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Never mind the service delivery, feel the citizen engagement

By Martin Stewart-Weeks - posted Thursday, 24 May 2007


The e-government project, broadly defined as the use of information and communications technology to improve the work of government, has been with us for a little over a decade. In that time, we’ve seen some steady progress, a few outstanding successes and some dispiriting failures. From that patchy track record emerge three insights.

The first is that the real challenge to make e-government successful is not technical, but cultural and organisational. Not surprisingly, we’ve worked out that realising the promise of new communication and collaboration technologies in government is much more about the people than it is about the machines and networks. Technology, it seems, we can pretty much do, give or take the occasional glitch. People and change, on the other hand, we find a lot harder.

The second insight is that e-government only becomes compelling when it become invisible, an integral part of the larger endeavours of public sector reform, democratic renewal, and the changing role of government in the knowledge economy.

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And the third insight is that governments have been more motivated to embrace the potential of technology to lift the reach, convenience and quality of services than they have been to embrace the potential of the same technology to lift the reach, convenience and quality of the basic relationship citizens enjoy, or endure, with their governments.

Although the vision of “e-democracy” was at the heart of the e-government rhetoric from the beginning, the reality has been much less impressive. It’s worth briefly considering why that has happened.

I think there are three reasons. The first is that, as with the impact of these same technologies in the corporate sector, affording your customers (or citizens) more opportunity to participate in the processes of policy and government decision-making means a dramatic shift in the locus of power and authority.

The second is that, although technology creates opportunities for a much more equal and conversational relationship between governments and citizens, it can’t on its own shift deep-seated cultures of distance and disinterest which pervade much of what we experience as policy making and government.

And third, the technologies themselves have not, until recently, offered a relatively simple, accessible and reliable platform on which to fashion a whole new practice of open and collaborative policy making.

With the advent of new technologies of communication and collaboration, however, often grouped under the convenient, if mildly ambiguous title of “Web 2.0” this is beginning to change. Even if you are not all that familiar with these technologies - think Skype, wikis, podcasting, blogging, social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr and Wikipedia for example - you only need to know that their cumulative, and it seems irreversible effect, is to make it easier to harness the collective intelligence of massively dispersed communities of people and interests and their diverse experience and expertise.

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These rapid changes and bewildering opportunities are conspiring to confuse the world of politicians and public sector managers. A new book, Electronic Engagement: A Guide for Public Sector Managers (ANU E-Press, 2007) by leading Australian e-democracy researcher and analyst Peter Chen, has arrived at just the right time, reducing a complex and evolving topic to a more manageable set of concepts and practices.

The aim of the book is to “equip public sector managers to assess the value that new communications and computing technology may bring to their interactions with a range of potential stakeholders. It is written for managers who have an interest in expanding their approach to public engagement, rather than information technology professionals.”

It sets out a typology of engagement consisting of three distinct activities - active listening, cultivating and steering.

When managers are in “active listening” mode, they should be using the technologies of engagement to discern ideas and values within the community, to get a sense for the shifting attitudes towards existing policy priorities or more importantly, towards issues that might become priorities in the future.

“Cultivating” and “steering”, by contrast, tend to be more instrumental, providing citizen and customer feedback to specific proposals or policy initiatives. The key management decision is to select from a range of electronic engagement methods to suit the changing demands for input and deliberation across the policy cycle. Appendix B of the book provides a helpful catalogue of e-engagement tools according to complexity and interactivity and their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Talk of e-democracy and using new technologies for citizen engagement has prompted mixed reactions, ranging from renewed bursts of unsustainable techno-hype to deep scepticism.

So let’s be clear about what this is not. It is not a call to live in a state of permanent and pervasive plebiscites where the community is polled on every decision and where a careless click of the mouse ends up delivering some kind of crude majoritarian judgment.

It is not about subverting the institutions of representative democracy or the call for courage, judgment and leadership by which they are sustained. Nor are the familiar techniques of engagement - the letter to your MP, a phone call, protesting on the streets - rendered either irrelevant or less useful simply because you can now blog your way into a debate or leave a pungent comment on a wiki.

What this timely guide suggests is that we need to confront, in an intelligent and practical way, the possibility that the tools and capabilities of “electronic engagement” are making new demands on all who are involved, in some way or another, in the business of governing and in nurturing a resilient public realm. And that should mean all of us.

This is an issue that doesn’t just affect perplexed politicians and public sector managers wondering just how far they should go in embracing technologies that disrupt settled traditions of policy making. It is as much a challenge to the rest of us as we work out how we might harness the potential of these new technologies to renovate the instincts and practices of self-governance.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, those who are keen to advance the discussion are not waiting for an invitation. In this world, fewer and fewer people are prepared to stand around waiting for the announcement of a public meeting or a new website where they can be “consulted” by a system that can sometimes appear to be either dismissive or uninterested. They will start a blog, create their own website or community of interest or set up a wiki where they will collaborate to fashion new principles of behaviour and culture to suit the possibilities of this new more open, user-driven and networked age.*

These are developments which bring the e-government project back to its original promise to not just improve but, in some cases, transform the way we govern. We will have to live with the unsettling ambiguity of making much of it up as we go (which actually turns out to be quite a good thing). But however we choose to respond - as politicians, as public managers, as citizens - these new capabilities for engagement, participation and trust can’t be ignored.

* Here’s some examples you might like to explore - this is a New Zealand blog developing some operating principles for public managers using the new social networking tools: the Network of Public Sector Communicators. For example, “Openness: share content that is an honest reflection of your thinking and position. Don’t set up a social media channel to broadcast your risk-averse, legal-approved and comprehensively qa’ed copy. Remember, this is about engaging people, not boring them into apathy …”

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About the Author

Martin Stewart-Weeks lives in Sydney. Previously, Martin held positions with the Liberal Party of Australia, the NSW Cabinet Office and was Chief of Staff to a Minister in the Fraser Government.

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