Federal to Local). I’ve actually just shot a documentary on the Open Gov initiative – where i interviewed key players – including Beth Noveck – the White House’s head of Open Gov. We have also been involved working hands on with Obama’s administration for the last 12 months on a whole range of participative policy making projects – most of which aren’t the huge flagship policies like Health, but the nuts and bolts policies that make everyday government move-along. There is a ream of policy crowd-sourcing examples I could list . . .
So – as I mentioned in my original post – I really do think it’s great that you guys (the Conservatives) are embracing participative governance, however I would urge you to be careful with how you go about it so you don’t wreck the opportunity to create a truly effective participative government.
02 Dec 2009 at 12:03 pm