Michael De Percy from the University of Canberra speaking on "Citizen Engagement & Policy Learning: Forming, storming, norming and performing" at the Public Sphere event on Government 2.0, hosted by Senator Kate Lundy on the 22nd June 2009.

The slides for this talk are available at:
slideshare.net/greebo/michael-depercy

The rest of the videos from the day are linked from the schedule at:
katelundy.com.au/2009/05/29/public-sphere-2-open-government-policy-and-practice/

All slides for the day are available at:
slideshare.net/event/public-sphere-2-government-20-policy-and-practice

Transcript below:

Kate Lundy: Our next speaker is Michael de Percy from the University of Canberra and he is going to be speaking on citizen engagement and policy, learning, forming, storming, norming and performing. Michael.

Michael de Percy: Good morning, it’s wonderful to be here. A few months ago the big question might of been is the Australian government or are Australian governments ready for government 2.0? I think today proves the case that that they are and we've started on that journey already. But the question that I wanted to look at in particular today is not so much government, but are Australian citizens actually ready for government 2.0.

Now I’ve been researching the deployment of broadband infrastructure and the use of broadband services in Canada and Australia through a comparative perspective and I’m drawing upon that perspective today. I notice some of the tweets already have mentioned cultural cringe and I think that it is necessary that we have a collective moment of self reflection when we look at how Australian political and civic culture has developed and maybe where we are at now. But I also think in many ways the process of citizen engagement and the track that we are moving down is somewhat inevitable as more and more people have access to information I’m sure that more and more people will be involved.

So what I’m going to try and so in the short time that I have this morning is outline one approach to understanding where we are at and hopefully where we can move on into the future. So I might just start with the idea of culture. Now when I talk of culture I intend to think about the way that things are done around here. Now if any of you have moved into a new organisation and Tried something new, you probably heard the phrase that is not the way that things are done around here. So I wanted to just look briefly at this Australian tradition of political culture.

Now prior to the 1970s authors such as Paul Kelly, frank castles at the anu and others suggested that Australia had developed a culture known as the Australian settlement, where we are so used to having the government do everything for us that it was actually expected. But indeed it was very conservative in many ways and if you look at **indaudible** tradition the political stability was achieved by self restraint in the interest of constitutionalism when it was reinforced by an informed and vigilant citizen. Now I think particularly with social media and government 2.0 we have the ability to improve that level of information and therefore lead to a more informed and vigilant citizenry. But having said that in the 1970s throughout the Australian social sciences surveys we saw that Australians were viewed as not much interested in politics and actually displayed low rates of political participation outside of course of the formal requirement to vote.

And indeed Hugh Emming and Owen Hughes argued that one cannot be sure if Australian has yet acquired the demonstrably civic culture. Now you can really start to see this when you look at nation states such as Canada and the United States where you see much more grassroots level politically and community involvement. It’s not to say that we don’t have the same here but it is to be extended remarkable. But this hasn’t changed much even throughout the 1990s the survey data suggests that Australians are very sceptical of government and even in 2005 we had some suggestions that public trust in government was at an all time low. So I suppose in many ways we have an opportunity to improve that view of government, but how do we actually get citizens to engage? So why is this political culture important? Well firstly as we move towards this technologically drive and more open society we will find that the system we use will depend on the political culture which underlies it. And I have been involved in many of these networks for sometime within organisations, within community groups and so on and it leads me to some observations about some emerging online culture.

It raises some important questions; the first thing I notice is the online conflict that I have seen in many of these forums. I’ve seen lately a number of community efforts which initially have been quite good with many involved only to lead the conflict to many participants and see some of these forums actually disappear as conflict intensified. But it also makes me wonder, do we really have a democratic political culture which citizens will want to engage in these particular forums. But I suppose the point is that there has been an explosion of conflict and participation on a number of different forums including in higher education institutions, in community groups and also in media participation forums. One of the problems we see is the tendency for a new jerk reaction particularly from the authorities when this conflict occurs. It is not uncommon that in these organisations that if conflict does occur, immediately some outdated policy is pulled out and it is reinforced that these are the guidelines you must follow in engagement. I think in many ways there are some problems with how we view the world and how we are applying some of the policies and procedures of the past in this new environment.

This brings me to the concept of policy learning, and again I apologise for skipping through many of these theoretical positions very quickly. But in its broadest meaning and borrowing from Howard and Ramesh, “policy learning includes both the intended and unintended consequences of policy making activities, and it is an iterative process of active learning on the part of policy actors.”

And the point being I suppose is that as conflict and learning occur more and more on this online environment, and it will as the number of actors increases, then we need to expect a certain level of failure. We need to I suppose be able to experiment and expect that sometimes things won’t always work out. The trouble is if we don’t do this, then we tend to reinforce the old ways, the old culture. I’m seeing this in many ways, but at the same time it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t embark upon risky ventures. But if we don’t accept some level of risk, then how are we going to take advantage.

The other problem I see is with this networked society that we are moving toward – networks tend to resist central control. So the power in these networks tends to change from time to time depending where the node happens to be. And I suppose we need to accept that as a natural part of doing things.

This leads me to this concept of netiquette, or online etiquette. I’ve had discussions with others doing research in this field as well and some suggest it’s just a matter of course, a matter of time. It’s a bit like attending dinner parties. After a while you’ll learn what the accepted etiquette happens to be. The trouble I find with that etiquette model is that much like a dinner party, you have to be invited to the dinner party before you can actually learn what the sense of etiquette is. And we have the potential here to extend beyond the old invitation model where it will be I suppose grass roots involvement of citizens. But in light of this civic culture, what is our capacity to learn through this process which essentially involves a level of conflict and how do we deal with that is also the problem.

This leads me to my idea which stems from some of the project management literature of how groups and teams form. In the initial stages we see the forming where the group comes together and once the group comes together there is initial conflict as they storm the sense of values and the like in the group moving through to norming and establishing the rules in the game before actually performing and obtaining either the benefits of the group or of the objectives that the group or team have set out to achieve. In many ways I think we are still very much in the forming stage. A public sphere obviously is a large part of that, but there are also many other community organisations, Open Forum, also the Open Australia which has been a leader in many ways in bringing information to the public. Lots of these grass roots initiatives. But also of course is the ABC. I wasn’t surprised to see in the media that the ABC was being attacked for possibly being anti-competitive in terms of developing or enabling user generated content. If you go back to the 1930’s when the ABC was bringing international artists to perform in this country the same charges were laid against the ABC in the 1930’s. So it’s not unusual what is happening right now. But I suppose in many ways why should we have to wait for industry to catch up and in many ways what if some of these industries are outdated and are soon to reach the date of their natural life? There are many new industries that can be created and I think in many ways we need to be looking to the future. But in the meantime we will be moving into the storming area. There will be many follow up debates. There should be and there is lots of research happening and there will also be many reactions. One of the biggest problems I have seen and it is particularly for community groups which have been attempting to improve participation and get information and attempt to teach and educate people is that if they ever make a mistake they tend to appear in the traditional media which then leads boards and others to try and close down the forum because of the unwanted attention that it brought with it. But I am hoping that as participation intensifies there will be too much of this happening for it to be something worthy of the traditional news media to report. But having said that, how do we then establish the rules of the game? The rules will emerge somewhat from the first two fazes, but I am concerned about central control. I hope that we can look more to a decentralised model so that that way we can obtain the benefits which I am convinced this technology will bring for us.

So one of the approaches in Australian politics in innovations and in many ways Australia lead the way in statutory authorities and other mechanisms for getting important issues out of the day to day politics where the issues could actually be implemented. And I think that that same process might be useful in terms of how we convince citizens that this is not another centrally controlled consultation where we listen and then make the decision we intended to anyway. And how can we do this?

Well the first thing and I think this is important is that we need more specialist policy online research centres and these need to be decentralised spaces to experiment. Centres for social innovation have developed in North America, through out Canada and the United States. We have had one here in Adelaide but again it seems to be very much an elite organisation and I think if we could get that same model out to communities where communities could be more involved in the process they will then see more tangible benefits rather than waiting for the good old trickle down affect.

And there are also some emerging models. The first one I have noticed is the outsourcing of citizen engagement which I think is a fantastic model, the idea being of course if it is outsourced and when I say outsourced it doesn’t matter if it is private, third sector or whatever but moving it out of the centre of government, I think it enables that one step away process which assists in people wanting to participate. One of the reasons many people who are not necessarily users of the technology are psyched for not being involved is an element of fear or uncertainty and I suppose if we can get the models out to the community there will be less fear because it is not the centrally controlled, distant unknown.

And finally I think education will play a primary role. One of the biggest myths at the moment is the myth of the digital native. I have taught several thousand students of the last few years and believe me it would only be about five percent or less who have the ability to engage. And these are quite young savvy people, so I believe again there needs to be more of an outsourced, maybe even an open sourced education model which will enable people to learn the skills that they need to operate in this digital future.

One of the problems I am finding at the moment is there are many boundaries to the legitimacy of social media in an educational environment and again I suppose this comes back to that organisational culture of central control and the like.

So these are my thoughts for today. I’m very pleased to be here and I would like to personally thank Senator Kate Lundy for everything that she has done in bringing us together and thank you for your time this morning.