Matt, That is the space that E-Democracy.Org is attempting to fill in a few UK communities.
Our experience is that essentially everyone paid is "council" focused - how does the council get input on the items it wants input on. As an outsider, I think the biggest barrier to semi-mediated/semi-open council/citizen engagement online is party discipline. Whether it getting Councillors to take up blogging and gasp allow comments or sustaining their participation in council-wide Issues Forums. The next barrier is that our model requires a few - only a few - people who are willing to play a more or less convening and discussion seeding role. The forums with these volunteers are far more active and agenda-setting. My sense is that too many people expect council staff or someone to serve them just as the BBC serve people based on a service fee. Their are other local forums - often general web forums that are quite active around the UK. Typically they are based on aliases and those types of forums are too open to engage formal council participation and while some councillors might post anonymously few put themselves out for abuse. Around the world, newspapers are adding online news comments in the anonymous style of blogs. Definitely a fine way to democratize national political punditry with debate as sport. Highly destructive and corroseive at the local level IF you actually want people who live near one another to be engaged and solve/act on issues that arise (instead of just using the Net as a giant complaint board). So what works? We are finding that Issues Forums at the neighbourhood level are attracting broader public interest, councillor participation, potential council support, and are far more civil community-building sort of experiences. However, our best forums with Oxford and Bristol are those which are leveraging existing neighbourhood engagement/social capital networks. In the U.S. we have funding for a couple low income/high immigrant population neighborhboods and the one-person-at-time effort is very labour intensive - but the rewards and "community empowerment" is well worth it. I've tried to plant a few seeds with DCLG and other in the UK to connect the community empowerment agenda to neighbourhood forums, but we don't have anyone on the ground in a paid capacity (or volunteer capacity) who can water that seed and create the partnerships required to extend what we know works to more places. Let me conclude by saying how this relates to mySociety - I do wonder if there is an "Issues Forum-lite" version still using real names, but w/ratings/ability to shun bad apples w/o the forum manager requirement that could be more technology enabled - something where people across the mySociety network could be given the opportunity to opt-in to something that says, "My name is X, I live here, and I want to participate in my local community online." Then as people pile up, they receive automatic prompts ... there are now ten of you in X postal code/parish/nhood/place - you can step up and X,Y,Z. If no one is willing to act/lead, you wait for the next 10 or 20, etc. (We feel you need a 100 people in an online space with e-mail notices as a default to have critical mass for ongoing exchange in "bridging" online spaces.) The break with traditional mySociety approaches is that you guys do a really go job with weak tie quick relationships that expire (pledgebank) or you serve the personal interest "my" in terms of what individuals want from parliamentary information, etc. Having to manage people in a highly distributed environment recruiting on you behalf (the ones encouraged to lead local recruitment or serve a tending gardener/facilitator) can be difficult. We've always felt it is required to go beyond virtual ghost towns (look at Topix.Net in areas w/o media partners). Anyway, I am open to new ideas. However, in the end whether it is through advertising or a percentage of participants donating, a broadly local "public life" everywhere platform that builds sustained and constructive connections among neighbours must pay for itself over the long run. Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org On 2/5/09, Matt Wardman <[email protected]> wrote: > One of the key interests on my blog is going to be trying to help > rebuild/create/support what I call "local civic society" - the concept > is a spin on the notion of conversational politics. To me "engagement" > cannot be driven from the centre (i.e., a culture has to be allowed to > develop), rather the centre has to create a space and wait for little > people to fill it. I'd see the MySociety work as providing straw from > which those little people can make bricks if they want to. > > There are a lot of people doing stuff and providing resources, but I'm > wondering whether anyone is providing a rallying/dialogue point. > > At the moment it seems (in blog terms at least) to fall between the a > lot of niches - especially between the "politics" (esp party politics) > and "government" niches. I'd see at 2 dichotomies that are barriers: > one between blog openness and govt control freakery, and the other > between necessary political "opinionatedness" (yuk word 1) and Civil > Service apoliticalness (yuk word 2). > > That's all very basic for this list, but is anyone providing a > reasonably visible bridge between these niches for public debate and > discussion? Or is that a channel of information that I can aim to > provide usefully? > > I'd welcome any other supportive initiatives that people know about. > Votewise.co.uk recently discussed is one example. > > Rgds > > Matt > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
