Ryan MacMillan

I’ve been chasing a conversation around the internet which has careered off from an article by Anthony Barnett on Comment is Free. Following Gordon Brown’s plans for reforming the Governance of Britain, and the Justice Minister Michael Wills’s further suggestion of taking this debate online, Barnett and his chums at openDemocracy want to have a go at answering this killer question, “as the voting system comes under review, how can we widen and deepen democracy by other means as offered by the internet?”

openDemocracy picked up the ball from Michael Wills a few months back and, last week, gave birth to Networking Democracy, an attempted framework for online political debate. The project started with a small panel of experts to make the initial recommendations; now they have opened the issue for public comment/abuse/championship (delete as appropropriate). Their new baby is going to be quite a handful.

The proposal is to have some kind of grand scale deliberating environment for all to be able to engage with, which could inform what the Minister refers to as a Citizens’ Summit: a group, probably of a few hundred people, probably selected at random, to formulate decisions or recommendations representative of the whole British population. The views of the Summit are likely to be devised using Stanford University’s Deliberative Polling process.

The group defines three uses for this deliberating environment for the time-being:

- educate through engagement
- demonstrate public opinion
- debate new ideas

They express concerns over how to aggregate results. Perhaps a nod to the work already being done in online conversation monitoring would be helpful here. Billions of words of verbal data are being processed to identify trends and influencers already so the groundwork is in place.

The suggested solution for moderation is premoderation, which would be tricky but is probably necessary. This seems to assume that the discussions will happen locally, not be taken from the wider web, so there would have to be a discussion forum built for the great British debate. Sounds lovely; sounds hard. It would be difficult to build something that would be appealing enough for all but the most self-interested minorities to attend.

Greater success might come from opening the process out to include the discussions already underway elsewhere. In the list of recommendations there is an allusion to the encouragement of social networks, blogs and suchlike to be connected into the debate. This would have to be extremely simple for users to engage with and could be tied in with the conversation monitoring mentioned above. One idea might be to offer a political equivalent of Digg, whereby users can click a button to state whether they support or disagree with the content they are viewing, wherever they are.

If the debate is well attended, if the debate is allowed to be open and chaotic but a strong system for coagulating the important issues is built from the start, I think it could at least become an authoritative test bed for draft proposals, if not a valid voice for the people - opinion via crowdsourcing. Right now, public commentary on this lofty scheme ranges from risibly aggressive to fascinating, which in itself is starting to look like some kind of debate so maybe the will is already there.