Social Networking on Climate Change: The IDEAL-EU Experience Francesco Molinari and Erika Porquier
Deployment of a multilingual Social Networking Platform in three European Regions (Catalonia, Poitou-Charentes and Tuscany) dealing with the issue of climate change and energy policy-making at the level of the European Parliament (http://www.ideal-debate.eu).
Research questions:
Are computer-based SNS valid extensions for F2F interaction?
Can they be of use for policitians and policy-makers?
Are there any structural differences between a EU and US approach?
Social Networking Sites are growing in audience and in amount of time spent in them. But it is problable (according to data) that though being used really intensivelly, SNS are still used by a minority: they pattern of adoption differs from most other online applications.
And it seems that Dunbar’s number (n=150) also applies to SNS.
Chris Kelly (2007) stated that there are five impact areas of social networking sites in US politics: branding, voter registration, fundraising, volunteering and voter turnout.
The project
The project featured a social networking site to debate climate change. Topics were launched and moderated by community facilitators.
Five characters of successful social networking sites in EU/US politics:
Specialist rather than generalist
Top down (by government initiative, rather than bottom up (party campaign)
Dealing with policy issues, rather tahn electoral aims
Presence of lively debates increases reputation and attractiveness, thus Google driven traffic (only EU)
They can induce mass imitation and multiplicative effects (only EU)
“Vote Rush” (US) vs. “Bar Chat” (EU).
Recommendations:
Limited in scope, single issue
Aiming at structural change in behaviour of people
E-Government and Social Media: The Queensland Government’s MYQ2 Initiative Matthew Allen and Mark Balnaves, Curtin University of Technology
Toward Q2: information-oriented website with markers of “interaction” but little action.
MyQ2: informatics in action, commitments, communications, citizens adopting behaviours aligned with governmental goals.
MyQ2 lets you create a “commitment” on the website (i.e. a task you’ll perform, a goal you pretend to achieve, etc.) and you can make it public, state why it is important, comment it, be reminded about it, etc.
Shift from understanding e-government as “talking” to understanding e-government as “acting”.
g4c2c: Enabling Citizen Engagement at Arms’ Length from Government Axel Bruns and Adam Swift
Why some top-down (G2G) approaches have failed?
Government operated projects have limited impact on government decision-making, often result in general criticism, have problems with effective management by public service.
May be mere service delivery
Simply perceived as insubstantial spin
Citizen participation is a fig leaf for goverment
Process of impacting on gov desicions unclear
Why some bottom-up (C2C) approaches have failed?
Some of them are not representative, have good functionality but have limited take-up by target community.
May generate open an engaged debate
Often only by usual suspects
Perceptino of inherent bias, unrepresentative community
Unable to match the clout of eswtablishede lobby groups
Too distant from politicdal actors to be recognised
Towards G4C2C
Desirable qualities for citizen consultation:
Government support and recognition
Independent and flexible operation and management
Distant enough to allow real community development
Close enough for outcomes to be accepted as meaningful
Government support for citizen-to-citizen initiatives: the government is involved, but not directly promoting, but supporting:
Hybrid model combining g2c and c2c aspects
Government-supported, but at arms’ length from government
Public service broadcasting approach
Participation by citizens as well as politicians and officials
cf. “Civic Commons 2.0” (Coleman & Blumler, 2009): a space of intersecting networks, pulled together through the agency of a democratically connecting institution, raises questions about the scale of such a project.
The Expressive Turn of Political Participation and Citizenship in the Digital Age Jakob Svensson, Karlstad University
Is a democracy sustainable without participation? What do we mean by the “political”?
Concerns of the organization and structure of society
The relationships of power, distribution and equity
Discursive and relational
Characteristics of the late modernity:
dispersion of cultural frameworks
Individualization
The network and the digital
Sub-politics and life-politics
Instrumental rationality: why participate if I’m getting anything in exchange? why engage citizens if costs are higher than benefits? And if participation is good/better for anyone, then why people do not participate?
Expressive rationality
“Expressive preferences” (Brennan) are not the same thing as “market preferences”: self-realization, processes of identification, networked individualism, etc.
Participation as an act of identity expression, participation provides participants with meaning.
Do Facebook and Video Games promote political Participation among Youth? Evidence from Singapore Marko M. Skoric and Grace Kwan, Nanyang Technological University
Is there any relationship between using these emerging platforms for online sociability and entertainment, and political participation among young Singaporeans. See if these platforms are “third places” (Oldenburg) where they hang out and eventually participate.
Literature (like Pew Internet Projecte, 2008) shows that there is huge civic potential in Facebook, MMORPGs, etc.
While traditional media are quite controlled in Singapore, the Internet is not, so freedom of speech is almost guaranteed. There are also weak civic traditions.
There are some examples where social media have been used to impact the traditional media, by starting protests online, taking them offline (organizing online an offline protest) and then hitting and appearing in mainstream media, once (or during) the offline event has taken place.
Do intensive usage of Facebook and intensive gaming has an impact in (a) traditional participation or (b) online participation? Is there a relationship between online and offline participation?
Findings
Being a Facebook is slightly correlated with participation in politics
Intensity of usage is correlated with in both online and traditional participation
Gaming alone is not related with participation
But civic game-playing is correlated with participation
And online and offline participation are also correlated
Facebook use and video gaming linked with both online and offline participation
Online participation as a driver of traditional participation
(increased) Importance of attention to political/public affairs news in traditional media, even for online participation
Disruption and Empowerment: Embedding Citizens at the Heart of Democracy Andy Williamson, Director of Digital Democracy, Hansard Society
Where have we failed?
What are the challenges?
It’s not about technology, but about people…
We have historically been shifting from community societies to individualist societies, from citizens to consumers. We are treated as consumers of “democratic services”, a consumer of democracy. And we are not: we are citizens.
People have gotten used not to do anything, not to get up and demonstrate their thoughts: 4% of British citizens are involved in some participation activity; 5% want active involvement; 24% want more of a say; % just want information; 16% don’t care. The ones that want active involvement are the primary goal, while the 24% that “want more of a say” do not want to talk about “politics” or “e-government” but about schools or public transportation: we have to address them in their own language/interests.
In the last 10 years we have been unable to create a momentum of participation. We got some true successes, but we failed in creating a social change. The reason is that we did not bridge the adoption gap of most (e-)participation initiatives.
Privileging individuals over the collective reduces opportunities for citizens to be engaged, debate and modify their believes. When we look at individuals as individuals we lose social capital, the relationships.
How can we reassert and independent public sphere when it remains colonised by powerful corporate interests, media outlets and technocratic agencies?. You really need higher levels of information literacy and lots of time to find out the truth amongst all the diverging discourses. And we are colonized by technocratic agendas.
Citizens do not trust governments, but governments/politicians trust even less citizens. Consulting the citizens is costly and expensive, and it takes a lot of time and you (governments) do not know where you’ll end up. A participative democracy is a healthy democracy.
Some NGOs have bought into the technocratic arguments of government. We have created an intermediate layer of civil society representatives that actually do not represent the civil society and were never elected to. If NGOs were there to fill the void of participation and engagement, the Internet changes the whole landscape.
Several access stages to be able to participate:
Mental access
Material access
Skills access
Usage access
Civil access
Democratic access
But the Internet itself won’t motivate me, but a wish. The Internet is not a motivation tool, but it certainly is a barrier/enabler.
And there is a huge gap between governments and online engagement, and technology. We need a brand new bunch of people to facilitate online engagement. We need a disruption in the system. We need to find people of both sides (i.e. governments and citizenry) to build it together. Governments need to understant citizen participation, and citizens have to understand the democracy cycle.
Two examples: NHS Website vs. Patient opinion, the first one does not work, the second one does.
Discussion
Q: we are operating in a representative system and most e-democracy claims for a deliberative or even a direct democracy. How do we make this shift? A: There is a vested interest in keeping the actual system. It would be a more realistic approach to just aim for people to participate a little bit more. It’s not a revolution: it’s an evolution.
Q: People asking for more democracy and more participation are failing at educating people on what democracy is, represents and how does it work. A: We should certainly talk more about democracy than about the “e-“.
I have recently been involved in both a project on citizen participation and participation at the University. Not surprisingly — to me at least — both projects share much more than what they differ on. Indeed, they both share a very similar infrastructure:
They are both initiatives of the public sector (in Spain, private Universities are really a minority).
They both provide core services that have a central source and whose reliability is based on the legitimacy of that source.
They both address a large community that is interested not only in getting those services, but in participating in their design, including the transparency and accountability of the whole process.
The central source and need to certify the information generally goes in the opposite direction of participatory design and engagement. The former asks, naturally for centralization, the latter for decentralization.
The fall of transaction and replication costs (the two big constrains of the industrial revolution) make it possible to separate management from participation. It’s like if you could have a football game being played in every player’s living room while still being able to have a game and keep an up-to-date scoreboard and stats.
But, as said, centralization attracts both management and activity to your own platform (the learning management system, the government’s portal), while participation centrifuges activity out to social networking sites.
Simplifying things to the max, my landscape now looks more or less like this (please understand Management in a non-restrictive way):
Education
Participation in own platform
Participation in alien platforms
Management in own paltform
Centralized in-house Learning Management System
(I)
Core Virtual Learning Environment + Aggregator / open API + PKE (PLE, PRP) Constellation (II)
Management in alien platform
One stop shop + Custom Cloud Services (III)
Social Networking Sites Constellation + Distributed/diffuse institutional identity (IV)
Government
Participation in own platform
Participation in alien platforms
Management in own paltform
Government Portal (I)
Core Public Services + Open data repositories/sources + Citizen initiatives (II)
Management in alien platform
One stop shop + Custom Cloud Services (III)
Social Networking Sites Constellation + Distributed/diffuse institutional identity (IV)
The problem with case IV is obvious to me and is about the risks of Cloud Computing which, again simplifying, are twofold:
The risks of security and ownership, which are still to be fully addressed and fixed by cloud service providers, and which a public service just cannot afford to leave unattended;
and the blurring of the institutional identity, which undermines the main asset of a public institution: legitimacy.
I thus advocate for a mixed solution of keeping your main assets centralized while externalizing all the participatory side (see case II):
The core value stays “home”: data of the students, syllabuses, data from the government, government plans…;
Centralized, the core information is legit, certified;
A centralized management is compatible with a decentralized access: open API and open data provide gateways so that access can be remote but management of data still be centralized, secure, private;
Your staff has to develop skills to outreach your target while focussing on management, which is your core;
Your staff has to develop skills to monitor and even capitalize what’s happening outside of your platform, but without needing to interfere in off-core activity;
Participation is not mediated by management needs or management staff, can freely emerge, and can do it where it pleases.
And, most important, participation has the fuel to fully engage with all the information possible;
If communication and information channels are open and work in two-ways, the (virtuous?) circle closes and the cycle starts again.
In my Predictions for Social Media in 2010 I revisited the importance of the ePortfolio and the institutional website. As I there said, I plead for the construction of the (e-)portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.
Andrea DiMaio writes — Why Do Governments Separate Open Data and Social Media Strategies? — about the need to merge open data strategies and social media strategies. He there complains about open data and social media strategies being treated as independent ones, which he believes to be actually related one to the other one.
I not only believe they should go altogether and hand in hand, but that their interaction defines different ways of understanding government or education. It always helps me to draw things and see what see what comes out of it:
Case I is definitely what we do have nowadays in most modern democracies: a democracy based on 4- (or 5-) years time span between elections, increasingly ruled by plutocracies bound to the economic powers.
Case II is common in plutocracies willing to be seen as cool. They “engage in the conversation” but, without the required information to feed a true democracy, it finally becomes a dialogue of the deaf. The governments perform populist acts and the masses believe they will be heard by shouting out the louder.
Case III is a genuine approach to openness, transparency and accountability. Nevertheless, without the proper communication channels, data can only be used (then exploited) by the “best” (in an elitist sense of the word), hence the ones that can interpret them and make their feedback get to the governments (the Goverati in its worst meaning).
Last, Case IV, is what we should we be aiming to. I definitely avoided labelling it Government 2.0 because it is surely not the “2.0” what matters, but its components: participation, engagement, collaboration, cooperation… all in all, democracy in its purest sense.
In fact, it is just another way to thoroughly look at e-Government, which means Government enhanced by means of Information and Communication Technologies. Or, if you prefer it, enhanced by means of Information (data, open data) and Communication (Social Media) Technologies.
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