More on Sidewalks for Democracy – Latent Communities for Government Webpages
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).
I think this is a good way of looking at online citizen engagement. The premise of Shirky’s book is that as a result of the flood of new social media tools that have emerged recently, the transaction costs of forming groups or communities of interest have collapsed. As a result, we can now form communities around a whole range of subjects that in the past simply wasn’t worth the effort. For policy makers keen to increase government’s responsiveness and its ability to ‘listen’ to its citizens, these latent communities of interest could be an information god send.
It’s likely that there are hundreds of latent communities revolving around a specific government activities waiting to be engaged. A great example of this in practice can be seen on the US Transportation Security Administration blog which has recently successfully activated latent communities revolving around travel security requirements and the administration of different airports. If we can engage latent communities around issues as prosaic as airline security processes at your local airport, I can imagine there would be literally hundreds more waiting to be engaged.
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