Public Services 2.0

Thanks to David Osimo‘s pioneering energy and imagination (and the enabling support of FutureGov and Headshift), I was privileged to have the opportunity to outline some of the thinking behind Debategraph at the European Commission’s Public Services 2.0 workshop in Brussels last month.

As David described in the agenda for the workshop:

“Over the last 3 years, we have seen a dramatic rise in user driven, web 2.0 style initiatives in and around public sector service provision. Initiatives such as Patient Opinion, Farmsubsidy and Theyworkforyou all seek to challenge, disrupt and improve on traditional models of public service delivery from the outside, built on the web 2.0 principles of openness, transparency and sharing.

Against this background the workshop “aimed to bring together the best experiences from all over Europe” to: share experience and knowledge between the people running the web 2.0 initiatives; promote a surge of collaborative initiatives; and raise awareness and better understanding between government officials about why and how to promote web 2.0 in government.

The workshop was a great success across all these dimensions, and the slides and videos for all of the presentations are worth exploring in depth.

On a personal note, one of the joys of the event was the chance it afforded to meet people whose work I have long admired from a distance including James Munro, Lee Bryant, Anna Maybank, Dominic Campbell, Justin Kerr-Stevens, Emma Mulqueeny, Richard Stirling, Ivo Gormley – whose highly recommended film Us Now features Debategraph briefly and tantalisingly on screen at a key moment – and Søren Duus Østergaard.

In the aftermath of the workshop it has been delightful to see the same sense experimental adventure bubbling up elsewhere, and in the European context, the next collaborative step, emerging as spontaneous initiative from the workshop, is to imbue the European Commission’s imminent consultation on the i2020 strategy with more of the same spirit.

Of which more later.

Public Service Broadcasters in the Digital Age

Two quick reminders for anyone thinking about the reformation of public service broadcasting in the UK:

(1) The closing date for responding to Phase 1 of Ofcom’s PSB Review is Thursday 19th June. You can read further details here and here about the Review which was launched in April by Ofcom’s Chief Executive Ed Richards.

Ofcom and Tom Loosemore, in particular, are to be congratulated for bringing the consultation process into the blogosphere, and for experimenting with the CommentOnThis / CommentPress approach to allow readers to comment directly on each paragraph in the PSB Review’s interactive Executive Summary.

I love the simplicity of the CommentOnThis and CommentPress approach, which is clearly motivated by similar urge to transparency and read/write participation as Debategraph.

The document-centric approach of CommentOnThis / CommentPress also makes it comparatively simple to enable public participation once the initial time, energy and resources has been expended on creating the original consultation documents.

Debategraph takes a more radical, subject-oriented approach to the same challenge, which if followed to its logical conclusion could (we think) significantly reduce the overall time spent by the consulting body and its stakeholders on the consultation process.

Instead of creating a long consultation document at the outset, the consultation team could start building a public debate map of the consultation issues, and invite the stakeholders to join them in this process—decomposing the subject matter into the individual issue, positions, arguments, evidence and scenarios, and allowing the stakeholders as well as the consultation team to edit, rate, challenge or support the individual arguments.

To give a sense of how this process might work I have produced a seed map of some of the arguments live Ofcom’s interactive summary executive summary (below).

As each element on the map is also its own wiki-page it’s easy to layer in longer commentaries (up to 50,000 words), images, tables, and charts etc as the map builds towards maturity. And as the core, hierarchical structure of the map is similar to the hierarchical outline of a standard report, it’s relatively straightforward at the end of the consultation period to automatically generate the basis of a final report directly from map—with the a key difference being that everyone’s contributions are already represented in the report.

In this way, rather than having multiple people create multiple documents that redundantly repeat many of the same arguments (each of which has to be written and read multiple times), everyone can focus collaboratively and directly on the issues at hand and ensure that all pertinent considerations and all voices are represented fairly on the map. Visualising and exploring the issues and arguments in this way also enhances transparency and trust in the consultation process and helps to ensure that every issues is surfaced and addressed comprehensively.

As well as potentially reducing the cycle time of the consultation process, the debate map could save further time and resources when the next consultation round on the topic begins; as many of the relevant arguments will already be in place on the map and will not need to be recreated from scratch. Indeed, once created, the debate map can be updated over time by the different stakeholders as new arguments, evidence and scenarios emerge; providing a continuously evolving view of the subject; so that when the next formal consultation process begins the majority of the thinking and work involved may have been accomplished on the map already.

(2) The second PSB reminder is that TechCrunch and the BBC are holding a debate at Broadcasting House on 25th June to discuss the issues around the BBC’s assets and technology prompted by the debates here and here.

The debate will be chaired by Steve Bowbrick, with an impressive list of speakers:

* Tony Ageh, BBC New Media controller of internet.

* James Cridland, Head of Future Media & Technology for BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

* Jem Stone, Portfolio Executive, BBC new media.

* Azeem Azhar, startups angel investor, ex-BBC, proposer of the BBC Public License.

* Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch UK.

Web startups and developers are encouraged to attend, with tickets available here. And for anyone interested in exploring the debate in detail in advance or afterwards I have seeded a debate map here:

Debate Maps, Public Policy, Openness and Trust

Paul Johnston wrote a characteristically thoughtful and constructive post last month on the need for public authorities to open up debates on public issues to genuine citizen engagement and influence.

Prior to the post, Paul and William Heath catalysed a debate map on the government’s plans for a new Identity System in the UK; a snapshot of which is shown below. Reflecting on the process, Paul provided an excellent précis of our public policy objectives for Debategraph:

“David believes that as more experts engage with the map, its quality and accuracy will steadily improve, so that even newcomers to the debate will quickly be able to see what parts of the debate are most important and where the real differences lie. The tool anyway has a capacity for people to rate elements of the argument, so there is also scope in this way for the wisdom of the crowds to shape the debate. So for David (if I have understood him correctly) the key issue is to go beyond the superficial yes vs. no of much political debate and provide a map that really captures an argument in all its complexity and sophistication. For him (I think) a map needs to be fairly detailed if it is to be genuinely enlightening and so make a real contribution. And Web 2.0 enables this because a wide range of true experts can engage and so allow the real substance of an argument to emerge.”

It’s a lucid summary, to which I would add:

(1) Debate maps aim to capture succinctly and in context every argument that anyone thinks is pertinent to a debate. The complexity of a map mirrors the complexity of the relevant issues as perceived by the community of mappers. Simple issues produce simple maps: complex issue produce complex maps.

(2) Many of the issues that we face in the 21st Century are intrinsically complex. And we can either ignore or deny this complexity and hope for the best, or seek to understand and deal with it. Debate maps give us a means to understand this complexity by letting us to capture and explore it at our own pace.

(3) Debate maps strip away the extrinsic complexity of public debates—the cacophony of partial arguments repeated in ever-louder voices—that can bedevil attempts to deal with the underlying complexity of a debate. Once an argument is represented on a debate map, people can focus on improving and responding to it rather than repeating it.

(4) Debate maps grow to maturity through iterative community interaction: capturing, responding to, clarifying, distilling, rating and reorganising the arguments into as rigorous, concise and comprehensive a structure as possible. Expert input is a vital part of this process, but, from the perspective of the map, the definition of an expert is simply anyone who has something novel and pertinent to add to the debate.

In his post Paul proceeds to outline a 5-stage template model that he suggests could be applied to complex political debates to help participants to get to the essence of the debate and of the different views within the debate. It’s a stimulating proposal that merits detailed reflection. From my perspective, the distillation and clarity that Paul is quite rightly striving for here, will naturally occur with maturing debate maps; as the focus of activity shifts from gathering and articulating the arguments and options to sifting and choosing from the arguments and options.

A further characteristic of debate maps is that they provide open spaces in which debates can evolve to find their own form, as new issues and options emerge. Hence, the boundaries of debate maps are not fixed by government-centric frames—a potential concern Martin Stewart-Weeks raises with respect to the templates—but are discovered and defined by the participants in the process of building the map. This is important because, as Martin notes:

“Part of the citizen engagement debate is about expanding the capacity for people and organisations to not only be the ones being consulted about the government’s agenda, but to be able to determine, at least to some extent, what the agenda should be in the first place.”

The open process of exploration on a map also frees participants from the need to adopt and defend fixed positions in the debate from the outset; keeping open the possibility that previously hidden but ultimately more attractive options will be identified. It also reduces the risk of premature distillation of the issues into a superficially attractive but fundamentally flawed policy position.

The belated publication this month of the Crosby report—which reframes the ID debate in an imaginative and potentially generative way—highlights the structural weaknesses of the current policy making process. An initial exploratory mapping process might have brought the arguments the report makes to the surface of the debate sooner. Conjecture, perhaps, but there are few less visible places for an argument to reside than in a drawer in Whitehall.

The transparency and openness to arguments from all sides that debate maps embody and encourage are surely vital components of any serious project to rebuild public trust in the policy making process. An issue that William Heath reflects on elsewhere.

And the transparency works both ways; as debate maps bring the trade-offs involved in political choices into sharper focus for the people making the policy demands as well as those making the decisions. And constructive engagement with these trade-offs is essential on both sides of the decision, as Matthew Taylor has argued eloquently at length.

Debate maps aren’t predicated on an assumption of underlying consensus—although if consensus is there to be found they will assist in its discovery—and debate maps don’t remove the burden of contentious decisions from Government. They merely strive to ensure that those contentious decisions are made in full cognisance of all the arguments that the community can muster, and that the Government provides an open and clear rationale for its decision in the context of those arguments.

As Paul notes in closing his post:

“Anyway, I think this is a really interesting field and I would love to see some public authorities embracing it and experimenting!”

Rethinking Drugs Policy

Following the publication of the report by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy earlier this year, the Debatemapper team worked with the RSA to create a debate map of the case made in the report for rethinking UK drugs policy.

The map decomposes the report’s arguments into constituent elements, each of which is open to further refinement, challenge, comment and evaluation. You can see the top level structure of the map in the debate strand below.

The Commission’s report is intended to feed into the UK Government’s 2008 review of the National Drugs Strategy; for which a formal public consultation process is underway. You can read more about the RSA’s other initiatives in this context here.

The debate map is now open to editing, comment and evaluation by anyone with an interest in the drugs policy field, and we hope that over time a community of experts will form around the map to cultivate it as a permanent resource for drugs policy stakeholders in the UK and beyond.

With the wider international debate in mind – and to illustrate how Debatemapper can be used to build clusters of interrelated maps – we have also created a new map from an existing strand of the RSA debate map, which explores the arguments for and against the legalisation of drugs.

The top-level arguments are shown in the strand below. Like a wiki, the debate map is inherently provisional and open to further refinement. So if you spot any gaps or weaknesses in the arguments or if you have any new lines of thought or evidence to contribute, please feel free to sign in and start editing and evaluating the map straightaway. Video and text help is available directly from the map.