What this means for the Government

WILLIAM PERRIN, Talk About Local

When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for.” - John Milton (1608–1674)

For the government, social technology is about an enforced loss of control and increasingly uncomfortable transparency. The impact will be felt from national strategy and policy in Whitehall all the way down to district and parish councils’ public services. The impact will fall most heavily on those who have the highest proportion of customer facing services and on those who cling the most to old ways of communicating. Local government will be especially hard hit.

We can already see emergent tools and methods that will become mainstream in the next few years. The mainstream adoption of self publishing (aka blogging) and routine politicisation (‘small p’) of discussions on social networks will be disruptive, even though these tools are already ‘unfashionable’ in fast moving social media world.

Government has a set of actions in the Power of Information (disclosure - I commissioned this work when I worked in central government) that will prepare them for this new environment. However bureaucracies take a long time to change and there will be a challenging transition akin to the arrival of rolling news and full time media management in the late 1990s.

Some parts of the public sector will experience sudden disruptive storms whipped up by social media unless they takes steps now to learn how to communicate in this medium. The future trends need to be understood at all levels for our bureaucracies to adapt and adjust.

Future trends for the public sector

As it gets cheaper and easier for individuals to engage in a political or civic process, the result will be a massive increase in engagement.

This trend is critical and runs through almost all of the examples in this handbook. The 19th Century processes of democracy act as a throttle or choke on democratic expression. High hurdles are presented by going to a meeting in a drafty town hall at an inconvenient time in the evening (or while you are at work) where there is no childcare nor even coffee. Most MPs, councilors and public bodies still prefer a letter on paper, despite the massive social decline in letter writing. When a 21st Century interface is put on the system to bring engagement down to a few clicks, the number of people who will engage increases by one or two orders of magnitude - this is very difficult for any organisation to deal with.

The Downing Street e-petitions service is instructive: an 18th Century system was put online using a simple, robust interface. 1.8 million people signed a petition on road pricing, huge numbers through a viral email which was then on the front of every newspaper for weeks in a self-reinforcing circle of promotion. There have been over 8million signatories to petitions on the system as a whole, so far. If this scale of democratic engagement were applied to something less constitutionally benign than petitions the impact could be remarkable.

19th century methods of engagement still dominate political discourse and rely upon face to face time. Processes are dominated by the self confident, literate, often males and people with lots of time to spare to go to meetings in out of the way places at inconvenient times or read long documents. If people in the modern world wanted lots of face to face time to do things they would not use Amazon nor eBay nor Tesco Direct nor even Netmums. The agents of the democratic process and the public sector will have to reflect this in the way they engage. This goes beyond service delivery online but in the way they engage in debate on policy. In London’s Kings Cross we saw a good example recently by my Councillor Paul Convery, at the link he concludes a local web discussion with some great information and help.

Self publishing – unlocking every voice

Consumer blogging platforms designed to be easy to use for regular folk are a huge breakthrough in publishing. Platforms such as Wordpress or Blogger allow zero budget groups to get an effective web presence for the first time. The micro-economics at work are powerful: lower cost communication means more of it.

There is a self reinforcing circle. It is both easier for people to organise campaigns online and for people to take part in them. This will see more campaigns, with more people involved. In London’s deprived Kings Cross we have reinforced and stimulated community action by using a volunteer website to keep all the local campaigns in touch.

However, out on the ground in communities most people don’t realise that it is now easy to set up a site and to prevent extremists taking it over – which I often find as a major concern. My Talk About Local project aims to address this by bringing the simple skills to over 150 communities.

Huge online common interest tribes are appearing that don’t realise their own potential power. These sleeping giants are often huge discussion forums with many hundreds of thousands or millions of posts and tens or hundreds of thousands of members. If these groups choose to run large campaigns or become ‘politicised’ as virtual organisations, and importantly keep their members with them as the organisation changes emphasis, they could have a substantial impact. These large networks use modern values and ways of communicating, so they are bound to be more attractive than traditional organisations and NGOs that use older, more time consuming, less convenient methods.

Netmums has over 600,000 members nationally and is an entirely online network – comfortably bigger than the main political parties. The Sheffield Forum has 75,000 members and 3.4m posts – and the population of the city is only 450,000.

The cumulative impact of these changes suggests potentially huge numbers engaging in digital media across many new outlets. This is very hard for anyone cope with, government or not. It presents challenges too numerous to list here. Factional capture of large unrepresentative campaigns will be a major issue for government. Even US guru Clay Shirky is pessimistic about the ability of technology to provide checks and balances in large online campaigns - citing the pro-marijuana campaign on Barack Obama’s Change.gov. For the public sector, simple physical processing of very high volumes of public correspondence is also a huge challenge – a democratic government can’t simply put it all in the bin.

During adjustment to new processes there is a risk of frustration from the public that the public sector doesn’t respond to new methods of communicating.

Changing Whitehall and government itself

Whitehall and local government still use many business processes from the 19th Century, especially in statutory areas. With some noble exceptions, office technology has often just sped-up the transmission of minutes and documents.

Radical changes are needed to ways of working using tried and tested methods from the private sector. But for the public sector, security is a major huge hurdle to an open fluid information working environment. The threats government faces are face higher and more sophisticated than those in the private sector. The government needs an alternate model of working for its policy and strategy executives – how to move, as it were from Whitehall to ‘Blackhall’.

Since the late 1990s the public sector has focused on communicating through tightly controlled press offices. This is a rational strategy when you face only 100 or so serious news organisations. But this will not work when every citizen and public sector worker can broadcast globally by publishing to the web. There are too many outlets for a press office to keep up with. As the Power of Information work set out, organisations have to broaden their communication base to include the workforce taking part in online discussions in their specialism. After 15 years of constricting communications this is a challenge for the public sector especially in the harsh political comms environment.

Citizens are also taking control of public sector information and repurposing it in a process known as data mashing. Clever coders are getting better and better at bringing meaning and clarity to vast quantities of incomprehensible information. Stand out examples include Schoolmap.org.uk and MySociety’s Theyworkforyou.com. Political leaders’ interest in what was an obscure geeky area has been redoubled after the expenses scandal, where very large quantities of previously unpublished data were unexpectedly made public and analysed by journalists. Changes to Freedom of Information and the 30-year rule as well as 21st Century interfaces such as Whatdotheyknow.com will bring more and more data out for analysis. The 2011 Census will even have its own API. Data mashing and the new semantic technologies will create far more transparency and analysis by machines for non statistical people.

Widespread data mashing will be a step change in transparency. The public sector needs to engage with people who might mashup its data and be prepared to respond to unexpected outcomes. In America Obama has seized the agenda with data.gov and in the UK, the Cabinet Office has brought in Sir Tim Berners-Lee to advise on opening up government data. But both countries face a huge challenge to bring data mashing to the entirety of the public sector.

Understanding the direction of travel is a good start; moving in that direction may take a little longer.