Last week, I went along to see the awesome Clay Shirky talk LSE. Clay's book Here Comes Everybody wasn't just one of my favourite books of last year but one my favourite web books of all time. It's as readable as it is informative and beautifully articulates all the things you knew about group participation on the web but were never quite able to put into words. Clay's one of those rare talents; gifted at both writing and speaking. It must be the premier form of recommendation to know that most of the audience are repeat visitors.
Clay's talk stayed true to the central premise of the book that group action is easier but he brought some of the stories up-to-date and made some interesting comments on the Obama presidential campaign. What made the evening for me was the standard of questions from the audience some of which had Clay thinking on his feet, revealing new insights and directions in his thinking and work. I won't go over stuff that's in the book but I'll pick up on a few new titbits and draw some of my own conclusions.
Don't always deliver an optimum user experience
Clay referred to Obama as being one of the first successful platform candidates mirroring some of the thinking we've been doing at 4iP. I won't dwell on the now well documented way in which Obama tailored his message to be portable and re-mixable but on how Clay saw Obama's site as a deliberately unsatisfactory experience. It did just enough to engage people, an on ramp for participation, but deliberately stopped short of delivering the full participatory and organisational power of the network.
Their motive for this was simple. To ensure a successful outcome team Obama still needed people to do things, real things in the physical world. They needed supporters to haul themselves up from the sofas and screens to knock on doors, attend rallies and most importantly vote. The Obama site had to get you onboard but leave you hungry wanting to do more. The Obama site was designed in such a way as to neuter users' ability to actually lobby the presidential candidate on minority or specialist issues. Groups were designed to facilitate users' organising in the real-world and fund raising. They offered little to engage the electorate on policy.
But history shows us that users always find a way of subverting sites intend use. Facebook's groups were probably never designed as a mechanism for protesting against large corporations or lobbying broadcasters but the users' will use it to satisfy their needs regardless. In this case, users of MBO simply used the site to organise a protest against his actions on telecom immunity. While the tools were basic users' used the simple act of joining the group as an act of protest making it the largest group on Obama's own network with over 22,000 members. Obama didn't back down but the collection action of the users' on his own site forced him to issue a policy statement on the subject.
Don't always let your users organise you
Obviously the campaign was a success but if a campaign is fully grassroots and participatory it's going have problems when in power. Once you've been a platform candidate and called to account by the users' can you govern in the same way? Right now the answer's probably no. The tools with mainstream adoption aren't refined enough to allow the users' read/write access to the president's diary.
Sure enough, within days of being elected special interest groups had hijacked the transition site. With the economy in meltdown and the US in the middle of two wars it seems reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of the US electorate wouldn't want Obama to focus on the legalisation of medicinal marijuana. Nevertheless, the question asked by the most number of users after voting on the Open for Questions ended was:
'Will you consider legalising marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the US'.
This clearly raises the inevitable question of under what circumstances do you take advice and under what circumstances do you ignore users? What are the checks and balances needed to facilitate and legitimise the outcomes of participatory government? There's got to be more than a couple of 4iP projects in there and I hope that 2009 will be the year we test out some of the thinking needed to allow a large number of users to participate effectively.
Decentralise and empower
The marijuana example stands in stark contrast with MySociety's successful campaign to force the British Government to keep their work expenses transparent. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of justifying MySociety's success by believing the expenses carried issue carried more gravitas than marijuana one without really investigating why. Why was it that one government chose to listen to a set of users and another chose to ignore a large number of users?
Part of the answer lies in the user experience and the process utilised by MySociety. There were almost certainly not as many users as in the marijuana example but each user was vastly more more effectual. Instead of trying to produce a leviathan product, like change.gov, that tackles central government head on MySociety have produced a service called WriteToThem that capitalises on the decentralised nature of the UK parliamentary system.
Writetothem is simple tool that makes it easier to send a message to your locally elected parliamentarian. While MPs aren't obliged to respond they many would have received personalised correspondence from their own constituents asking them not to approval the bill. According to Tom Steinberg, Director of MySociety, "users sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs".
In this nascent phase of digital democracy it would be hard to see how a Facebook style group could topple a government but the network effect of each locally accountable MP being individually digitally lobbied by their electorate might. If the Obama team really wanted to grow participatory government they might do well to focus their efforts on a product that first tackles Congress rather than at the White House itself.
Writetothem carries more weight simply because it's not designed for mass participation like Facebook and Change.gov. It would be wrong to call it a sub-standard user experience but certainly more effort is required by the user and as a result the actions carry more weight. This, fused with the the efforts to authenticate the users with postcode and email information, makes the correspondence generated more credible and identifies the users as actively engaged.
Finally, Writetothem is not produced instead of a Facebook group. On the expenses issues you could join a group to 'passively' register your disapproval but you were encouraged at every opportunity to write to your local MP. Just like most web experiences users should be offered a spectrum of interaction and engagement. Think levelling up in games.
There's certainly much more to say on this and on the subject of mass participation and the web and we're a way from genuinely building an effectual participatory democracy in the digital space. I agree with Shirky when he says that the most interesting things and important progress won't be at a national level in 2009. Instead it pays to keep an eye on the small, passionate and focused groups starting to solve some of these issues from themselves.
