For more information on the Political Innovation project, you can e-mail Mick Fealty [twitter] by using this spam-proof link or Paul Evans [twitter] using this spam-proof link.

For anyone who has ever asked themselves “why is politics still done like this?”

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The post Update: Audio file of Warren Hatter’s talk is now online first appeared on Political Innovation.

Crowdsourcing analysis for policymakers

How open data is being used government, how it could be used as a participative tool, and what the opportunities / pitfalls could be.

Presented by Andrew Stott

Co-design and policymaking

A look at the practicalities of involving large numbers of people in planning and designing policies, followed by a discussion of the politics and the ethics of ‘collaborative authoring’

Presented by Steph Gray

Policymaking in the cloud

A discussion of new ways of doing things that arise from more dispersed technical networks. ‘Scrum’ project management, open source development and, Peer-to-Peer organisation have all been held up as being ideas that politicians and governments can learn from.

Presented by Dr Andy Williamson

Quicker, cheaper and easier than polls

In the past, opinion polls and focus groups have had a great deal of influence over policymakers. Today, the social media ‘firehose’ provides us with a torrent of opinion and sentiment to draw from. How is this done? And how well does this commercial practice apply to policymaking?

Presented by Dr Nick Buckley

What policymakers can learn from gaming

Technological entrepreneurs have become adept at finding new ways of motivating people, not only managing to change their behaviours but also encouraging them to develop skills, mentor others and solve problems. What can politicians learn from the most successful interactive-content industry the planet has known?

Presented by Jude Ower

Are we too irrational to participate in policymaking?

Can a government that adopts approaches from behavioural economics be trusted to be serious about any kind of participative politics? Are the two oil-and-water opposites? Or is it more complicated than that?

Presented by Warren Hatter

In other developments, we have been working on an ‘open data for schools’ project, and the Political Innovation approach to understanding policymaking in the digital age has formed the basis of a number of one-day professional training events.

The post What we’ve done so far in 2012 first appeared on Political Innovation.

Lord Krebs, incoming President of the British Science Association was reported last week as criticising government use of ‘nudges’.

Yet this amounts to a reservation that they are using behavioural insights as a “get out of jail card if the government wants to avoid tougher approaches like taxation and regulation”, shooting down a case that precisely no practitioners are making in the first place.

In fact, it feels as though using behavioural science to inform policymaking is on the verge of becoming mainstream – in principle at least. When you remember that this was only really a trendy discussion topic a handful of years ago, it represents a significant advance.

Looking ahead, in the long run, the underlying assumption behind the case for using behavioural insights (that we are “predictably irrational”, so policy and services need to reflect this) will be challenged.

I predict it will be turned on its head, and I’m going to do what I can to make sure it is. Why? Because our true nature, our loss aversion, our temporal discounting, the heuristics we use are, in fact, completely rational, given the way our species has evolved.

We only appear to be irrational when viewed through the lens of economists and philosophers whose assumptions were never true.

I’m sorry to have to break this news to some readers, but humans are not rational economic agents, operating in an economy heading for equilibrium (and credit is due to IPPR for bringing this understanding closer to the mainstream with its Complex New World report).

There are, however, a number of obstacles that stop this growing acceptance being put into practice.

1. the number of practitioners (that is, people who help bodies apply behavioural insights) is small;
2. there isn’t a clear market for commissioning behavioural work in public services which don’t already focus on behaviour (and this is also a chief cause of #1);
3. it doesn’t ‘belong’ to any existing profession (and, of course, this is a chief cause of #2)

So while behavioural insights have informed the work of designers and advertisers for decades, that’s just not true in public policy. What’s becoming mainstream in principle is being held back in practice.

If I’m right, then over the next few years, we’ll have to face up to the real challenges of public policy catching up with the evidence base and making decisions based on what people are really like, not what Enlightenment thinkers and classical economists say that we’re like.

These challenges should be much more substantial than the red herring debates to date (such as that around the House of Lords Select Committee report).

The event I’m doing with Political Innovation aims to highlight one such practical challenge, namely the tension between using insights from behavioural sciences and an approach that progressive voices, myself included, are rightly positive about: co-design.

Surely, in participative democracy, participation and service design, co-design with citizens and users is a good thing?

Surely it can cement the move away from the ‘we know best’ style of decision-making which has rhetorically been a no-no for twenty years, but which we all privately admit still prevails?

Here’s the problem, though: Why would I, as a citizen, play a part in designing a service which aims to prompt certain behaviour on my part with cues which I consider irrational or childish?

As a policy maker, what is my response to this? Should I accept that the human inclination to think that we are much more in control of our actions than we really are trumps proven, scientific insight?

The risk is that the use of behavioural insights becomes an extension of ‘we know best’ policy-making. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid, isn’t it? I’m not sure I have the answers, but I’m pretty sure that the questions here are going to be important.

I hope we get a good crowd along on the 25th September to discuss this.

The post Can the use of behavioural insights ever really be mainstream in public policy? first appeared on Political Innovation.

A new website launches today calling for think tanks and public policy campaigns to publish their annual income and name their major funders.

For its pilot project, Who Funds You? – http://WhoFundsYou.org – asked 20 leading UK-based think tanks and political campaigns to disclose their major funders and rated them on the depth of their responses.

The website awarded six organisations its top “A” rating (Compass, IPPR, New Economics Foundation, Progress, Resolution Foundation, Social Market Foundation), while three received its lowest “E” rating (Adam Smith Institute, ResPublica, TaxPayers’ Alliance).

The full results are:

A – Compass, IPPR, NEF, Progress, Resolution Foundation, Social Market Foundation
B – Demos, Fabian Society, Policy Network, Reform
C – Centre Forum, Civitas, Smith Institute
D – Centre for Policy Studies, Centre for Social Justice, Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange
E – Adam Smith Institute, ResPublica, TaxPayers’ Alliance

Who Funds You? is now inviting other think tanks and political campaigns with a strong public policy or research focus to disclose funders who give £5,000 or more in a single year. It will give a funding transparency award to those that do, and encourages funders to favour such organisations.

As think tanks increasingly take an important role in formulating government policy, it is important for a strong democracy that they are open about their own agenda and where their funding comes from. This is particularly the case in light of increased scrutiny of political party funding.

Who Funds You? co-founder Clifford Singer said:

“It’s refreshing to see an increasing number of think tanks and campaigns taking funding 
transparency seriously. We are really pleased that four of the 20 organisations we rated have placed funding information on their own websites since we first approached them [NEF, Progress, Social Market Foundation and the Fabian Society], while a fifth [IPPR] had already added details several months before.

“But seven of the organisations we approached are languishing in our D and E streams. Those who received a D rating revealed nothing beyond the size of their annual income, while those rated E won’t even disclose that. However, these ratings are not set in stone. Our aim is to encourage think tanks and campaigns to be more open, and we will review methodology and scoring regularly based upon changes they make. We are pleased that one of our trailing organisations, ResPublica, has already pledged to improve transparency, and hope that others will follow suit.

“At their best, think tanks and public policy campaigns make a valuable contribution to political life, generating new ideas and producing important research. At their worst, they can provide a neutral front while actually working on behalf of vested interests. The issue is not whether they should take this money, but that people can make up their own minds about whether this might influence their work.

“As organisations that exert influence on public life, it is right that we call think tanks to account and ask for this basic level of transparency.”

ENDS

Notes to editors:

About the website

Who Funds You? takes no editorial position beyond that of promoting funding transparency. It has so far received no funding, though may seek funding to expand in the future – which it will naturally disclose.

The website came out of a discussion at the Political Innovation project – http://www.politicalinnovation.org/about/. It is independent, non-partisan and run on a voluntary basis by a steering group comprising: Clifford Singer (partner at digital design agencies Sparkloop and Social Spark), Karin Christiansen (founder of global aid transparency campaign Publish What You Fund), Paul Evans (founder of Political Innovation and editor of Local Democracy blog) and Dr Andy Williamson (independent consultant and researcher, and formerly Director of Digital Democracy at the Hansard Society).

Further details at: http://whofundsyou.org/about

About the pilot project

We wrote to 20 leading UK-based think tanks and campaigns from across the political spectrum, and asked them to supply their total income for their last reported year, and to name all funders who gave £5,000 or more (and the amount they gave).

We then rated each organisation, using the following weightings:

* Declares total annual income: 5 points.

* Names each funder who gave £5,000 or more during the year:
Lists organisational or individual funders only: 15 points.
Lists organisational and individual funders: 25 points.

* Discloses amount given by each funder: 10 points if listed by exact amount; 5-8 points if listed by band (depending on width of band).

* Where organisations gave some but not all of the information requested in each category, points were awarded proportionately.

* Up to 5 discretionary points were awarded to organisations that did not meet all our criteria but had clear plans to improve funding transparency in the next financial year.

Grades were awarded as follows:

A = 35+ points; B = 25-34 points; C = 10-24 points; D = 1-9 points; E = 0 points.

As this is a pilot project, we will review methodology and scoring on a regular basis, and invite feedback on how we run future studies, and 
which organisations to include.

Further details and a breakdown of points awarded at: http://whofundsyou.org/about/method

The post New website highlights secretive world of think tank funding first appeared on Political Innovation.

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….)

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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).

The post It’s not what you play, it’s the way that you play it first appeared on Political Innovation.

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!

The post Politics and Gaming? first appeared on Political Innovation.

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.

The post Has web-technology only brought one real innovation to politics? first appeared on Political Innovation.

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.

The post Policymaking in the Cloud: Doing Things Differently first appeared on Political Innovation.