Hats off for active engagement

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Chris Lipscombe

Chris Lipscombe is a Wellington-based manager and consultant, delivering strategic marketing, information technology, and communications solutions for corporate and government clients. He has worked for the past three decades in ICT, marketing, communications, publishing, and economic development, and has received awards for his work in New Zealand and overseas.

Hats off for active engagement

When I was a boy, one of my favourite stories was 'The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins' by Dr. Seuss. Without ruining the story for those of you who don't already know it, the hero of the story finds himself in the presence of the King, and is instructed to remove his hat. As he does so, another hat appears, and so on, each hat more elaborate than the last.

The relevance of this story for a discussion on e-participation is that, like Bartholomew Cubbins, we all wear many hats. Too often, participation – e- or otherwise – is reduced to consultation, a tightly bounded activity regulated according to guidelines and procedures policed by an over-zealous government bureaucracy. Yet take off the government hat, and the bureaucrat is a citizen too; and a homeowner, and a taxpayer, and maybe even a church-based community volunteer or a school sports coach.

Successful participation requires a certain amount of letting go, and the creation of loosely controlled (or even uncontrolled) public spaces, where issues can be debated and opinions expressed over a wide-ranging agenda, and where points of view can be presented that may be unpalatable to government officials – even embarrassing. It's not a matter of trusting others – participation is about trusting ourselves.

Here's an example of what participation might look like if we trusted ourselves to make good decisions. Imagine a situation where government agencies didn’t hold information, but you and I did. We already have a model for this – it's called your résumé. Imagine if this was a complete and accurate record of your work history, your medical history, and your education. Now imagine if this document was electronically stored in a secure online vault, to which you and other trusted parties had access. You could now choose to make this information available to the government agencies that you chose to interact with, for specific periods of time, based on the achievement of specific outcomes that you define. Rather than government agencies having 'clients', individuals would build portfolios of 'supplier' agencies, as well as agency-agnostic services.

The unexpected development and growing popularity of web-based peer-to-peer and social networking applications already point to a future where interactions are driven by users rather than web developers or administrators – or government officials. When Google purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction, it wasn’t buying content, or even applications. Google was buying a successful brand, and more than anything else, access to a 'passionate community'.

This community of users was built – and continues to flourish – on the back of fast, ubiquitous broadband connectivity. Slowly we are seeing a similar infrastructure being established here in New Zealand. With worldwide growth in mobile access to the internet accelerating significantly faster than the installed base of internet-connected PCs, and at a significantly lower entry price, we can expect that community to expand in numbers and in reach. Participation in government by empowered users is not a pipe-dream; the preconditions are being met now.

I'm not arguing here for some libertarian utopia. I'm talking about shifting the balance – from consultation based on pre-determined outcomes, to participation based on choice. Nor am I suggesting an atomised free market in information. I see no reason why associations of workers (or rugby players for that matter) shouldn't also take advantage of this opportunity to select agencies and services based on information they collectively own and deploy. Direct democracy is also a separate issue – choice of government services is not the same thing as choice of government.

Successful e-participation is not about technology. It's about opening our eyes and our minds to the changes that technology can enable. Poor Bartholomew Cubbins was threatened with decapitation if he would not remove his hat. A government committed to active engagement with its citizens can do better than that.