Networking Democracy: can the internet help democracy work better?
OurKingdom is hosting what we believe to be a unique online deliberation on how the potential of the internet can be integrated into a national political process. It is about this question: can participation on the web reinforce representative democracy? The initial phase took place among a group of experts who were asked to set out the problems and summarise what is already known - please look at it here. The first section of it has an email exchange between Anthony Barnett of OurKingdom and Michael Wills, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice - who bravely agreed to an independent debate. Their exchange sets out what we are doing.
We are now opening up the debate for anyone to contribute, here or on your own blogs and websites. The post below is Anthony Barnett’s personal summary of the discussion so far. Please read at least some of the discussion before commenting. We have an important opportunity to raise the game of the web in politics - and not just in Britain, we are trying to bring in as much international discussion as we can.
The minister and some of his civil servants at Justice are listening to this conversation, and have already contributed in the initial exchanges as you can see. We would like as many people as possible to blog about this, write about it, and host discussions about it in their own fora. If you do, please link to here and email us ( at jon.bright@opendemocracy.net ). After three weeks, we will aggregate all the discussions that we know about into a final document.
Please also note something that is very important: the starting point of this experiment may be the government’s commitment, for which Michael Wills is responsible, to have a citizens summit. But our concern is not with how to make this specific summit work. The Minister’s questions are ones of principle: Tories and Lib-Dems and Scot Nats and Welsh and Irish politicians should all be asking these questions for themselves. As the voting system comes under review, how can we widen and deepen democracy by other means as offered by the internet? This is a non-partisan issue that will grow in importance over the coming decades.
Networking Democracy: National conversations on government policy using the internet
Here are some of the lessons I draw from the first stage of our on-line deliberation. A very big thanks to everyone who has participated so far. What follows is not a formal aggregation and taxonomy of different views. It’s an overview of the lessons I have learnt.
The aim is to initiate a web-based debate on how a government - that is any government - could integrate the potential of the internet into a national political process designed to support representative democracy. The idea started from a conversation I had with Minister of State, Michael Wills, who is charged with organising a Citizens Summit to make recommendations to parliament on a British Statement of Values. He told me that he wanted to draw on the potential of the web. As you can see from our initial email exchange, he had the courage to ask us to discuss how this could be done - and I want to stress again openDemocracy’s OurKingdom team is doing this unpaid by, and independently of, the Ministry.
The nature of the proposed summit caused some nervousness amongst those invited to take part. There were objections to the abstract and general nature of what we have asked everyone to do. What emerges from this is that if a government wishes to draw in popular input it must be clear about what it wants and why. What is the aim of the specific conversation? Who is supposed to be talking to whom - and who is listening? What members of the government are reading the comments even, let alone responding? What is being made of the comments?
The Minister had two specific concerns: how to make sense of large numbers of web contributions (if they occur) and how to ensure both that there is a good input and that it is fairly representative and is secure from ‘capture’.
An important lesson for me is that while the Minister’s fears are understandable they may be misconceived. The web is not just a version of ‘The general public’. Voting does indeed disaggregate everyone into private, anonymous individuals, whose ‘x’s are then counted. But the web is not just a soup of isolated individuals prone to manipulation by the wicked or the commercial and in need of benevolent guidance from the authorities. Rather, it consists of many groups, networks, communities and cyber-associations, such as regular readers of particular blogs, small and labile aggregations, some very persistent, with over-lapping interests and memberships, often very intelligent and capable of learning. The success of social networking sites like facebook is that they generally use real names and create, precisely, social networks.
To go to the web to assist a national conversation means asking these groups and networks and communities to debate and discuss the issues for themselves, off-line as well, and on their terms, while feeding back within whatever rules are set.
How to use the internet to assist a national debate: my lessons from the initial openDemocracy discussion
- A government needs to be precise about its aims for the process and must then define from the start what role the internet debate is expected to play.
- For example, if the aim is a citizens summit that will deliberate on a specific policy, lets say for simplicity a new voting system, then people will want to know does the summit decide or recommend; if it recommends what then happens precisely to that recommendation; e.g. if it is to make a recommendation that goes to parliament will the MPs have a free vote or not?
- Then, what role is foreseen for internet input and how will this be adjudicated?
- What is the aim of maximising on-line participation? This question is linked to the concept of a citizens summit itself. The thinking behind the concept of a summit is that if a representative group of citizens chosen at random (say 500 or 1,000) deliberate on an issue they can reach a decision that is both wise, because they have listened to experts and debated the evidence, and is perceived as legitimate. (The process has been most systematically developed as ‘deliberative polling’ by Jim Fishkin at his Stanford centre). Until we have more experience, on-line participation is unlikely to be used for decision taking. Its use is therefore three-fold:
- It educates through engagement and deliberation so that a much wider public gains a deeper, personal understanding of the issues and a counter-balance is created to the simplicities and banalities of the media.
- It creates a better sense of public opinion for any deliberative body to take into account.
- It provides an opportunity for inventive and fresh approaches to be proposed and debated.
- The relationship of online and offline needs to be clearly frameworked from the start. It is a mistake to just ‘ask’ for responses, not much will happen if you do.
- While the numbers the web can bring to a national discussion are large and the relative cost is low, the support and investment in web debate is significant. It needs to be led by people who know about and enjoy the medium and its latest advances. Executive control should not lie with a civil servant who is suspicious of the rabble, just uses email and can’t twitter or blog. Discipline and good quality politics are available on-line but is best achieved by those who have embraced its potential.
- Aggregation. This cannot be done by machines, though they can help. It needs to be done by humans who are given the task of reading the material, use simple categories, report their findings in good prose with all the material open and available for others to assess differently. (This report is an example of just such ‘aggregation’ if from someone defiantly one-sided as well!). Aggregation should be in place from the start and not begin when all submissions or comments are in. Those who comment should know their views will be read, assessed and aggregated - this is an incentive.
- Moderation. Any process needs clear rules, e.g. about brevity, no personal attacks, encouragement of links, clear examples AND engagement with the question being asked. Then moderators can be recruited to ensure these are kept. Personally, I favour pre-moderation: a process that is guarded is more valuable for readers - and there will always be many more readers than commentators.
- Highlighting. Best comment of the day, wittiest comment of the week, most original, most bizarre, all of this attracts readers as well as encouraging participation.
- Capture. The first and best answer to concerns about any online process being ‘captured’ by groups or special interests is to recruit as many groups and interests as possible to participate!
- The fear of capture resides in an assumption that any open process of citizen involvement will be a shadow the process of voting. For historic reasons, voting privatises and makes anonymous the individual participant. But online deliberation should be open and joint. This is where the use of online input is not costless. The government needs to approach large off-line associations, such as the Consumers association, the Women’s Institute, universities, trade unions, business associations, churches and religious congregations, large NGOs, to ask them to encourage their members to participate. The use of independent polling and the process itself will identify cheating and the mechanical reproduction of unrepresentative views.
- Personal names. I support the advice of Steve Clift here, and the evidence of facebook. Real names, with area and even postcode, and citizenship identified, should be mandatory - with anonymous contributions being allowed via email to a moderator who also gives the reason for accepting it. I think the use of real names in a public process of this kind is good in itself. We are holding politicians to account and to high standards in the public arena, why should members of the public then hide themselves? We also want to encourage the restraint that public accountability reinforces. There is a clear difference of view on this - a motivated decision will be needed.
- Multi-media. The use of video, sound, face-to-face debates, should be encouraged, for example with a video wall. The larger aim is to intensify and deepen political talk. It is not that this kind of participation will necessarily influence the outcome in an immediate practical way, but what it will do is assist the positive acceptance of the outcome and widen public understanding independently of the main media (who are likely to slag this off therefore).
- Invite in as many different organisations and networks, from political parties to churches to online networks. Ask them to run their own debates, train own moderators and encourage members to participate. Use widgets and all other devices: don’t isolate the process from the rest of the web, on the contrary. Off-line advertising may help the process gain legitimacy and win the support of the commercial media (perhaps by advertising on their websites and announcing how many have clicked through from them). More important the process should be projected across the web, actively seeking links, ensuring input from blogs, social networking and organisational websites, permitting viral reproduction of comments and comment upon them.
- Timing: if the internet debate is going to be about something complicated, it might need to proceed in stages and over time with the explicit aim of helping to involve as much of the population as possible. If it is about a relative technical aspect - for example the voting system - then there needs to be advanced web publicity, a clear beginning and end. The web easily gets bored. I would say, over seven weeks with the middle week being a breather week in the middle for the aggregators and moderators to take pause and meet and assess how it is going. If this little experiment is anything to go by the moderators and drivers should do nothing else at all for its duration. The quality of the input is hugely improved by the quality of the caring and moderation.
- In summary: be clear about the aims and how there will be a policy outcome, have clear rules, work with what already exists on the web and do not try to control the process.
Anthony Barnett, March 2008
Filed under: Networking Democracy
I have responded on my own blog here.
Probably not the sort of response that you want, but it’s the way I see it!
In theory this is an excellent initiative.
However, my apparent enthusiasm is tempered by the recurrent issue of government sincerity.
Public cynicism towards the motivation and tactics employed by the political classes reaches new heights with each revelation about the innerworkings of our democratic institutions.
This feature of discourse in the UK spawns dangerous ramifications for the efficient exercise of democratically accountable political power.
For example; politicians are routinely assumed to be lying from the outset, even before they make any public utterances on a particular topic! They are also perceived to be motivated entirely by greed, addiction to the trappings of public office and personal self-aggrandisement. This wholly negative public perception of the political classes is applied with a very broad brush.
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this poisonous level of public disengagement (note that I deliberately do not use the word “apathy” in this context) is plummeting voter turnout. In turn political elites respond with measures that eventually denigrate respect for democratic principles even further - witness the relaxation and utterly predictable subsequent abuse of postal voting rules.
I want to engage positively with this initiative because it boasts vast beneficial potential. It is therefore vital that individuals within the government understand the value of sincere engagement on their part.
Deliberative processes around the world in which governments have participated without any pre-set agenda or outcome have been greeted by a healthy reciprocation of public goodwill.
Those (and this is a depressingly common feature amongst similar UK based projects) which do not and are mere one-sided activities, in which the government fawns interest but has in fact already decided the outcome are met with naked public cynicism and hostility.
I am prepared to engage without pre-conceived ideas and an open mind - we can only hope that government representatives will adopt a similarly positive approach?
I think you are setting yourselves an impossible task. I doubt if you have the staff to collate and moderate the deluge of trivia you are going to get from every one man and a dog pressure group with a keyboard.
Have a read of http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page11051.asp
this will give you an idea of the problems the governments e-petition site has had and then ask yourselves how much influence has that had on government policy? (The original mission for this petition site was a cynical attempt to do what you are now proposing).
I wish you luck but I have the feeling that you might come up with the answer … 42; just like “Deep Thought” did http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything
with particular reference to “The exclusion philosophy”
This is one of those occasions when “bottom up” does not work, particularly where the internet is involved. It does not lend itself to condensing information only expanding it. You need one person to step out of the crowd and say “follow me”, just like it always has been.
Meanwhile, the ultimate answer to dealing with this government remains “”Question everything, believe nothing, trust no-one”.
[...] first in a preliminary “Networking Democracy” exchange which is now flowing into a just launched public discussion. See: [...]
It saves time!
Sadly not all Members are honourable. Time after time the public is let down, with little to no perception that the dishonourable person has been punished in any significant way.
Naturally (and again, sadly) a broad brush is applied. There are no easy answers except to say, if only all Members would behave honourably.
But yes, we have to engage, we have to keep giving them another chance, because what else can we do?
Incidentally, Michael Wills did not raise the issue of trust when he referred to disengagement in his recent speech on kickstarting a Bill of Obligations and Privileges - I mean, Rights and Responsibilities.
Just to concur with PD above about reservations but also to point out that like most media forms the voices of minorities are generally drowned out by the masses and ignored by the decision makers.
Very pleased to see this happening
How about a piece of commitment to the people by the parties ?
The next time a by-election comes up, none of the big parties will contest it
They will allow a local person to win the seat
Otherwise, why on earth do we believe politicians ? Until they start to put right the terrible wrongs of their class, we, the people simply do not trust a word they say.
I have not yet changed my car for global warming purposes, not done anything that they ask me to. They simply do not deserve it.
If I do something, it might be to help my family, my community or some other stakeholder. Never a politician.
So I look forward to seeing a true representative at Westminster, not another party apparatchnik….
[...] Networking Democracy - really interesting debate beginning over at Our Kingdom about how government can use the internet to assist a national debate. This is related to the Governance of Britain programme, which I have talked about before. [...]
> Networking Democracy: can the internet help democracy work better?
> Posted on 24 March 08, 10:17 pm
> by ourkingdom
Short answer: Yes, it does help some, as witness China, Serbia, Nepal, and even the US, and the absolute refusal of North Korea and Burma to
allow public Internet access. But the obstacles are great. The enemies of democracy also have the use of the Internet.
> OurKingdom is hosting what we believe to be a unique online
> deliberation on how the potential of the internet can be integrated
> into a national political process. It is about this question: can
> participation on the web reinforce representative democracy? The
> initial phase took place among a group of experts
I mean no disrespect, but there is no such thing as an expert on this
subject. I have studied the issues for more than a decade, and what is
most clear to me is that we don’t even know what the appropriate
questions are. If you think you understand the matter, that is
sufficient proof that you don’t (as Niels Bohr said of Quantum
Mechanics).
> who were asked to
> set out the problems and summarise what is already known - please
> look at it here. The first section of it has an email exchange
> between Anthony Barnett of OurKingdom and Michael Wills, the
> Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice - who bravely agreed to
> an independent debate. Their exchange sets out what we are doing.
This should not be a debate, but an investigation. Not an expression
of competing opinions, but a gathering of facts, a creation of
hypotheses and theories, and a process of systematic, peer-reviewed
testing of those hypotheses and theories. And also a great flowering
of new ideas, such as we see every day on the Net.
> We are now opening up the debate for anyone to contribute, here or on
> your own blogs and websites. The post below is Anthony Barnett’s
> personal summary of the discussion so far. Please read at least some
> of the discussion before commenting. We have an important opportunity
> to raise the game of the web in politics - and not just in Britain,
> we are trying to bring in as much international discussion as we can.
A key issue is the use of the Internet in education. Most countries
still use something like the late 19th century Prussian education
system, the first to apply the principles of factory automation and
mass production to the classroom. The avowed purpose of this system in
Prussia was to keep the population in line while the rulers did what
they pleased. Its success was all too evident throughout the world
during almost the entire 20th century.
I volunteer with One Laptop Per Child, which is an education rather
than a computer project. It has a rather different view of education,
based on learning by doing in a process of collaborative discovery.
The aim is to create independent lifelong learners and thinkers,
rather than compliant factory workers, shop clerks, bureaucrats, and
so on. In order to end poverty, we have to teach students how to link
together around the world, and to create sustainable international
businesses together. This same global collaboration will have other
important economic and political effects, most of which we cannot yet
foresee.
We can, however, at least say that universal access to e-commerce,
both to buy and to sell, is a far more serious version of Free Trade
than letting corporations go anywhere while limiting most people to
their home countries. As in the case of Overstock.com being certified
as the largest employer in Afghanistan after the war, with rugmakers
and other craftspeople and artists getting more than 60% of the
selling price. (Number two was a brick factory.) The Talmud describes
the political and social consequences of prosperity and poverty thus:
“Without bread there can be no righteousness, and without
righteousness there can be no bread.”
Any attempt at prediction is likely to be little more than pious hope.
Just remember that if you want to make God laugh, you should tell her
your plans.
But there are elements of the future that can be effectively
predicted, mainly by inventing them. That is the plan of One Laptop
Per Child and my NGO, Earth Treasury. I cannot give a full account of
the plans and the possibilities here, or of the existing experience
from such educational projects. I would be happy to explain in much
greater detail, and to provide appropriate evidence, in a suitable
forum, and to help you get further information from the OLPC and ICT4D
communities, and others that will be involved.
> The minister and some of his civil servants at Justice are listening
> to this conversation, and have already contributed in the initial
> exchanges as you can see. We would like as many people as possible to
> blog about this, write about it, and host discussions about it in
> their own fora. If you do, please link to here and email us ( at
> jon.bright@… ). After three weeks, we will aggregate
> all the discussions that we know about into a final document.
>
> Please also note something that is very important: the starting point
> of this experiment may be the government’s commitment, for which
> Michael Wills is responsible, to have a citizens summit. But our
> concern is not with how to make this specific summit work. The
> Minister’s questions are ones of principle: Tories and Lib-Dems and
> Scot Nats and Welsh and Irish politicians should all be asking these
> questions for themselves. As the voting system comes under review,
See, for example, the Open Voting Foundation project to create secure
Free/Open Source voting software, which anybody can test, in contrast
with the proprietary software and secret testing processes in use in
the United States.
>
> An important lesson for me is that while the Minister’s fears are
> understandable they may be misconceived. The web is not just a
> version of `The general public’. Voting does indeed disaggregate
> everyone into private, anonymous individuals, whose `x’s are then
> counted. But the web is not just a soup of isolated individuals prone
> to manipulation by the wicked or the commercial and in need of
> benevolent guidance from the authorities. Rather, it consists of many
> groups, networks, communities and cyber-associations, such as regular
> readers of particular blogs, small and labile aggregations, some very
> persistent, with over-lapping interests and memberships, often very
> intelligent and capable of learning. The success of social networking
> sites like facebook is that they generally use real names and create,
> precisely, social networks.
Hear, hear!
> To go to the web to assist a national conversation means asking these
> groups and networks and communities to debate and discuss the issues
> for themselves, off-line as well, and on their terms, while feeding
> back within whatever rules are set.
The Internet communications protocol, TCP/IP, was designed to
interpret rules limiting communication as damage, and to route around
them. Once you start this conversation, you will no longer be in
control of it, even though you can control the official reporting
process.
[rest of post, mostly procedural, snipped]
Anybody who wants to see what the Internet can accomplish is welcome
to come to a demonstration in Haiti or Rwanda during the coming year,
after they get their 10,000 or more One Laptop Per Child XO computers
in their own languages (Kreyól Ayisyen and Kinyarwanda, respectively).
Or we can show you some of the results from early trials in Canbodia,
Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and elsewhere.
[...] OpenDemocracy - Networking Democracy: can the internet help democracy work better? [...]
[...] morning I came across a great UK experiment in online democracy - Networking Democracy, an OpenDemocracy project to explore how the internet can be integrated into a national political [...]
I think this site is part of a great project. My focus would be on the point of the online (and offline) activity. And I think it is a mistake to think of it as a way to short circuit our current democratic institutions. For me it is much more about generating new ideas and perspectives, creating links between people and moving people towards a more engaged mindset. Of course our institutions and our political elites need to do more to open out to engagement, but online engagement cannot form any kind of alternative decision-making mechanism. Rather it is a key part of our society moving towards a more engaged citizenry and a more open and in touch set of political leaders. See my blog on this (http://www.theconnectedrepublic.org/blog/?p=74)
Very interesting discussion - many thanks for spelling out the key fears and the 14 points which are very valuable.
This is an important initiative but needlessly complicated as it stands.
First, it seems to aim at quantity rather than quality. namely, it appears that the focus is on attracting as many participants as possible from the start. My suggestion would be to have a ‘dry run’ with say 300 participants (a varied group, recruited by contacting various groups throughout UK) over a period of say 8 weeks with say 5 sessions in total. You would need to work out appropriate environment to use as the ‘conversation’ is meant to be synchronous. So, is it Skype, or GoogleTalk or? How many participants should be in the group for each to have a chance of a voice? What privileges should the Moderator have? The experience suggest no more than 10 people and sessions of 1 hour are fine.
Second, while Deliberative Polling is mentioned, lessons about its use online appear not to have been taken into account. I suggest looking at “Considered Opinions on U.S. Foreign Policy: Face-to-Face versus Online Deliberative Polling®”, Robert C. Luskin, James S. Fishkin and Shanto Iyengar at http://www.sdd.stanford.edu/research/ and especially the conclusion.
Third, you should look to use systems like Crystal Interactive (contact Ray Elmitt at relmitt@crystal-interactive.co.uk) for face-to-face deliberations as much of the issues mentioned about managing the developing information is fully handled there. What is more, by the end of say a 5 hours session, a group of 300 attendees would have produced a fully documented and distilled results with everyones views recorded. The total information is also available shortly after the session close in digital form so each participant can get a full report.
The initial pilot suggested in the first point could serve for guidance.
I would be happy to explore how I might be able to help make this happen as both the intent and the topic deserve doing it well. What is more, progress has been made in the way one can accomplish this effectively and in an open way while still having it organised and captured without undue moderating effort.
[...] "Networking Democracy" from OurKingdom.OpenDemocracy (2008-03-24) - ironically sent to me today in the Victorian EGovernment Newsletter [...]
[...] picked up the ball from Michael Wills a few months back and, last week, gave birth to Networking Democracy, an attempted framework for online political debate. The project started with a small panel of [...]
I agree this is a great concept - both as an end in itself (to explore the Statement of Values) and as a means to wider ends (how do we increase the breadth and depth of participation through on-line media). And the subject is sufficiently broad to be of some interest to most people in the UK.
A key challenge is how we give a ‘voice’ to people who are happy to read stuff on the internet but are less comfortable posting, and those who don’t use the web at all. Part of the solution is to attract the support of people who are interested in listening to the views of others and can summarise them fairly. Whilst there is a whole industry built up around consultative exercises using a wide variety of excellent and innovative approaches, the issue here is ideal for capturing views based around natural conversations. As a previous poster commented, there are really no ‘experts’ in what it means to be British. This is how it should be. Rather than experts providing complex information in a comprehensible way (the essential basis of many consultation exercises) this is a discussion which can draw out and articulate the core values that British people already have.
Clearly this will create some complications and contradictions – our values are shaped by our history, life experience, and the communities we live in. But making sense of all that is where the citizen’s summit will come in.
So what does this mean in practice? In whatever site you set up to capture this debate, have a space specifically for views collected off-line – in pubs, church groups, restaurants, cafes, coffee bars, workplaces, dinner parties – natural as opposed to formally structured conversations. Whilst there would need be some basic stimulus questions to get started, the more open the conversation the more real it is likely to be. Proportionately, only a very few people have the motivation and confidence to take time out of their busy lives to contribute to on-line debate. But almost everyone is happy to talk about the subject of the day in the settings they talk about everything else of interest to them. What (dare I say “all”) we need are some people who are prepared to listen, and share what they’ve heard.
(And yes, I would be happy to help!).
[...] conversation, politics — David @ 4.30 am This is my somewhat belated contribution to a request for views made by the OpenDemocracy blogsite on the possible role Internet discussions might play in a putative ‘national [...]
Just added my belated contribution to this debate on my blog.
David, aka Britology Watch
Anthony,
Thank you for this, and again for all you do.
We will need to use the internet to host our nations’ open citizens’ conventions. Having set up and run a war on an earlier armed forces intranet, i foresee no insurmountable problems.
The we is us the people. We will provide and decide, individually and severally, the future of our democracy.
I have a favoured outcome. But most of all, my preference is that it should be ours in self- determination.
Aye ours,
Keith
nae feartie frae
Fife and Yorkshire
Surely if this government hadn’t gone out of its way to disenfranchise the public and ride roughshod over centuries of tradition and values they wouldn’t have to think about how to have a discussion about what it means to be British ?
As a resident of Swindon where Michael Wills is my MP or rather as he and his colleague Anne Snelgrove MP are know as the Labour Governments Representatives in Swindon, I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in the Labour Government to listen to peoples opinions however they are put. A classic example is the online petition at number 10 - ignoring the facile petitions, there are a number of well supported and serious items, but the Government is not doing anything to address these concerns.
Rather than trying to assist the likes of Michael Wills, perhaps you would be better putting effort into supporting the ground up approach to democracy such as talkswindon.org which is active in debating issues whether they are political or not.
Democracy is something the “people” own - not the government. The key is to support groundswells in opinion and make the Government respond. If they refuse to listen (as they do) where is our democracy ?
There have been some highly intelligent posts made on this site, but actions often speak louder than words.
belong to a growing church of about 180, mainly under 30 year-olds in Leeds. As a university town, Leeds attracts a lot of overseas students with whom we come into contact (we meet those mainly from China and Eastern Europe). I asked one of our small groups to answer the question ‘What does it mean to be British?’ as a 10 minute conversation over coffee. Their responses were shaped both by their own thoughts, and impressions from overseas students. Comments included ‘You have to understand the need to queue,” “You always have to something to whinge about,” to “Love the Queen”. Whilst of little help in establishing a set of British Values, I was interested that, without any steering from more focused questions, ‘Britishness’ was defined in terms of certain national characteristics rather than beliefs. They kindly produced an MP3 of the discussion, but it’s sadly not clear enough to share. But this brief snapshot does show two (not insurmountable) difficulties with this discussion. The first is that many people think of Britishness in active as opposed to value driven terms. In my limited experience, this isn’t untypical. What makes you British is seen in terms of what you do, rather than what you believe. And whilst many people from overseas see the Royal Family, especially the Queen, as an important component of Britishness, where does that leave republicans?
Having started to get some interest, I’ll go back ans ask about the values that underpin Britishness and see what that throws up. If anyone has any specific questions they would like ‘road-testing’ with a random sample of northerners, I can get the comments of at least 50 at pretty short notice…
Dear colleagues
I suggest that you have a conversation with Aleco Christakis , Ken Bausch and Laouris Yiannis who have been working for the last 20 years on a project to enhance participation and the testing out of ideas with those who are to be affected by the decisions.
I have found their ideas and scholarship most helpful in developing my own research.
They can be reached via the International Systems Sciences and they have published widely in Systems Research and Behavioural Science.
All the best
regards
Janet