> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Networking Democracy - Final thoughts - URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/networking-democracy-final-thoughts/ - Published: 2008-03-18T11:03:44.000Z - Updated: 2019-02-14T22:44:05.000Z - Author: openDemocracy Supporters - Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:59 **Opening Statements** - [**The rationale**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/michael-wills-anthony-barnett-exchange) **\- Michael Wills and Anthony Barnett** - [**The "National Conversation" Conversation**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/national-conversation-conversation) **\- Tony Curzon Price** - [**Values and Virtual Debates**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/values-and-virtual-debates) **\- Bill Thompson** - [**Online Engagement in a National Debate**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/online-engagement-in-a-national-debate) **\- Steve Clift** - [**Building Online Participation into a National Citizens Summit**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/building-online-participation-into-a-national-citizens-summit) **\- Suw Charman** **Discussion threads** - [**Networking Democracy** ](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/networking-democracy)**(43 responses)** - [**Ensuring Security** ](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/ensuring-security)**(5 responses)**[](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/ensuring-security) - [**Asking Difficult Questions** ](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/asking-difficult-questions)**(3 responses)** - [**How do online and offline interact?**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/online-offline-interact) **(3 responses)** - [**Building Participation**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/building-participation) **(7 responses)** - [**Final thoughts**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/final-thoughts) **(7 responses)** \--------------------------------- ## **Final thoughts** This is the archive for the "final thoughts" thread. \------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the final thread we are going to start. In it we'd like people to sum up, in 500 or so words, what approach they would take to designing the online process, given all the contributions and discussions which have gone on so far. We envisage contributions to this thread being something like Steve Clift's original contribution (http://groups.google.co.uk/group/networking-democracy/web/online- engagement-in-a-national-debate---steve-clift) - albeit shorter. We would like people to imagine they have a timeframe of four months until the summit, and a budget of around £1 million pounds. I want to emphasise that we are providing these figures to provide a bit of a concrete frame of reference - neither of them reflect fixed plans given to us by the Ministry of Justice. **From: "Suw Charman-Anderson"** **Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 23:41:09 +0000** **Local: Tues, Mar 4 2008 11:41 pm** **Subject: Re: \[Networking Democracy\] Final thoughts** \> This is the final thread we are going to start. In it we'd like people \> to sum up, in 500 or so words, what approach they would take to \> designing the online process, given all the contributions and \> discussions which have gone on so far. I'm sorry... this might sound a little grumpy, but I figure that it's best to be honest. The discussions here have been interesting, but I'm slightly struggling because we haven't had a chance to really interrogate the questions in any sensible way. I feel a bit like a contestant in one of those TV shows who has to stick their hands in a closed box and figure out what's inside, just by touch alone. I'm still not sure what it is that we've achieved, nor am I clear on exactly what are the themes and ideas that have come out of the discussions. I feel a lot like we've gone round in at least a few circles, and a bit frustrated because some of the questions that came later on in the discussion seemed to have forgotten some of the earlier discussions. if i were to suggest a next step, it would be to take a step backwards to reassess what we are attempting to do. I would convene a small, but diverse and experienced group of people to get together regularly in person to interrogate the brief. What is it that we are trying to achieve? What are the real questions? What are the red herrings? What are the areas of contention? What questions can actually be answered? What can not, and why? What are our goals? How will we know when we have finished? What is success? Then I'd convene a larger group to collaborate on addressing the very specific and answerable questions formulated above. I'd use a wiki to bring together ideas and allow people to flesh out and elaborate on others' work, (rather than use email which causes people to reiterate and repeat). I'd consider also using a blog to help raise specific points that need discussion, and then feed those results back into the wiki, but that may turn out not to be necessary. I would ensure there were regular face-to-face meetings, with IRC and conference calls so that those geographically distant can contribute. I'd ditch email: no matter how comforting and familiar it is, it's an awful medium for collaboration. I would then get someone to pull together a cohesive strategy from the above work. Note that you only need one visionary person to do this, and absolutely must avoid getting into committee mode. (It's really worth reading Joel Spolsky's article about how having one inspired programmer is worth a gazillion mediocre ones because, as he puts it "Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html ) If even just the experts available on this list were to all contribute fully to part 2, then part 3 would be best done by a single person, preferably someone who really gets online culture and can produce something inspired. In short I would: 1\. Gather a small group to formulate the questions and aims. 2\. Convene a much larger group to discuss those questions using a wiki (and maybe blog). 3\. Derive a strategy from the results of the above discussion. Note that this is actually a lot of work, and needs to be properly paid. Suw **From: David Wilcox** **Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 07:59:55 +0000** **Local: Wed, Mar 5 2008 7:59 am** **Subject: Re: \[Networking Democracy\] Re: Final thoughts** I'm with Suw, who wrote \> In short I would: \> 1\. Gather a small group to formulate the questions and aims. \> 2\. Convene a much larger group to discuss those questions using a wiki \> (and maybe blog). \> 3\. Derive a strategy from the results of the above discussion. \> Note that this is actually a lot of work, and needs to be properly \> paid. A lot of interesting issues and ideas raised, but within this medium it don't believe we can offer any coherent proposals for a still fuzzy brief. Moving to face-to-face would enable us to extract real value from work so far. David **From: "David R. Newman"** **Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:57:40 +0000** **Local: Mon, Mar 10 2008 6:57 pm** **Subject: Re: \[Networking Democracy\] Re: Final thoughts** Unlike David Wilcox, I'm willing to take up the challenge of writing a science fiction account of what might be possible. I will try and make my assumptions clear, so that when the final brief is decided, we can see which parts of this vision are worth adopting. I'll organise this around 4 democratic principles: voice, space, audience and influence. 1\. Influence Unless the people taking part, from across the UK, whether on-line or off-line are convinced that what they say will have some influence on policy, they won't bother. Why waste time writing and talking, if you will then be ignored. This is the most common complaint we found of bad consultations in our research across Ireland. The Oireachtas made their e-consultation an official act of a parliamentary committee, with hearings and a formal report to both houses of Parliament. That guaranteed influence. In this case, the Ministry of Justice has to think of some way of guaranteeing influence (directly or indirectly). For example, imagine a Royal People's Commission, with all the powers of a Royal Commission, but involving many more people than normally serve on such bodies: hundreds face-to-face and thousands on-line. Whatever approach is followed, make it a constitutional experiment or pilot, like the Oireachtas did. 2\. Voice Once there is a point in participating, how do people become aware of the issue, and learn how and where to participate? How can large numbers of people, from a variety of backgrounds, be enticed to take part? We need to get a variety of voices: not necessarily a representative sample, but sufficiently diverse to cover different parts of the UK population. If you want thousands of online participants, then it needs to be as attractive as a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO), like World of Warcraft or Lineage. That is the route the US Army followed, by commissioning the game America's Army, which they use to encourage recruitment. I suppose the British Government could commission the game of "British Politics", in which citizens could, en masse, play characters like Alan B'stard. But you would need to put aside a few million to develop a compelling MMO game. Second Life is not accessible enough (requiring 3D graphics cards) to set up in there. Instead, I agree with Ella and others that we should go to where people hang out, both in geographic space and cyberspace, rather than expecting everyone to visit a government web forum. If people are used to meeting in chat rooms, mailing lists, social networking sites, community halls, allotments, libraries, computer training suites, Mums Net, Patient Opinion, Brighton and Hove Issues forum, sluggerotoole.com, Young Scot or wherever, then we should make it easy for them to take part there. In particular, we need to make it easy for civil society organisations to run events and ongoing conversations. Prepare packages of tools and information that could help people: \- bring groups together to a place for a face-to-face discussion on British values. \- collect stories, photographs, videos and audio recordings of their experiences of what is good about their town, county, country and the UK (be it in local competitions, or on-line collections). \- run a discussion on British values as part of an existing chat room, forum or opinion site (which they could then customise, e.g. what British values inform the NHS on Patient Opinion, what British values to Irish republicans hate on sluggerotoole.com). \- fill in questionnaires (for those too busy to take part in long deliberations) \- play short Flash games, where they have to make value-laden decisions, then ask them to explain why they made the choice they did. And arrange another set of tools to help each group report on what came out of the event, stories, discussion etc. Once it is easy, then we need to raise awareness, first within civil society groups who might organise events, and then among the general public. 3\. Space We need to design spaces in which everyone feels able to contribute creatively. They should encourage expression, problem-solving, and attempts to find consensus, without forcing conformity on people with different ideas. The "real" world models are from mediation and negotiation practice. In education, there is a process called pyramiding. Students do one task alone, move on to another question in pairs, expand on that in fours, and so on. Analogous to that people might: A. Individually tell stories, submit photos or videos, or answer simple questions, illustrating what they like about living in a particular town, county, nation or state. These are collected both locally and on-line in places that can be searched and indexed nationally. B. In small groups, discuss why they like these things, and what is good about the way people behave that way (the best of Cardiff, Welsh or British behaviour). A couple of people in each group enter their conclusions into regional or national on-line discussion spaces. C. Topic teams (see below), prepare lists of common features across the UK, things or behaviours that people everywhere like, giving clues to "Britishness". Then a few interested people from each group in B take part in on-line discussions and collaborative writing trying to extract British values from these lists. They could write it up in a group reporting tool like Aldo de Moor's GRASS, so that they are not forced to agree, but make disagreements explicit. 4\. Audience If there is not even anyone who reads or listens to a discussion, it is a real waste of time. The people who guaranteed influence in 1 need to be part of the audience, including Ministers, civil servants, MPs, parliamentary officials, and civil society organisations. In addition, we need a kind of professional audience: those who work on the project to ensure this national conversation works. This includes facilitators, information and publicity staff, and, quite important, summarisers - people who can extract from a large amount of qualitative material, important issues, needs and ideas to be worth taking to the next stage of the process. Technology can help them, but in the end we need human understanding. \-- Dr. David R. Newman, Queen's University Management School, Belfast **From: David Wilcox** **Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:56:24 +0000** **Local: Mon, Mar 10 2008 7:56 pm** **Subject: Re: \[Networking Democracy\] Re: Final thoughts** Thanks David, I just didn't have the imagination:-) If Government will rise to the challenges and ideas that you set out it would indeed be something special. Brilliant stuff. On 10 Mar 2008, at 18:57, David R. Newman wrote: \> Unlike David Wilcox, I'm willing to take up the challenge of writing a \> science fiction account of what might be possible. I will try and make \> my assumptions clear, so that when the final brief is decided, we can \> see which parts of this vision are worth adopting. \> I'll organise this around 4 democratic principles: voice, space, \> audience and influence. **From: "Tony Curzon Price, OD"** **Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:06:07 -0700 (PDT)** **Local: Mon, Mar 10 2008 8:06 pm** **Subject: Re: Final thoughts** With my £1m and 4 months, I'd be thinking hardest of all about getting enough people excited about participating. In particular: 1\. make the outcome meaningful. we've heard separately that the people's convention will lead to a proposal that will be put to Parliament. Fine, if that's a constraint. But make sure to explain what that would mean, at every level of detail. Will it be a free vote from the government? Does the convention get involved in drafting the bill? Do the participants in the convention get acknowledged in the bill? etc. 2\. make online participation meaningful. However measured, your online conversation-making activities should influence your chance of getting picked for the convention. reward the talkers having the right kind of conversations. 3\. make reporting of online conversational activity enjoyable - encourage video walls, stories, etc. encourage use of common tags to permit aggregation of activity; encourage the collection of survey- type data. Give away t-shirts signed by Our Monarch saying "I Talked for Britain" to anyone who demonstrates they have made national conversation. Photos, tags, survey responses should all count to earning the t-shirt. 4\. leverage existing fora. several people have said this, and it's absolutely right. A thread on CiF, a YouTube video, a blog, a school site, a sports forum etc are the right places to have the national conversation. 5\. make the on and off-line conventions interact. make sure the online continues to be important during the convention period. I started out this consultation not being sure what a National Conversation means. I think I am now a bit clearer - it is a nation, or a good part of it, having had many small-scale semi-independent conversations about the same topics. The weather, the football, the soaps all regularly make national conversation. The challenge here is really to make a national conversation about something which is usually more of a national soporific. Make it a game, yes, but keep it very simple. **From: Bill Thompson** **Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:51:45 -0700 (PDT)** **Local: Tues, Mar 11 2008 6:51 am** **Subject: Re: Final thoughts** I hope you don't mind me de-lurking at the very end of the process :-) It's clear we've had lots of interesting ideas and arguments, but I find myself more aligned with Suw and DavidW in that it feels like we have not yet managed to reach a place from which we can move forward with confidence and if anything we've shown just how slippery the idea of 'national conversation' about a specific piece of policy can be - and it's a potentially very important piece of policy in a world where Lord Goldsmith can suggest making children pledge an oath of allegiance to the monarch. I'm also not sure that Tony's view that 'The weather, the football, the soaps all regularly make national conversation' is true in the way that we want one here, since there are multiple overlapping conversations and beliefs but rarely a single consensus (except that the English cricket team is currently rubbish, of course). With four months and £1m I'd spend the first month doing what Suw suggests and spend around £100K on it, and then assuming there's something that can actually be done - not guaranteed - build it in a month, push it on the social network spaces. Gmail and the BBC iPlayer (together they'll reach all the UK net using population rather quickly), run it for a month (people get bored quickly) and spend a month analysing and interpreting.... Bill **From: Ella** **Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:49:10 -0700 (PDT)** **Local: Tues, Mar 11 2008 8:49 am** **Subject: Re: Final thoughts** Hi I'm presuming a distributed discussion and agreeing with most of the ideas so far, just adding a little extra detail. I would suggest that these tasks are done in this order: 1\. I would suggest a pre conversation takes place with a range of stakeholders to look at the questions "What we need a Statement" and "What it would be used for". If this discussion did not end the matter, then the answers to these questions would form a major part of the supporting information. 2\. Need to have a clear path of influence. Write stories of what will happen from the time the contributions are complete to the time of a vote in parliament. Get a wide range of people, including ministers, MPs, civil servants and people from well known media or community sites (BBC, NetMums) and organisations (My Society, The Hansard Society) to write these stories. (Technically these stories are scenarios, as you probably know. This is a powerful design mechanism which helps people from diverse backgrounds understand something which exists in the future and begin to design it.) From these stories/scenarios create a diagram that people can easily understand. Use this diagram as a main part of your publicity. 3\. Gather and organise supporting information. Break this down into a series of questions (and possibly sub- questions) and use these To create an agenda that organises the conversation over the time period. This will keep the discussion interesting and focussed. It will also make it easy to gather the responses in stages and sort them out. (Mirroring what I said earlier, I would suggest that these questions cover whether we need a Statement and what it would be used for pretty early on) I would suggest that this information, the diagram of influence and the agenda are all put together in one website at this point. You can then refer to this as you recruit online communities and spaces. 4\. Each community recruited will have a facilitator, whose role it will be to keep the conversation on topic and moving forwards. It will also be the job of the facilitator to summarise the discussion into input, in the way that facilitators in "break out groups" report back to the wider group in a plenary. (Though I'd suggest you provide them with a well-structured and word-limited template). The facilitator should be paid for this. Larger sites may require more than one facilitator. 5\. As the discussion and collection of input progress, this should be shown on the diagram described above. 6\. There's nothing in this that doesn't apply equally to offline discussions. \-------------------------------------- *Comment and discussion on Networking Democracy is taking place on OurKingdom -* [*click here*](http://ourkingdom.opendemocracy.net/2008/03/24/networking-democracy/?ref=opendemocracy.net#comments) *to join in.* \--------------------------------- **Opening Statements** - [**The rationale**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/michael-wills-anthony-barnett-exchange) **\- Michael Wills and Anthony Barnett** - [**The "National Conversation" Conversation**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/national-conversation-conversation) **\- Tony Curzon Price** - [**Values and Virtual Debates**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/values-and-virtual-debates) **\- Bill Thompson** - [**Online Engagement in a National Debate**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/online-engagement-in-a-national-debate) **\- Steve Clift** - [**Building Online Participation into a National Citizens Summit**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/building-online-participation-into-a-national-citizens-summit) **\- Suw Charman** **Discussion threads** - [**Networking Democracy** ](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/networking-democracy)**(43 responses)** - [**Ensuring Security** ](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/ensuring-security)**(5 responses)**[](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/ensuring-security) - [**Asking Difficult Questions** ](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/asking-difficult-questions)**(3 responses)** - [**How do online and offline interact?**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/online-offline-interact) **(3 responses)** - [**Building Participation**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/building-participation) **(7 responses)** - [**Final thoughts**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/networking-democracy/final-thoughts) **(7 responses)** \---------------------------------