The government can serve a vital role as convener – bringing together smart people from a variety of viewpoints to collaborate and debate online over particular policy initiatives. These policy discussions – whether in wiki or blog format – can be kept transparent and open to the public’s view, but as we have seen during the Transition, these must be controlled in such a way as to prevent hijacking by small, organized groups.
You have to read the long post by Pete Peterson to understand what went wrong with the Obama administration’s experiments with open participation sites such as the Citizen Briefing Book and others, but essentially, the author concludes that pure crowdsourcing is easily hijacked by active minorities such as those in four of the liberalisation of the use of currently illegal substances.
Here is the significant paragraph, where he advocates bringing together “select group of citizens.”
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“In the face of all these challenges to formulating an online participation strategy, I suggest that the White House should “go small, and go home (local)”. The web is a powerful idea creation platform, but as we have seen in enterprises like Wikipedia and countless others, it works best when smart people in specific subject areas are asked to accomplish specific things. At times sounding more oligarchic than democratic, Shirky made similar points in London, telling an audience at the London School of Economics, “If you want to know where new interesting useful ideas are going to come from, don’t look at crowds and don’t look at individuals, look at small groups of smart people arguing with each other. Historically that’s been a big source of change.” This can happen both intra-governmentally and with select groups of citizens. The government can serve a vital role as convener – bringing together smart people from a variety of viewpoints to collaborate and debate online over particular policy initiatives. These policy discussions – whether in wiki or blog format – can be kept transparent and open to the public’s view, but as we have seen during the Transition, these must be controlled in such a way as to prevent hijacking by small, organized groups.”
There’s a bit of a tension here. Is this form of participation valid because it is more democratic, or because it generates more and possibly more worthwhile ideas? Citizen participation in governance isn’t optimal because they will necessarily produce the “best” ideas. It is more significant because it is a reflection of the reality of what government is really supposed to be- the coming together of individuals and groups to accomplish society-wide tasks that they cannot accomplish apart. Of, by and for the people.
I think there has been a great deal of knee-jerk dismissal of the Obama virtual Town Hall process given the dominance of questions on marijuana legalization in the US, but it ignores the context in which this exercise was constructed. What good smart liberals would expect is for masses to ask about health care and the economy. However, at this point the messages from the government and academic leaders in the country are so confused and haphazard that I wouldn’t expect a strong consensus of opinion on these situations. These are issues that most people (even well-educated professionals) don’t really understand, despite their importance, and they are issues the media as we know it has been loath to explain clearly and assertively.
A very large portion of the American public, I expect a majority of the under 30-population, supports the decriminalization of marijuana. It’s an easy issue for them to understand, and an easy issue to agree on, across the political spectrum. That it became a prominent theme doesn’t illustrate anything more than the clarity of that issue versus the absurd obscurity of our economic crisis. Yes, NORML or other groups encouraged their members to support questions- but those members are still citizens and still believed in what they were asking, and any number of organizations or pundits could have done the same to greater effect had they so chosen.
I would say that if a more open, radical approach to this type of participation is abandoned, it should not be replaced with a simple recapitulation of what already happens- educated professionals and consultants conferencing on topics of their interest and influencing policy through such an exercise. Some of the most effective pieces of legislation in American history have been provoked and crafted by genuine popular pressure organized through mass movements- the GI Bill, Civil Rights Act, minimum wage and working day laws, etc- not through the closed off discourse of experts.
Throwing open the gates of policy discussion to whoever feels like walking up might be overdoing it, but the reality is that without large-scale, open, movement-based participation in the generation and implementation of policy, we’d just be trotting out the same old play with new costumes.
That being said, there aren’t many viable mass movements in America at the moment interested in participatory democracy, so maybe it’s just too late for us…
interesting…
“select group of citizens”
glad you highlighted this
in your typically understated way 🙂