Rebooting Democracy – Sidewalks for Democracy Online - Steven Clift
Continuing with some of the highlights of the Rebooting Democracy essay series…
While I found Newt Gingrich’s essay to be the most surprising of the collection, it was Steven Clift’s contribution that gave me the biggest ‘Aha!’ moment of the book. The essence of Clift’s essay is that:
government websites don’t have sidewalks, newspaper racks, public hearing rooms, hallways or grand assemblies. There are no public forums or meeting places in the heart of representative democracy online… why have we decided to delete democracy from the most visited interface citizens have with “their” government?
The typical e-government experience is like walking into a barren room with a small glass window, a singular experience to the exclusion of other community members. There is no human face, just a one-way process of paying your taxes, registering for services, browsing the information that the government chooses to share, or leaving a private complaint that is never publicly aired. You have no ability to speak with a person next to you much less address your fellow citizen browsers as a group.
I think this is a really good point. If Rupert Murdoch allows comments on News.com.au (most of the time), why can’t government allow comments on government webpages? Even better, why doesn’t government try to facilitate the emergence of communities of interest around these documents by providing an architecture of participation on these sites.
It’s long been recognised that a lack of responsiveness and innovation is one of government’s biggest weaknesses. Clift makes the point that ICT allows government to improve not only its information provision functions, but also its listening functions:
Government needs the capacity to listen to and engage people online to settle conflicts among the loudest and most powerful voices in society as well as to engage everyday people. We desperately need tools and techniques that provide a counterbalance to the politics of divisiveness and vitriol. We need places for civility and decorum online as all of our public life, particularly politics, substantially moves online.
Clift goes on to argue that government should actively moderate these forums to encourage as broad participation as possible. If you can encourage those with an interest in government policy in an area to engage with each other in an open forum, it’s conceivable that these ’sidewalks’ could become extremely valuable sources of User Innovation (Eric von Hippel’s brilliant but often overlooked theory of bottom down innovation).
Definitely worth exploring….
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July 5th, 2008 at 8:50 am
[…] Steven Clift’s idea that we need to build in ’sidewalks for democracy’ in government websites (ie social forums - moderated comments sections, social networking tools etc - that allow citizens to interact with each other while they are interfacing with government online) was still fresh in my mind when I re-read the following section from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: “Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak… or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. But things like the comments section on Flickr allow those people who do want to activate otherwise-latent groups to at least try it.” (Shirky, Here Comes Everybody; The Power of Organising Without Organisations, 2008, p. 102). […]
July 15th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
[…] work of Steven Clift is also very relevant (see also Tim’s summary): “Because representative democracy is based on geography, content created by […]