So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time?

Of course, this makes a massive case for investment in ‘usability’ (and going beyond usability – almost into seduction) – making the online experience a compelling and pleasurable one. Compelling, not compulsory, as David Barrie puts it here. The ‘Nudge‘ argument, if you like? But it also makes the case for investment of time and energy in ways of getting people to make quick light responses on issues where they care very slightly rather than strongly.

Is there a case for using mobile phones to do surveys – sending people text messages and saying ‘answer our five questions and we’ll refund £2 from your council tax.’ This will incentivise people who….

• don’t have access to a computer, sufficient bandwidth or a local authority that could design a usable interface if their lives depended upon it
• don’t care about specific issues enough to sit through a clunky consultation questionnaire online
• think that saving £2 would make a slight difference to their lives

In other words, exactly the opposite kind of people who normally get involved in consultations in order to provide responses that are unrepresentative (and therefore, often worthless). If – instead of valuing people’s time at £0, we value it at £2 (or whatever figure finds the right equilibrium), we will get a more representative sample of collective wisdom.

I’ve been researching mobile phone multi-question survey platforms and I’d be interested to see if any local authority and government body would consider this approach instead of the usual ‘come to our website and Have Your Say’?

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Last week, myself and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole launched PICamp. We did it using a free-of-charge Ning website and the whole development took about an hour – soup-to-nuts (as they say in the film industry).

Mick put a couple of posts on Slugger O’Toole to get a bit of interest and within a few days we had over fifty people signed up on the site. On Friday lunchtime, I set up a PICamp Twitter account. I found a handful of key political twitterers in Northern Ireland and followed all of the contacts that they have as followers / followees. Within a short time I had nearly 1,000 people that are likely to be interested finding out about PICamp for the first time in a fairly unobtrusive way.

Over 140 twitterers were following PICamp back within 24 hours and the numbers have grown steadily since.

Anti-spam purists (and by most standards, that description fits me quite well) may find this slighlty objectionable, but by any utilitarian calculation, I’d argue that it’s OK to use a permissive system to market a non-profit conference about how social media can improve politics. 

Getting 2-300 people in the door of an unconference in London is fairly easy these days. BarCamp Belfast attracted similar numbers using a template that social media geeks would be waiting for.

Politicos, however, are another matter altogether. If we can pull something like this around, attracting around eighty people  for an afternoon of lively debate (on a weekday during a European Election campaign) I think it will demonstrate quite a strong convening power – bearing in mind that the whole of Northern Ireland’s total population is 1.7million – about a quarter of London.

None of this is that original. Kathryn Corrick helped to organise a set of Digital Britain Unconferences recently, and provides a good briefing in the basics of how to do this.

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I’ve written about it over here on the Local Democracy blog, but as a quick primer, Debategraph takes the idea of a ‘debate wiki’ one step further – providing a Graphical User Interface to arguments.

I’d argue that this is the most valuable application of new media tools in helping promote inclusion in policymaking.

By crowdsourcing judgement, Debategraph (along with other applications such as Mixed Ink) can contribute to the quality of public policy.

Crowdsourcing opinion doesn’t appear to add much value. Judgement is another matter entirely.

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At the end of February, I was in Miami for the WeMedia Pitchit final.

It was a fantastic event – very interesting to see what the social media community looks like in the US – how they are responding to the different challenges of a different polity.

I’ve written this up in more detail over at the Local Democracy Blog, but as a quick preview, easily the most interesting application that I saw there was the Mixed Ink project.

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Though there are lots of ways to make a document available for commenting online, I’ve still not seen anything as effective as the use of a slightly hacked blog in allowing the public to get into the detail of a document. A few years ago, the Power Enquiry made it’s findings available in this way.

Last week, after the Digital Britain report was published (and criticised for not having been very consultative in it’s origins, a blogger put it online in a commentable way. The best example I’ve seen in terms of an attractive interface and a useable design also was published in the last week or so – the Power of Information Taskforce report – done by a group of people who have really lived with this way of discussing policy documents for a long time now.

Slugger O’Toole editor Mick Fealty and I had planned to do something about the Eames Bradley report anyway, and when I saw the Power of Information site, I jumped on it. The system is open-source and I’ve had a few conversations with Steph Gray the lead developer about other matters, so I was comfortable about giving it a try. And – with a bit of intervention from Steph – clearing up a few bugs – we got it up and running with all of the content added in a few days, and it’s being launched this morning at 9am.

This is a hugely interesting project for me, for a couple of reasons:

1. All of the examples of comment-blogs that I’ve seen have been done on techie subjects or with very metropolitan focus. This is different. It will be a first step into this kind of deliberation for many of the participants, and the subject is a particularly thorny one. All of the other consultations I’ve mentioned here can expect to be discussed with a fair degree of detachment. But the question of closing the wounds that were opened over thirty years in Northern Ireland is a different matter altogether. Keeping this conversation going in an effective and useful way will take the managers of this site into somewhat unchartered territory. The results will be interesting.
2. Slugger O’Toole is a unique site. It has a huge reach in Northern Ireland that political bloggers elsewhere can barely comprehend. It also has a reputation for civility of a kind that is rare in the political blogosphere. Slugger sometimes erupts, and can often be quite combative – but nothing like as abrasive as Northern Ireland’s politics can be – and significantly more civilised than any other large-volume political blog that I’ve come across elsewhere. Slugger can bring the numbers – and the tone that is needed.

All of the ingredients are there then. If any site can run an effective consultation on a highly controversial issue, Slugger O’Toole will do it. I’m hoping that we can learn a lot from this before applying it elsewhere.

Slugger’s announcement is here.

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