The demise of ICELE
Some of you will have been following this on other blogs anyway, and there are good conversations on them to join in with about all of this if you want, but would be foolish to ignore the news that the government, after a little delay, has finally pulled the plug on the International Centre of Excellence for Local e-Democracy.
A shame in a way, as there is clearly a role for a co-ordinating body in UK e-Democracy (perhaps the international angle was a little too ambitious?). Despite some great councils doing some great work, there are still many more barely begun on getting e-Democracy established, and individually making the same mistakes as each other time and again.
The problem for ICELE seems to have come down to sustainability ‘going forward’. A difficult issue. As discussed on the blog before, I don’t think I’d be giving away too many trade secrets to say that pretty much no private sector body has been able to build a sustainable funding model purely from e-Democracy in UK Local Authorities over the last few years.
This ‘problem’ (if it is a problem) is only going to get worse as the internet gets ever more free, and excellent quality tools for e-Democracy with a massive user base can be obtained and deployed for free. I did doubt the wisdom of ICELE trying to build sustainability by developing a blogging platform, when wordpress and blogger already do pretty much everything you want. I know through talking to them that they had a good case for developing such a platform, but still suspect it could have been done differently.
So, there’s talk of a new body rising from the ashes of the current heated debate, and it will be interesting to see what happens from here. My personal wish list would be;
- More encouragement for local authorities to use free or open source tools where appropriate (e.g. wordpress for blogging, youtube for video, facebook for collaboration)
- The focus to move away from ‘tools’ and ‘products’ and towards how to use them to greatest effect and in a coherent manner. So often people have deployed tools only to watch them die because they didn’t know what to do with them.
- Above all, the development of a real and shared aspiration to see e-Democracy become a mainstream feature in the UK web. No more pilots, no more being satisfied with tiny participation rates, and instead an expectation that, through hard work and knowledge sharing, e-Democracy should really become a mass participation activity.
For more blogs on this, see;
Gez, on moving the focus away from tools and towards how to use them - back in the early days of the National Project for Local e-Democracy we were very much thinking in those terms. Although that project did develop some innovative tools, there were also a number of pilots using existing tools, where the project output was guidance on how to justify them, choose them and use them.
I think the later shift in emphasis towards providing tools had a lot to do with the perceived need for an income stream to achieve sustainability, the assumption being that councils (those that weren’t already into this) wouldn’t pay for guidance but might pay for tools. The way the market has gone, it looks like many don’t see the need to pay for tools either.
So the options I can think of for doing something sustainable now are:
* see if people will pay for guidance in this area after all (my guess - maybe, but not a lot)
* see if the commercial players will fund something providing guidance and promotion to stimulate the market (my guess - looks like a very speculative investment, not very likely to happen)
* try to build something that doesn’t need an income stream because it relies mainly on voluntary effort rather than paid staff (feels to me like the direction minds are heading just now, but as someone pointed out in another conversation, in the UK we’ve tended to rely on government in this area rather than activism).
20 Jun 2008 at 2:51 pm
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20 Jun 2008 at 11:33 pm