Just a quick one, from my friend Andrew Regan, developer behind Poblish (among other things): Here is a Google Chrome ‘Banned List highlighter’ extension – helps you identify pages that have words from John Rentoul’s ‘Banned List’ and even tweet them to others.

The pictured page (below – click to enlarge) shows what happens when you look at a page that has ‘banned list’ terms on it.

Enjoy! (If that’s not on the list, it should be….)

Have you seen The Hunger Games yet? If not, don’t bother. I know it puts me in a minority of something approaching one in the world, but seriously: it’s rubbish.

For those who have avoided the adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular book, the plot revolves around an authoritarian future in which a continental government keeps the otherwise restless masses entertained and distracted with an annual fight-to-the-death tournament between 24 teenage “tributes”. Sort of like X-Factor. But with bows and arrows.

(If you want visions of the future how they should be realised, just download Bladerunner, Twelve Monkeys and The Fifth Element; if you want half-decent portrayals of bloodthirsty voyeurism in the mix, add Battle Royale, Rollerball, Running Man and The Truman Show).

Anyway, its one saving grace for me is that it at least combines my two main professional interests: creating policy and creating games. A little more fascistic and lethal than I would normally advocate but thankfully a democratic and constructive approach to the potential of games in policy-making was recently at hand, too. On 3 April, Jude Ower of PlayMob led the latest (and sadly last for a while) of Political Innovation’s Translation Layer Events.

Jude discussed her (and others’) creative and game-based approaches to promoting ideas and causes. With the exponential growth in mobile technology and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, games are becoming more popular, more social and more significant. In an accompanying essay, and in her presentation, Jude highlighted examples such as Fate Of The World (which models the impact of different policy choices on climate change) and MP For A Week (which guides players through the trials and tribulations of the backbenches). There are dozens, if not hundreds, of games like these, adaptable to a number of scenarios. The PlayMob Founder and CEO recommended that, as a starting point, policy-makers could create scenarios in existing games to discover possible outcomes of new policies, and gather feedback and opinions.

In the discussion which ensued, at least three possible thematic uses of games by policy-makers were identified.

First, simulation: giving policy-makers and their constituencies the chance to test reactions to proposals, discover possible results and gather data.

Second, gamification: motivating people by applying game mechanics to non-game situations (this could be relevant to the work of the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight Unit, the so-called “nudgers”).

Third, as a cultural and communication tool. A popular book amongst policy-makers recently has been Neil Gabler’s Life: The Movie which argues that the entertainment industry has become so dominant that its products, especially film and TV narratives, are the prism through which we analyse and plan our real lives, expecting story arcs and characterisations to play out as “normal”. Many of us have a similar relationship to games of all types, with the choices we make and the people with which we interact, as we go about our business, being similar to “turns” and “players”. Policy games can tap into this popularity and mindset. Especially amongst young people, where Marshall McLuhan’s assertion (I would say, prophecy) that the medium is the message holds nowhere more true than for the mobile screen in their pocket. The opportunities for communicating in the form of games could be very significant.

With 7 billion hours per week spent playing games, the potential for linking all this playing to policy-making certainly cannot be ignored. Games are moving from the entertainment to the experimental sphere.

The barriers are those familiar to anyone looking to reform bureaucracies: cost-effectiveness, political courage, and top-down control. No one wants to (or even can these days) end up spending more than at present to achieve marginal improvements; and no one wants to be coerced.

It is perhaps the last of these that is most significant. If games are to be used in education policy, for example, it is only educators that can ultimately make it work for learners. In health, only the healers can really decide if it will be effective for those seeking treatment. In transport, only the carriers can really implement it for those being carried.

The introduction of a more widespread use of games in policy-making, then, needs to focus on the end-users of services and their immediate suppliers. Facilitated by decision-makers and supported by those who make, promote and play games, it could certainly change how some public services are designed and delivered. As the boys and girls didn’t quite once sing, it ain’t what you play, it’s the way that you play it (and that’s what gets results).

This is a guest post from Jude Ower, founder and CEO of PlayMob. Jude will be speaking at the What Policy Makers Can Learn from Gaming? event on 3rd April

Seven billion hours per week are spent playing games. The average age of the social gamer is 43 and more women play social games than men. 1/3 of the global population play games.

Do we still need convincing that games are typically played by the teenage boy, on his own in a dark cupboard? We’re told that even David Cameron is an Angry Birds fanatic!

The past three years have seen a massive growth in games due to the platforms we play on (mobile, Facebook/social networks and consoles such as the Wii and Kinect). Games are more widely available, cheaper, easier to get your hands on, and a lot more family friendly and social.Despite grim economic downturns, games still continue to soar (mainly online games). But why is this? We are human, we love to play and we love to have fun. We are social so we play games with our friends, in person or online or turn-based. It is fun to play together or competitively.

Games provide a sense of joy and happiness, of achievement and motivation. There is something for everyone. This year I had the honour of judging the Mobile Category for the BAFTA games awards. I usually dip in and out of games for research or experiment, but here I played 15 games in a month, all because they were mobile and can fit in-between a busy lifestyle. There is always time to play, and it made me happy.

But how can this fit into the role of a policy maker?

Games are an interesting and effective way to gather feedback and opinions. To watch the way large groups of people react and to gauge a general consensus. Now, if I was a policy maker, I would look to connect with an existing game, model a scenario and see what the outcome was.

I would do polls within games, or even create a game or scenario for my constituency to play and provide feedback and learn, in a simulated environment, what the possible outcomes of a policy could be.

Games are a great way to educate audiences on a policy, and not just for kids. But for adults too. Here are some examples:

• Fate of the World
• MP for a Week
• Future Parks Planning
• Save the City
• A Force More Powerful
• Road Safety
• The Public Policy Game -

In this space, we are just getting started. There is so much more scope to create games, to educate and to gather information and opinions. One of my favourite areas is looking at the potential to tap into existing games in order to educate or gather opinions. The new Sims game coming out this year has elements of environmental balancing and sustainability which I feel will be a growing area in the next few years. Getting important messages out to a global audiences via games they already play.

Click to enlarge

If you’re coming along next Tuesday, I look forward to discussing further with you!

Analysing social media. Like trying to drink from a firehose.

The five ‘Translation Layer’ events that we’ve organised have attempted to break down the different kinds of innovative technologies that have changed politics in recent years. Four of the events cover the applications of technology.

With apologies to the excellent speakers who have (or will) be addressing these issues, it seems to me that the first three on that list (below) are tools that have enabled us to do something that we were already doing – but doing it bigger / faster / better / more. The only wholly new item is the fourth one – social media analytics. This is also the subject of our next event on Tuesday evening.

The fifth – Andy Williamson’s ‘Policymaking in the Cloud‘ (last Tuesday) – looked at how the methodologies of the web have changed the way policy-makers operate, and their potential to do their job effectively.

Four ways policymaking is changing

I think that it’s important that politicians and policymakers understand that web-enabled innovations have only provided four new types of policymaking tools.

They need to understand the underlying political questions that these concepts pose, and they need to know what their working attitudes and ethical approaches are to them; They are

• Open data and visualisation
• Collaborative authoring
• Gaming
• Social media analytics

Using data to make problems easier to understand is hardly new. The opening slide at every presentation I’ve ever seen about open data has always been John Snow’s 1854 Cholera Map. Sure, new demands have been created. The wrangle around who owns the data and the demands for transparency are game-changers. But, in itself, it’s not a new concept.

I’d say something similar about collaborative authoring. ‘Compositing’ is hardly a new idea. Every political anorak must be excited that there is now free software to do this, and that it can be more efficient and inclusive. There’s no doubt that access to these tools has created new demands and opportunities. But it’s an incremental, rather than revolutionary change.

Gaming is a more nebulous question, of course, but we’ve always watched games to draw out useful conclusions – and role playing games are a well-tested management tool. As Albert Camus said on the t-shirt,

“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”

But the final issue – social media analytics – is the one that introduces something entirely new.

Of course, we’ve had opinion polling for a long time. Over the past few decades, focus groups have helped provide richer information from the public. But we have never had a firehose of human sentiment that we can analyse until now. Never before have we had the incentive to invest in tools that allow us to analyse the comments that millions of people volunteer every hour of the day.

It is already changing policymaking in profound ways. In some cases, investment companies regard the firehose as a more reliable authority than an expert in forecasting value-changes. Health authorities are able to predict epidemics. There are so many other applications of this information. I’m not going to spoil Nick’s talk for you now, but follow this link to get your ticket.

Cloud computing is a popular buzz word. It means that the data and applications we use can be hosted anywhere then distributed to us on any device, wherever we are, whenever we want them. It extends one of the most powerful practical applications of the internet, namely letting us do things on our own terms (in theory at least).

Policy doesn’t work this way. Policy is by-and-large a closed shop. If we examine the traditional policy cycle – still the prevalent model in the UK – we find that the only point of connection between government and the public is a narrow window of ‘consultation’. This usually happens towards the end of the process, once the ‘experts’ have made most of the decisions.

It’s not a greatly empowering experience for the public. Nor is it a surprise that trust in government has been consistently falling for more than forty years. The majority of Britons don’t have any interest in taking part in policy making and don’t believe that there is anything that they can do to influence policy.

The internet, social media and the cloud won’t of themselves change any of this. Governments have remarkably thick hides and have been remarkably resilient to pressure to democratise the policy process. Risk aversion and inherent conditioning means generations of policy makers don’t have the skills to effectively engage or the willingness to try.

Society though has changed. Society does engage, if not with government, with each other. Perhaps creating a nascent spring from the winter of neo-liberalism, social media allows individuals to coalesce with like-minded others around issues. Networks are viral, rapidly evolving and temporal. Weak ties mean that people build loose networks of association and through this trust is built across society. This trust is no longer vertical – targeted upwards at ‘authority’ – but horizontal, built upon the values and sense making of the crowd.

So what does this mean for policy making? I believe it has a number of serious and potentially positive implications but also some risks and costs associated with it. Ultimately, I believe that engaging in the cloud can lead to a democratic renewal, although this won’t be instant and much work is required to build levels of trust as well as political and information literacy skills.

The policy cycle can change. Engagement can now occur in different ways at different times, with different stakeholders. That’s hugely powerful. Open data and the third party agents who re-purpose it push information out and, instead of ‘broadcast and capture’, we shift to conversational models of engagement. Above all, social media means that policy makers have never been more able to listen. Sentiment analysis and qualitative thematic mapping of social networks and blogs makes it relatively easy to understand the public mood.

The engagement cycle becomes critically important here and as to adapt. It becomes vitally important to close the circle: Engagement starts with listening, moves on to conversation, responding by summarising what has been heard and then finally acting. Effective engagement is just as much about listening and reporting what happened as it is about asking for submissions and holding discussions. Philosophically, it’s about recognising the policy development must become a process of ‘doing with’, not ‘doing to’.

So far, I’ve talked about the cloud as if I mean it is simply a metaphor for being online, but it’s more than that. The cloud is a repository, toolbox and conduit but this can be combined with offline as well as online techniques. It’s also about aggregation and sharing – levelling the playing field. In the old model, governments controlled the engagement, in the new world, they don’t. We do. Or rather, we all do. Engagement doesn’t have to occur inside government fortresses (digital or otherwise), it can and should occur anywhere and everywhere that people with an interest congregate. The final benefit of the cloud is that it takes you beyond the firewall to where the real conversations happen.

This creates a challenge though as policy makers are not really trained in on-going, more intimate engagement models. It presents issues in terms of the volume of data and how this is to be analysed effectively. And remember, you can’t just consult and move on, the new model requires feedback loops too, so communication strategies need to be enhanced and refined. There’s a risk in all of this that engagement is boiled down to simple quantitative measures but this is problematic; engagement is a largely qualitative process. So as well as changing the inherent culture of engagement, governments need to re-train their staff and employ real engagement specialists.

If there was one sound bite that stood out for me at the last Translation Layer event, it was Steph Gray’s ‘policy is written by those who show up’. If that’s the case (and it’s hard to argue against it) then the job for all of us concerned with democracy and engagement is simple… get more people to show up!

Unfortunately there are significant, multi-layered barriers to democratic access for many people: digital exclusion increasingly creates a sub-class of citizens who lack access to many engagement platforms and are limited in their access to others; lack of information literacy limits or prevents those who are online from participating effectively; and lack of political literacy means that many citizens do not have the knowledge, skills or confidence to navigate and participate in public policy environments.

This disaffection isn’t new, it’s part of a long standing decline (starting in the 1950s) in political participation and trust. Some might of course argue that this suits policy makers as there is little public awareness of (read: interference in) much of that they do. To overcome the current deficits we have to re-build levels of interest in policy and politics, but doing so is neither quick and or easy. Nor is increasing levels of political and information literacy. So alongside strategies to build long-term capacity through education (both formal and life-long learning), we need to build up, harness and connect networks of intermediaries – people with the pre-requisite skills and knowledge – and then connect them up with communities that need support.

This will work because the power of new media lies in the power of the networks it facilitates. There is the potential to overcome the power of strong ties through networks of association. In this new landscape the strong ties that count are the mavens who connect vast networks of issues-based citizens, who in turn are best place to nudge the latent nodes within their networks into action.

On the other side, government, both politicians and policy makers, need to do their bit and step out of broadcast mode. Engagement cycles need to go through the key stages of listening, response, action and reporting on action right around to more listening.

Listening too must occur outside the engagement framework, new social networks provide rich seams of data that, through tools such as sentiment analysis, can help to understand public opinions. In effect, we need to shift from passive policy cycles to active policy cycles. This method can be helped by a willingness on the part of those who host the engagement to step out from their normal domains. In the physical world, this means going out to engage with stakeholders where they live, work and play.

Online, it requires the virtual equivalent, instead of engagement sitting passively on gov.uk or parliament.uk websites, push it out to third party blogs, websites and social media – go where the people who will really be affected already are: don’t expect them to come to you.

Such a strategy can be unpopular and for a very good reason; the impact on resources can be significant. However, this is, I believe, manageable, what is really required is a new set of processes and tools and above all a new mind-set. If we are to look at making more grounded collective decisions then we need tools that are collective and collaborative. We need to match the technology to people, the engineering to the design.

Whilst there are numerous good digital engagement platforms around, innovation in this field is remarkably slow and many engagement exercises are simply shoe-horning offline tools into digital settings or copying what was done elsewhere, often with limited results. Ticking the engagement box is very easy, creating effective valued-added engagement, less so.

I’m arguing here for a move towards a common centre. I don’t believe that governments own the systems of democracy and engagement. Nor do I believe that civic society does either. Both are polarisations. Both demonstrate tensions and fractures, particularly along their borders. Whilst good things can occur, too often they leave both sides feeling unsatisfied. For effective engagement, we need to build more consensus driven approaches that inhabit shared spaces that are neither public sector or privately run but partnership-led with independent brokers and information gardeners able to facilitate a meeting of minds.

Ultimately what I’m advocating is for the democratisation of knowledge gathering and a more transparent, less ideological approach to informing policy development. This is about trust, not power.

The second in the 2012 Political Innovation ‘Translation Layer’ series - Co-Design & Policymaking - is happening tomorrow evening at 6.30pm. I hope to see you there.

In a separate post here, I’ve outlined some of the more interesting examples of collaborative authoring that I’ve noticed in recent years and Steph Gray will be elaborating on this theme.

The format for the evening will be similar (with a few modifications based on what we learned a few weeks ago) and you can see what to expect here.

Matt Ridley – The Rational Optimist – outlines why the ability exchange ideas is more important than the quality of brains in any policymaking circle – and why it’s important to have as wide a circle of people as you can. Have a look at his Ted Talk – it’s well worth a look if you have time.

We have five ‘Translation Layer’ events planned between 24th January and the 3rd April 2012. Full details can be seen here.

At each event, there will be a short-ish talk followed by a discussion among participants. Personal networking is at least as important as the talks and we will be asking everyone to provide a short introduction, saying who they are and why they are here.

We have a way of making this a little more efficient (these are political events, speechmakers may be present!), so we will be asking everyone in the room to prepare a tweet-sized introduction to themselves and their work.

Everyone will be given a slip of paper to compose this on – one that looks something like this:

Click to enlarge

We’ve got a good mix of people coming along – politicos, entrepreneurs, bloggers, campaigners etc. We asked all attendees to complete a survey as part of their signup – here are the results:

Click to enlarge

The main event should be finished by about 8.15pm but we hope you will be able to join us for dinner afterwards as well!

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen just how powerful a concept collaborative authoring is. Using little more than standard blogging tools and a creative use of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, campaigners Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin started an avalanche opposing proposed reforms to the UK’s Disability Living Allowance (DLA).

Event Sponsors: Repknight.com

You can read a fuller account (with links) of how they did this here. But, for the purposes of the second 2012 Political Innovation event in London – Co-Design & Policymaking (Tues 7th Feb) – perhaps the most interesting thing (aside from the strength of the arguments and the political victory that flowed from it) about this initiative was the way that it was received.

This was not a pressure-group funded mixture of ‘research’ and spin. It had received little attention from elected politicians and the media were largely indifferent to it until it came to dominate Twitter prior to a key vote in the House of Lords.

No-one could ignore the thousands who collaborated to examine the ignored responses to government consultations, adding their own arguments and research to create a report. Many of the participants were people who may have struggled to participate in conventional political campaigning because of the very nature of their disabilities. None of the cynicism that could apply to corporate spin or demagogic journalistic grandstanding could be applied to this. As Sue Marsh put it:

“We did everything possible to engage with politicians, lobbying MPs and Peers, writing articles, attending conferences, but at every turn we were brushed aside.

Despite serious concerns from campaigners, charities and disabled people themselves, the Government’s the recent Impact Assessment (October 2011) into the proposed reform of Disability Living Allowance is almost identical to the original. Nothing has changed, almost none of our concerns have been addressed and as the House of Lords return to vote on the final stages of the welfare reform bill, we felt that it was vital we presented our own evidence.

This is the Spartacus Report. We all own it, we all created it. It is yours, use it in any way you wish.”

The perceived legitimacy of this response can explained from this request from Sue to her collaborators:

“Do what we do best and make our case honestly. Re-post articles, write short statements, blog, contact friendly journalists and see if they will drop a little of the DWP spin angles. Contact supporters and let them know we won and what it means. Own the internet. It’s all we have.

… Trust in our case, trust in the evidence we have presented, but most of all trust yourselves. Governments are not defeated often in the way ours was yesterday and you did it. Without the TV news, without much of the printed news, without an opposition, whatever Labour MPs claim today.”

I hope you can come to the second Political Innovation event examining how collaborative authoring can enrich policymaking and overcome many of the problems with our think-tank driven model of policymaking.

At this event, Steph Gray will share his experiences of grappling with this problem from both within and without government, creating and using collaborative tools.

The Spartacus Report may have relied upon an ad-hoc use of free standard applications, but there are also significant possibilities open to collaborators who know how to design a web-interface to encourage participation.

Wikipedia, after all, is a huge collaborative document. The standard ‘Google Doc’ application now allows a number of users to work on the same document simultaneously. My personal favourite collaborative document is Writeboard, but there are plenty more on offer.

In the past, I’ve covered some of my favourite tools elsewhere, including Debategraph and Mixed Ink, both of which promote different game-based approaches to this problem.

And finally, there is another twist. Over recent years, I’ve had the privilege of working with Mick Fealty of Northern Ireland’s cross-communal political weblog Slugger O’Toole.

Mick has forgotten more than most people have learned about keeping a useful conversation going, and his site hosts civil – even genial – conversations between protagonists who may have been less gentle towards each other in his absence.

I’m hoping that a few bloggers will be on hand to reflect back at the end of the evening upon the ‘it’s not just about tools’ aspect of this argument.

All five events intend to cram the following features into them:

To be a translation layer. I pinched that idea from a speech by Ben Hammersley in which he identified the need to explain innovation more widely. Having worked for some time in the overlap between politics and innovative media, a breakdown in communication has always been evident. Innovators are often impatient with incumbents. They’re bed-blockers. They just don’t get it, man! On the other hand, the incumbents often have a very clear idea as to why the bright ideas of innovators just won’t work. Or sometimes, they adopt a very simplistic version of what innovators urge upon them (see e-petitions). These events are intended to open a discussion between those urging innovation upon politicos, and the politicos who already know what ideas just won’t work.

Brevity. These are evening events. We’re planning to have only one speaker at them, and we’re asking the speakers to prepare a short, high-impact talk. The aim is not to provide anything that is absolutely cutting-edge in terms of innovation. Instead, we’re looking for something that explains why the matter in hand could be more interesting to politicos than they may think.

A thought experiment. These five events will look at how some innovative concepts could change the way we use and see think tanks. Think tanks are problematic. Dr Andy Williamson has written a number of short posts here explaining why. They’ve not (yet) been hit by the demands for transparency that politicians, the media and government in general have had to to endure. But they may do so soon. Being more familiar with the concepts that these talks will cover may help to shape the next generation of think tanks.

A networking opportunity. Adam St is a great venue for networking events. We are aiming to attract an eclectic mix of people along, and we’re working with Elwood & Atfield to promote these evenings. Elwood & Atfield are very active in the CIPR Public Affairs Group and have a great database of people who work at the top of the politics and public affairs professions.

Along with the geeks, gamers and bloggers that have been to previous political innovation events, we’re aiming for a few politicians, policy-wonks and campaigners. Everyone should come away with the kind of contacts that they won’t meet anywhere else.

All events will feature a short session in which everyone in the room will be able to see who else is listening.

I’m looking forward to the ‘Crowdsourcing Analysis for Policymakers‘ event next week, with Andrew Stott kicking the evening off with some of his experiences working on the Government’s Open Data and Transparency Programme. We’re expecting a packed house but there are still a handful of tickets left – get yours now and maybe join us for dinner afterwards?

One issue that I hope will come up is the democratic problem presented by all transparency initiatives, including this one. Transparency is, after all, A Good Thing, we are told. It’s a very fine political horse to ride, as Steve Bell observed a while ago.

But what can possibly go wrong? I’d suggest that, before the Internet was thought off, politicians privately had the same thoughts about the pressures that they face to consult as they do today. The perennial problem of the hard to reach and the hard to avoids. The two demographics that help to justify representative government so effectively.

There are all kinds of problems with self-appointed participants – too many to list, so I’ll just adapt my favourite one from something I wrote about referendums a while ago:

“Doubt and equivocation are a good thing. Instinctive certainty often isn’t. As Darwin put it, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Doubters and equivocators are more likely to [not grasp opportunities to participate] and – following the logic of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that’s a bad thing.”

There are plenty more reasons to worry about this and conventional wisdom has generally concluded that it’s better to elect people to do this for us most of the time.

Crowdsourcing, however, creates a chink in the solid armour of the arguments for representative democracy. Sure, if you value participation at £zero, you may only attract people with a stake in the game. If you find a way of making it easy to do, and converting quick light responses from a wide range of participants, then you can attract more of a counterweight to self-interested pressure groups or the social classes that are over-represented in public discourse already. and micro-participation offer a way of reducing the problems of participation.

Another approach is to find people who don’t have the kind of prejudices that self-appointed participants often have and see if you can find ways of encouraging them to do some of your analysis for you. This is one of the attractions of trying to capture what Clay Shirky calls The Cognitive Surplus.

The thing is, gamifying decisionmaking is, in itself, hard work. If you have the resources and creative capacity to do it, then that’s fantastic. But as a half-way house, I’m currently working on a project to encourage school pupils to start playing with data to see what they can find.

I hope to see you next Tuesday – I’m sure you have your own issues with ‘ Crowdsourcing Analysis for Policymakers’.