I’m quoted in the Economist today:

Government by (all) the people

[...]

Successful examples of legislation by the masses are rare. Most people don’t know how to write laws. Tim Bonnemann, the founder of Intellitics, an American firm specialising in public-participation tools, says a better method is to canvas views widely but use a small team to write a draft. The hard part is not the technology (a simple online discussion forum is adequate) but creating a fair and transparent process that assures people their voices have been heard.

For a more detailed take, check out our three-post series from March of this year:

• How To Create Policy on a Wiki
• Blast from the Past: Experiments in Wiki-Based Political Discourse from Way Back When
• Challenges for Wiki-Based Consultations

If you speak Russian and find the time to review the Wikivote.ru site, please share your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

I was invited to contribute one of three short op-eds about the upcoming Deliberative Poll “What’s Next California?” for Zócalo Public Square, an online magazine on civic issues based in Los Angeles, CA. You can read all three of them here (scroll to the bottom for mine): Hurdles Remain, But It’s a Start

The second of the three, by Tim Cavanaugh of Reason Magazine, was refreshingly negative. Excerpt:

By combining polling with top-down instruction from a panel of “experts,” deliberative pollsters hope to determine how voting would change if voters’ opinions could be forced into compliance with establishmentarian thinking – sorry, I meant to say, “if people had opportunity to become more informed and more engaged by the issues,” as Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy puts it.

[...]

Voters don’t need more be-ins with panels of self-interested experts. They see their taxes going up. They see the ever-expanding number of “For Lease” signs in their neighborhoods. They see the state economy falling apart under the misrule of the very same good-government types who organize events like this. And they are either resigning themselves to the collapse of a state government that plays no positive role in their lives, or (in increasing numbers) fleeing the state for places like Texas where the government does not prey upon them quite so eagerly.

Mr. Cavanaugh added a short follow-up on his blog, which has generated a number of equally negative comments.

Setting aside tone for a minute, these comments contain a number of very valid questions and concerns. The conveners should see every negative comment or mischaracterization of the event’s intentions or structure as an opportunity to clarify their message, address concerns and, ultimately, foster trust. The follow-up appeared some time mid-day yesterday, but so far it seems the What’s Next California team has yet to engage.

I was recently invited to write a short article about ParticipateDB for the Spring edition of GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications’ Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (PDF, 3.4 MB).

Here’s a quote that describes one of the challenges ParticipateDB tries to address:

The Challenge

While public participation is at the core of our democracy, e-participation, as it is commonly referred to, is still a fairly young and emerging field with a much smaller and incomplete body of knowledge, and a tool landscape that can best be described as fragmented, if not confusing.

There is an almost overwhelming variety of tools and services available today that can be, and have been, applied in the context of public participation. Some of the more established tools were designed specifically for the purpose of e-participation, while others, such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and Facebook, are more generic and just happen to also support certain participation activities.

In addition, there is a considerable long tail of experimental applications and solution approaches covering different countries, languages, and participation areas, most of which never rise out of obscurity. No matter what tool is being used, information about actual implementations is often incomplete, distributed, or simply unavailable.

This poses a challenge that is twofold:

• On the demand side, practitioners often have very limited awareness of what’s available, what works, and what doesn’t, making it difficult to choose the right tool for the job.
• On the supply side, even some of the most innovative tools fail to get the exposure they need in order to gain enough traction to be able to validate their concepts and ideas through

ParticipateDB continues to grow.  While March and April were mostly about adding more content, we did manage to add one cool new feature earlier this month: ParticipateDB: Covering 23 Countries and Counting

Last week, Federal Computer Week published an op-ed they had invited me to write on the issue of crowdsourcing, public participation and how the former might be applied in the context of the latter: The outer limits to the crowd’s wisdom

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that this is something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around over the past few months, especially since the conversation on the web continues to be characterized by confusion about concepts and terminology. The article is a good interim summary of my efforts, and more aspects remain to be explored.

I would like to thank the many who have contributed to this discussion in the comments, via the NCDD mailing list, on GovLoop and elsewhere on the web. Sharing your thoughts so generously has certainly helped me clarify mine. Please keep it up!