Digital engagement: transparency and power

A rascal comes of age

This week the new duty to involve comes into force, while the duties to promote democracy and for councils to respond to petitions are being considered in the Local Democracy Bill which is making its way through parliament. All this a mere 714 years after Edward I ‘invited two knights from every county and two residents from each town to meet with the Great Council to consent to new taxes.’

Well well, notions of empowerment and engagement appear to have come of age, like a ne’er-do-well rascal now considered mature enough to have a conversation with his olders and betters. And all around, the silent conversations of the digital age are accumulating – not behind the backs of those in power, but as if in full view, with or without them.

Yup it’s the year of digital engagement alright. There are events to help local authorities develop ‘Effective Social Media & Web 2.0 Strategies‘, and workshops to promote ‘Citizen empowerment through digital media‘. Our government is recruiting a ‘director of digital engagement’, and there’s a digital engagement site to bring stuff together.  Public sector officers could be excused for feeling a sense of impending turmoil: oh no, here comes another wave of something we’re expected to know about, on top of everything else.

As always, there’s both push and pull going on, or top-down and bottom-up pressures. The Power of Information task force has built up momentum to stimulate new uses of government and citizen-generated data. It’s doing so in the aforementioned context of increasing expectations of citizen empowerment. So where do the two meet, and what difference is ‘digital engagement’ likely to make?

I asked a few knowledgeable people some questions and was struck by a couple of things in the correspondence and conversations I’ve had. First, the extent to which this theme can still be expressed dichotomously (ie there isn’t, yet, something called ‘digital engagement’ – it’s still a combination of concepts on a collision course). And secondly, people are still talking about it in theoretical rather than evidenced ways – ‘digital engagement’ means you can do this or do that, ‘it offers such-and-such a variation on face-to-face…’ (But see below).

Of context and organisations

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t numerous insights to be gained. Nick Booth of Podnosh, for instance, argues that with digital engagement, ‘the “public” can have as much power as the public sector. In fact they can have more.’

‘Because light digital tools are free or inexpensive they substantially shift the balance of power to those who are savvy at informal conversational media. That can be anybody, but it is a harder cultural shift for organisations than individuals.’

Why should organisations struggle? David Wilcox, a pioneer of participation and of social reporting, notes that experience with social media is different if you’re working ‘in a hierarchical organisation that limits access to tools and creates systems that mirror the control and command structure, unless you are prepared to set up renegade systems of your own.’ Whereas, he says, ‘If you work in an open social media networked field, each new tool can be a new opportunity.’

Of cliques and digital enablers

True enough, but where does that leave the citizen, independent of an organisation, trying to bring about change in their neighbourhood? I wanted to know if there will be consultation cliques in our digital future. Poorly handled involvement processes can reinforce the separation of cliques from their supposed constituencies. Is that more likely or less likely to happen in a digital context?

Martin Dudley, who set up and ran a local community website and blog for several years, wasn’t ready to buy this crude dichotomy:

‘Some new faces might be drawn out by the attractions of being involved by a new process. And people who are interested will continue to have a say (subject to their expectations, fatigue, previous success etc.), unless they feel left out (excluded) by the digital approach. But they will still have their tried and tested methods.

‘These may include strong personal or organisational links to decision makers, through interest groups, family ties etc. They might prefer what they perceive to be the tried and tested methods, and not trust a digital solution where they might be exposed in a way they cannot control, exposed by what they say in a public and open context and therefore more accountable in some way.’

And as David put it, with digital engagement ‘there is just as much scope for tokenism, manipulation etc as in other forms.’

We’re certainly likely to come across concerns about the authenticity of digital engagement. Steven Feldman of BeLoca Consulting felt that it’s ‘somewhat thinner than “engagement” –

‘People hiding behind screens rather than meeting face to face cannot deliver the same level of community gain, but it is better than total isolation.’

Wait a moment. A writer in the digital world can get caught out by the timing of information. I had this article more or less ready when up pops a message from Hugh Flouch, the man who devised Harringay Online (HoL). I’m a great fan of this remarkable local site because of the huge number of digital conversations it generates among residents. Hugh cautions against the possibility that online will create a new group of ‘usual suspects’, and then blows away my concern about lack of evidenced argument:

‘An example just tonight. About a month ago, one of our cabinet members tweeted about a new local community engagement framework. I hadn’t heard about it till I picked it up from Twitter. I added a post to the forum – robust debate – defence by councillor – offer of a meeting to discuss with HoL members – tonight was the discussion – about community engagement principles. About 75% of those round the table had never been “engaged” before having the digital enabler of HoL (and you can count me as one of those).’

(And just in case you missed it, there was some face-to-face engagement in that story, which took place while I was working on this text).

Hugh offered another anecdote describing how he himself has come to be viewed by some residents as a ‘usual suspect’ – which suggests that, in the context of digital engagement, ‘the development of cliques may be more open to challenge and therefore less likely.’

It fits. And it fits because of a key point made tellingly by Ingrid Koehler of IDeA. ‘There is something fundamentally different about digital engagement, she says, ‘and that’s the transparency.’

‘If you handle engagement online poorly then it’s there for the world to see.If you are less than authentic, someone may well call you on it. That transparency also provides a kind of social proof. So others can see that it’s possible to engage with a service or a democratic process because they can see that others have and maybe see the outcome, too.’

So perhaps that’s the USP. Paul Evans, who writes the Local democracy blog, seems to agree: ‘Digital engagement changes the dynamic – it makes things possible that weren’t possible in the past – and it creates pressure upon organisations to consult when they could get away without doing it in the past.’

It must work, surely? Simon Grice of BeLocal Consulting thinks digital engagement works because it’s ‘easy, quick, and (for a lot of people) accessible’. Well I know enough to believe that ease and speed of use are serious drivers for increasing access.

And so?

People I spoke to seemed to divide between those who see digital engagement in relation to consultation and policy, and those who see it as an extension of digital conversations and everyday life.

So for some folk, all this will happen in a context of formal engagement – civic or political participation, consumer campaigning or community action. There’s a great deal of confidence that these can all be enhanced through digital media.

For others, what matters is social interaction, which generally implies an acceptable level of community cohesion and social inclusion. For these folk, digital media can make a contribution to levels of social capital, cross-cultural understanding, and the co-production of society and culture generally.

The good news is that there’s no contradiction, as far as I can see, between these two approaches.

But all of this leaves me wondering if there could be a genuine public reaction against community empowerment, around the argument that ‘we elect people to take decisions on our behalf – politicians should stop pushing us all to reduce their responsibilities’. If so, how would such a reaction take hold, gather momentum and gain credence? Through, er, digital conversations?