Previous page: Engaging policies
The infrastructure for communications and transport was not good when our political system was designed over a century ago, notes David Brown, senior associate at the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum. "Things have changed - we've eliminated time and distance with technology, and the population has far more information available," he says. "But whether our creaky old institutions are keeping up with that is a good question."
Politicians have been slow on the uptake because opening political processes challenges traditional roles and assumptions, asserts Brown. At higher levels, citizen engagement edges closer to direct democracy. "It implies defining issues that can be decided essentially by online referendum," he says. "We are probably headed that way in the long term, but existing institutions have to make room for this and decide the ground rules."
But he adds that direct democracy is limited, as it only works on binary, yes/no issues and not complex ones requiring trade-offs. "In budgetary discussions, what if you get 15 yes's but can only afford 10? How do you make a decision?" he asks. "That's where elected politicians earn their keep by making those calls."
Opening up areas of governance to the public means setting a host of policy issues around fair representation and process, says Lenihan. How to decide which citizens should be invited to a forum to debate, say, the environmental impact of a new development? How to decide what information they should be provided with as a starting point to make it an informed debate? Which experts should be brought in to provide objective testimony?
Even trickier is how to evaluate debate. How should people's opinions be weighted? If a citizen comes to a forum 100 times, are their views 100 times more important than another who only attends once? How to decide if a view that's expressed is a rant, and is this opinion less important because it's a rant?
Technology exists to facilitate citizen engagement via online forums, surveys, e-voting and so on, but whatever is used will need to be grounded in policy, says Brown. "A key issue is legitimacy: Is the process structured in a way that the voices that come out of it can be accepted as representative of public opinion?"
Another is universality: not all citizens have Web access today, although this will likely be a non-issue in the future, which means the foundations need to be planned today.
Many so-called technology issues in this area are in fact policy and process issues, says Lenihan, such as people skewing results by completing multiple online surveys, dominating online forums or creating untruthful posts. These issues need to be settled first, and then the proper technology mechanisms needed to enforce them can be built.
Designing the machinery of citizenry
The bottom-up trend in government is most pronounced in service delivery, where technology has allowed government departments and agencies to download huge amounts of citizen activity, says Brown. "Self-service is a big part of citizen-centred service: people fill out their forms online and are responsible for accuracy." But these aren't politically controversial areas, he adds.
Enterprise identity management mechanisms are a hot topic in government IT circles, as these will be needed to enable more political involvement online, says Karl Cunningham, head of e-government at the Ministry of Ontario.
"The question of whether we should be allowing more access to government decision-making has been resolved: the answer is yes, the writing's on the wall," he says. "But there are policy issues on how we go about doing this tactically."
A top-down governance model will likely be needed to allow more bottom-up political involvement, he says. "The issue is, can we put in a governance model across the nation that can hit all three levels of government?"
Next page: From theory to practice
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