Washington Day 1: thoughts (part 2) on White House Citizen Participation

Part 2: projects and pragmatism

So in the previous exciting installment, I tried to briefly summarise how the current US administration has taken hold of the principle of participation.  The next part of our conversation was about the work of realising that principle in activity, about the challenges of actually adopting more participation into the process of governance.

I’m not gonna pretend to have answers to these; I’m just gonna represent the discussion we had about some of the most common, sizeable practical obstacles to actually making this stuff happen.  Again, there’s loads to cover but I’ll stick to three core topics for now…

1.  The sell-in

A common frustration among suppliers and, I’m sure, the experience of anyone who’s ever tried to introduce anything new to government but it was interesting to hear from Katie that even she, as the White House Director of Citizen Participation, has to sell in any new idea or proposal to her seniors and a whole bunch of assorted internal stakeholders.  Building sufficient consensus around a project to get sign-off on a budget is a hard enough task as it is but one that seems to be even tougher when it’s something new that you’re trying to initiate.

The typical picture is that someone sees an inspirational example or discovers a new tool or has some other epiphany and can suddenly connect the dots from ‘what it’s my job to achieve’ straight through to ‘a way I can get it done’ and, understandably, wants to implement that straight away.  However, as soon as the request goes in for resourcing to press ahead with the idea, a whole other bunch of factors come into play – there are budgetary protocols to be met or the idea has to be tweaked to float a director’s boat or it needs to be contorted to come under the heading of another, higher priority agenda.

Whatever the reason, the biggest problem is the damage done to the momentum and the clarity of the initial idea.  This is why Price Floyd, speaking at the Open Government Conference, suggested to delegates that they never ask for permission and just press ahead with their initiatives and ask for forgiveness later.  Basically, one of the things that will make it easier to increase participation in governance through the internet is making it easier for government staff and agencies to get projects and experiments off the ground.

2.  The timing

A particular quirk of working in a field that combines technical development, consideration for human engagement/interaction, civil service operations and political issues is that of timing.  Politics moves fast, government moves slow.  Political factors call for very short lead times where effective design and development require long lead times.  Especially while this online stuff is still pretty new, it’s a real challenge to turn around meaningful, good quality public participation exercises.  Running out of time (ironically) and battery now so I’m gonna rattle through these last two points…

Basically, another of the things that will make it easier to increase participation in governance through the internet is improving the speed and efficiency of some or all of those timing factors: technical deployment getting quicker, interaction design getting more established and the experts more readily trusted, political issues becoming more ongoing and less subject to the fluctuations of news/attention cycles (hopefully a by-product of a culture of increasing openness and accessibility) and governmental processes becoming more alacritous and geared-up to this mode of working. (I have a good example of this from a recent project that probably deserves a post of its own – will come back to that in a bit).

3.  The use

The final challenge we discussed was around actually getting the use of this stuff at the ‘back-end’.  Because there’s a cultural as well as an operational shift in moving to more participatory governance, one of the first things to go is the integration of public feedback/input into the policy-making process – either because it’s the thing with which most agencies are least comfortable and probably the one where they see the least immediate, tangible value, or because it’s the thing which is the most tricky to figure out how to bring into their existing process in a useful, safe way.

Basically, another thing that will make it easier to increase participation in governance through the internet is government agencies, departments and decision-makers understanding the hows and whys of including public participation in the policy-making process and having their organisation and processes set up to better accommodate that.

Cliffhanger #2

Mercifully, it’s not my job to have to systematically solve these problems and break down the functional barriers to implementing more participatory governance.  However, we do and will keep coming up against one, some or all of these in most projects we’ll do for the forseeable future so we are in some way involved in shaping the culture of this area.  And that’s where the real opportunity for making a difference lies: there’s an amount of practical work that can be done to minimise or mitigate these problems in the short term but – and this was at the heart of our conversation with Katie – the (audacious, hopeful) goal is a change in the culture of society, politics and governance.  And that’s what I’ll get to in part 3 – stay tuned!