Digital Governance Theatre

by Nick Charney

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A couple of weeks ago an old friend and colleague Richard Smith (Simon Fraser University) reached out and shared an email newsletter written by Venkatesh Rao (@vgr on Twitter) entitled "Software Adoption is Bullshit". The article -- which is chunked out into numbered tweetable tweets and well worth reading -- argues that we are living in an era of digital governance theatre rather than transformation. Here's the relevant snippets:

I have spent a good deal of time in the last decade involved one way or another in enterprise software: helping to build it, helping to sell it, helping to buy it, writing about it, reading about it. The world of enterprise software runs on the doctrinal antithesis to the idea that software is eating the world: the world is adopting software. Specifically through existing organizations adopting it via a controlled, deliberate, strategic process. There is an entire cottage industry -- and I have participated in it more than I like to admit -- devoted to "strategic" thinking about how to "adopt" software and turn it into "competitive advantage" and "digitally transform" the business model. And loudly celebrating supposed "success stories."

This entire cottage industry, I concluded a few years ago, is unadulterated bullshit.

There are only three ways for an organization to relate to software: you're buying it like you buy potatoes, a pure commodity, while being loudly theatrical about it, or you're getting eaten by it, or you've made the only meaningful strategic decision: to jump to the disruptive "eating" side on a particular contest...

29/ ... we've seen 20 years of bullshit "adoption theater" talk on "e-governance" that was really "digital governance potatoes."

30/ Though some of the sustaining innovations on the e-governance S-curve have been massive and huge (NSA surveillance, healthcare.gov, things like India's Aadhar card), they have still been potatoes.

31/ In other words, they are not about strategy or about "digital transformation." They are about doing the same old governance things, the same ways, except with "paperware" in software form.

32/ There have been the same sorts of poster-child "e-governance" stories: wiki constitution efforts in Iceland, e-citizenship in Estonia. Interesting and worth learning from, but fundamentally, theater.

33/ Those are cases of governance adopting potato software rather than software eating governance. We are only just beginning to see what the latter might end up looking like.

34/ So what lessons can you draw from this story? They matter whether or not you're involved in enterprise software. The big lesson is this: don't mistake buying potatoes for software eating you or you doing the eating.

35/ When software eats something, what comes out the other end is deeply, fundamentally transformed...

51/ So why do people indulge in the theater instead of doing the real thing? It's a classic disruption reason: the incumbents don't have any reason to take risks while they have their core markets locked up.

52/ During this period, technology has no strategic value. At best it has marketing value with customers and morale-building value with employees. Neither is strategic or decisive.

53/ You can show-off "innovation" poster children to customers (campaign donors in this case study). "Look at all our cool analytics charts and social media engagement metrics."

54/ For employees (campaign staff), there is an opportunity for live-action roleplaying (LARPing) disruption instead of actually taking the existential risks of disrupting. LARPing disruption is fun.

55/ Don't get me wrong: lots of money can get spent (of dubious value, hence the sub-cottage industry of bullshit "ROI" estimates) and engineers can work hard on hard technology problems.

56/ But without the element of ideological risk -- dropping certain sacred values, adopting previously profane values -- and risking existing value for uncertain lower returns, you're just pretending.

Is he right?

How many of us have spent time building up the importance of digital, helping sell it, helping to implement it, writing about it, reading about it. How many of us are among the cottage industry devoted to 'strategic thinking' about how to 'adopt' digital technology and 'digitally transform' government's business model? How many of us loudly celebrate supposed 'success stories'?

And yet how much of what we have been able to collectively accomplish goes beyond the potato buying paradigm articulated above, how much of it is just LARPing?

The future of citizen engagement is vinyl

by Kent Aitken

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For the last little while I've been expressing wariness about online citizen engagement, and I'd like to explain that.

Of course a lot of citizen engagement will be online. And it can be incredibly effective. The distinction between online and offline is culturally and practically fading. I've defended the idea that online platforms are no worse than in-person ones; just different, suited for different interactions. The term "online" may have a cultural shelf life itself.

So why am I wary?

Let's shift gears a little and talk about digital audio. When CDs came out, they completely sidelined vinyls and cassettes in a decade. Vinyl basically ceased to exist. Yet today we've seen seven years of double-digit growth in vinyl sales and they're now a $1B market, representing 15-18% of physical music revenues.

It's because we over-adjusted to the digital audio option. It was seen as the future, and we wanted to future-proof our collections. We wanted to virtue signal the idea that we were modern and technologically savvy. But over time, those psychological bonuses to the economic decision of audio formats subsided, and we returned to a level playing field between vinyl and digital. We could decide in a less biased way between the two options. At which point we rediscovered the virtues of vinyl - the quality, the packaging, the art, the ritual - for some situations.

Which doesn't change that digital audio is the absolute standard, and for good reason.

Back to online citizen engagement. It's seen as nearly free. It's seen as easy. But most of all it's seen as inclusive. That is, because engagement is online it's seen as fair. It's seen as plausibly reaching the entire intended audience.

More simply: online engagement gets used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for thinking through your goals, engagement design, and audience. It's seen as the future, ergo it's good.

It is sometimes. It it not always.

There are many reasons, but let's look at three:

Digital tends to be shallow. As Robin Gregory put it:

"When hundreds or thousands of stakeholders are asked to (a) speak before a panel for ten to fifteen minutes, (b) submit short written statements to a government body, or (c) participate as representatives of identified interests, then the invitation contains an implicit request to be either superficial or one-dimensional."

This effect is exacerbated by our current culture towards online engagement. The idea that public policy issues are complex is repeated daily, but we ask people for bullet points. Yet! It's possible to do small, deliberative working groups that get into the complexities and nuances of an issue. They may report analyses or pros and cons to a larger interested audience, who may vote or be surveyed in a lightweight way. This can all be done online. But people to tend to assume online always means open, public, easy, and everyone.

Digital lets us think we can skip design and facilitation. When you're doing in-person engagement, the level of design is incredibly involved. Session designers or participant experience designers (that's a thing - do you have one for your online engagement?) think through to the individual personalities in the room. They adjust the timing of parts down to 5-minute increments. They pull from a library of techniques for group discussion. And they actively facilitate. We're only flirting with that level of sophistication online; this is where low-fidelity MP3s started getting replaced by high quality-digital audio but we're not quite there yet. It's a little bit about the technology, but far more about how we use it.

The digital divide is real. Canada's well-connected to the internet, but if you look at the top quartile for age, or the bottom quartile for income, those reassuring 90%+ numbers drop to more like 60%. Many people have to choose between home broadband and mobile and opt for the flexibility of mobile, but there are three activities with massive transaction completion drop-off rates on mobile: banking, looking for jobs, and interacting with government. To say nothing of skills, attitudes, and cultures.

All that to say: digital citizen engagement is going to be amazing for public policy-making and for the relationship between citizens and their governments. I really believe that. And digital will be the standard. But it'll only get amazing when we learn to love the record scratch of in-person engagement, realize the shortcomings of online and therefore get better at it, and choose deliberately between the right options for the right situations.

On People, Public Policy, and Technology

by Nick Charney

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My Venn diagram of interests has always put me at the confluence of people, public policy, and technology. Here's some of my latest thinking on all three.

On People

How we experience citizenship is changing. The modern state system -- and its corresponding economies -- are increasingly fluid and unreliable. That said, the trend seems to be towards greater diversification:

• education (e.g. public education system under pressure, proliferation of higher education and vocational pathways)
• culture (e.g. immigration and refugee resettlement)
• employment (e.g. rising precarity, 'gig economy')
• creation of physical goods (e.g. maker spaces, 3d printing)
• interests (e.g. ability to easily connect with peers around even the most niche subjects)
• information (e.g. the Internet, Google,)
• technology (e.g. drones, blockchain)

The trend towards diversification is ostensibly the macro level application of the 'long tail' argument advanced by Chris Anderson in the mid 2000s. This diversification can be positive, negative, or both, depending on your world view (See Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur and/or Clay Shirky's talk on Institutions vs Collaboration). Regardless, the impact of this diversification on our system of government are being felt in numerous ways:

• more ambiguous/tenuous links between education and employment (education)
• increasing public discourse on what constitutes our shared societal values (culture)
• increasing interest in basic annual income (employment)
• significant regulatory gaps (creation of physical goods, technology)
• potential for single issue issue, temporal, and often vociferous interest groups (interests)
• increase in content producers, decline of traditional journalism, 'fake news' (information)

The one notable exception seems to be urbanization, which is concentrating and therefore amplifying all of the above by ensuring that the issues manifest concurrently, in close proximity, and in high volume. The trend towards diversification is problematic for democratic systems (and their major actors) who have traditionally tried to broker compromises in the public interest wherever there are trade-offs.

However views on what is and isn't in the public interest is equally diversified and thus divisive. In other words there is a tension here that isn't necessarily new but is definitely cutting closer to the bone. This is likely part and parcel of the current interest and instinct towards electoral reform, an understanding that the system isn't well suited to represent niche (long tail) interests. An electoral system that doesn't reflect the broader diversification happening elsewhere in society is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the broader zeitgeist and experience of citizens in all other facets of their lives.

The bottom line, the trend towards diversification is rubbing up against our centralized systems of government and ideas of governance because diversity provokes thought.

On Public Policy

By now we're all familiar with the narratives around the loss of the public service's traditional monopoly over information and the rise of new policy actors / intermediaries. Yes, how we inform, form, and deliver public policy is changing, (as are the policy domains' relative importance to one another), but in reality its probably not as complicated as everyone has been making it out to be.

Sure, information is more broadly accessible and the skill to turn that information into insight or influence is more widespread, however the net result is simple: more actors, armed with more data and information, advancing more arguments. This is in part due to the availability of information and skill but it is also amplified considerably by the increased impetus on things like public engagement and open government. In order to be both engaging and open one must be willing to sift through the cacophony of inputs and competing views and evidence. Truth be told we like to talk circles around this point in government but essentially what we are dealing with her is an increase in competing narratives or what is often referred to as multiple truths. Practically speaking this can lead a number of different things: better awareness of complexity and consequences, multiple viable options, paralysis by analysis, additional public scrutiny, faux outrage, etc. As an aside, we often conflate innovation and technology which puts policy makers on a path that given greater influence to the high tech-elite and privileges the application of technological solutions to problems even when those problems are not necessarily technical in nature but rather are rooted in our complex social and economic systems.

With respect to policy formulation, the co-creation of policy options and delivery options has been widely discussed as a goal -- sometimes with Utopian undertones, e.g. government as platform -- but when you strip it down to its core, co-creation is also about as close to government capture as government can possibly stand. At a minimum, citizens actively shaping a particular policy intervention, and contributing to its development, design, and fulfillment, then ultimately privileging from it as a user, ought to raise concerns. Interestingly many of the instruments and approaches that are currently en vogue in the policy innovation and experimentation ecosystem are built around closing the gap between government and it citizens but -- if my recent experience in program implementation is reflective of the larger ecosystem -- little of the innovation from the design phase (inform/form) actually survives delivery.

Delivery, is a beast unto itself. I've remarked before that it's a blind spot in Canada (See: Is Innovation in Service Delivery a Blind Spot in Canada), that innovation faces asymmetric scrutiny (See: Asymmetric Scrutiny, Superforecasting, and Public Policy), and that we can't rely on old delivery mechanisms to deliver innovative solutions (See: Innovation: Design Process of Street Fight?). Quite simply, standard operating procedures and new are anathema. Moreover, the innovation narrative at the centre is far too disconnected from the implementation reality at the periphery. There's not enough connectivity, there's not enough translation, and there's not a good enough understanding of the practical implications of innovation rhetoric at the coal face of implementation. Finally, we often reduce 'innovation' to 'digital', which leaves a whole lot of potential innovations in delivery out of sight out of mind (See: On Organizing Principles: Service or Delivery).

The bottom line, there's plenty of room for improving policy making (and service delivery) but a lack of consensus on what constitutes improvement.

On Technology

I've always had an interest in technology. I used to call local bulletin board systems with a 300 bps modem. improvements to technology over my life time so far have been incredible. Today technology is absolutely pervasive. Everything is connected. Omni-present sensors have created an internet of things. Data is big. Privacy is dead. And we live in filter bubbles that create echo-chambers than justify our world view and amplify our outrage (and self-righteousness).

Technology was supposed to solve many of our problems but in so doing its created a whole swath of new ones. I often joke that its essentially the wild west out there, but there is a kernel of truth to it as well. There's a lot of people out there who purport to have all the right answers when it comes to technology and technologies of the future. In general, I try not to trust anyone who comes with an answer when they ought to ask a question instead.

The bottom line, I'd rather be a thoughtful critic of technology rather than a blind booster of it.