Interview with Steven Clift on Building Town Halls Online

Thank you for having me.

Yes, I am at home base right now in Minneapolis. I actually travel much less now that I have two small children! So I am not in some place like Mongolia right now.

http://stevenclift.com ... actually that is where I explain the difference.

For a decade+ I spoke to/consulted with governments in over 25 countries on "e-democracy" generally. (I still give speeches :-)). Publicus.Net is the home for my speeches and articles.

However, with my new Ashoka fellowship about a year ago, I now am working full-time for E-Democracy.Org. This is great, because I used to subsidize this extensive time effort before.

DoWire.Org remains a global online community on e-democracy. It is also my general e-democracy blog.

If there are 100 ways to attempt an e-democracy project or program the challenge is to find the five possible paths to success.

The challenge is to avoid the 95 routes to failure.

Some thoughts:

1. Most e-democracy projects fail based on expectations - it is essential to set reasonable expectations and declare victory. In the non-profit/government space momentum is far more important than in instant success in the .com world.

2. Build your audience before you open - never, never, never, start a project with a press release and an empty chamber. Everyone coming in is saying at the same time, there is no one hear or at least no one posting. They never come back. Say you are hosting a time-limited two weeks online event/consultation on some policy matter - you must seed the discussion and most importantly sign people up for a couple months in advance and have permission to e-mail them daily updates to bring them into the site during the event.

3. Don't get caught up in the latest and greatest technology when there are tools that work today. I am sure we will get into Issues Forums today.

Right now I am eating and breathing E-Democracy.Org.

As I've traveled the world, I always come home to the dynamic role a geographically-based online public space can play in the real world.

Convincing people around the world to build local Issues Forum (with us or on their own) is my passion. Shouldn't everyone have a place in their town where that can have a voice online and connect with their neighbors to make their small part of the world a better place.

The reality today is that I am spending most of my time on fund raising. In the past our formerly *all volunteer* effort had almost no costs and was therefore quite sustainable. Now that we are 10 communities in 3 countries with another 10 forums in the pipeline (some places have multiple neighbourhood/neighborhood forums), we have to professionalize our support. This is starting with long-time E-Democracy.Org volunteer and sometime contractor Tim Erickson who is now our Program Director.

If you want a glimpse at my latest "volunteer" passion, check out the 190 person neighborhood forum where I live is the Standish-Ericsson Neighborhood of Minneapolis: http://e-democracy.org/se.

Here is the short recipe:

1. Gather 5-10 people in your area interested in the idea. Contact us so we set up a "team" online group to support you.
2. Recruit a volunteer forum manager and assign other roles like discussion starter, recruiter, etc.
3. Draft your "charter" which defines the scope of forum and read up on the universal rules which make your job easier: http://e-democracy.org/rules
4. Recruit at least 100 people. Pay attention to making the forum "matter" by aggressive inviting those with power and access to resources in the community (elected officials, journalists, neighborhood activists, etc.). This is what you need to motivate participation by "average" citizens.
5. Open and facilitate your forum which we will host at forums.e-democracy.org - work to keep it issues-focused and civil!

If you want the long version, we have a free 60 page guidebook available from: http://e-democracy.org/if.

This is the one million dollar question. Or, I suppose it would now be more dramatic to say a one million euro question.

The honest truth is that online people have the power to click - then go to the website and online experiences that interest them most. That is why at the national level, we see a highly charged political class eating up this whole partisan blog thing. It may seem like their is more political participation, but it might be that this small percentage of the population is sufficiently isolating and self-referential in a transparent and access way.

My fear is that national models of democratized punditry are making their way into local online spaces and sowing the seeds of diatribe, distrust, and disconnect from real people.

I say this, because E-Democracy.Org's experience is that the more local, the broader the cross-section of the population that participates, and the more useful the exchange is online for real people in real places. When we opened our new neighborhood forum, we signed up 125 people in person on paper - that is how we ensured effective participation. We also use real names (like you tend to see on Facebook as well) which is completely unheard of in e-participation, but clearly a cornerstone for success.

In terms of tools, the key approach is to pick the open source tool that works for you - Plone, Drupal, GroupServer, Joomla, MediaWiki etc. - or use free commercial tools like Google Groups, etc. Any e-democracy project creating new stand alone software is probably wasting money.

One word: e-forablogikideoickrous

Our roots are in Internet 1.0 when you had your identity via an uncluttered e-mail account that allowed you to be highly interactive. Most things on the Internet were the very definition of user-generate context (mostly text albeit).

To me half of Web 2.0 is restoring the interactivity that Web 1.0 destroyed with its one-way shovel ware approach. (The other half allows computers/technically inclined to mashup/aggregate content which our system - forums, searches, even posts by person - feeds into with ATOM feeds.)

However, too many web developers today wear "broadband blinders. They are anti-e-mail to their own detriment. Location, location, location. Most people today and into the future spend most of their time in their mail box.

This is changing generationally and that is why we use GroupServer, the best open source tool for combining e-mail lists, web forum, a massive multi-editor blog. We also use Mediawiki and will be funding a few new features that enhance GroupServers's display of shared photos and inserts a YouTube video player with the simple inclusion of a YouTube link.

If you are trying to reach a critical mass of people within a local geographic area - you need to let people choose their preferred technology to access the same public space online. As an organizer, defaulting to e-mail delivery (and publishing!) is the only starting point I recommend for an ongoing forum. A time-limited topical online event, say two weeks, might default a daily e-mail topic digest.

Facebook, O, Facebook. The giant sucking sound. E-Democracy.Org has a group for supporters to join: e-democracy

But let me sharply point out - there is a huge difference between "publicizing" private or professional life online and making real geographic public life accessible 24 x 7 online. Is the Mall of America a saviour to democracy by bringing people together?

Hey there Jim.

Putting on my government hat, I see two key approaches:

1. Rule of Law
2. Funding

1. We need to mandate the most important e-democracy features we want to be universal. One simple example - public meeting laws must be changed to require that all public meeting notices, agendas, minutes, and handouts be placed on the Internet. Further all public meetings -at every level- must be digitally recorded (audio is fine) and posted online.

2. In the U.S. we need three streams of funding:

A. First, a percentage of all e-government project budgets, say 10% should be allocated to e-democracy/citizen input features which would include things like usability testing to personalized e-mail "what's new" notification tools like Google News Alerts.

B. Second, we need national sources of funding to state and local governments to experiment with e-democracy. Government websites don't have "sidewalks" or even limited public forums like public hearing rooms online. E-Government will bring the end of democracy as we know it if it remains one-way. The UK Local E-Democracy National Project is model of funding we should look at.

C. Third, foundations and major donors need to break out of the cycle of funding online election information related projects with almost no investment in online initiatives in governance and community between elections when it really really can make a different.

Back to moving forward, I outlined my top ten list for a U.S. General Administration newsletter recently:
http://dowire.org/wiki/Ten_practical_online_steps_for_government_support_of_democracy

As someone who led Minnesota's e-government portal ('95-'97) and has spoken to governments in over 25 countries, democracy and citizen participation are completely unsupported compared to e-services.

To survive, representative democracy must integrate online forms of participation or it won't compete as a viable system for moving society forward. The problem is that governments care more about making it easy to pay your taxes online and have no requirement to use these tools to help give you say on how those taxes are spent.

Another problem, in the U.S. in particular, is the arming of campaigns and advocacy - using the Internet to raise money and make noise - and almost no investment by elected officials in the tools they need to understand, listen to, and engage the public online. They are left with the auto-reply and delete key. Pretty blunt instruments compared to the highly interactive web we experience in private life.

Ooops, the questions was about which countries are leading the way ... assuming that the glass in 1/4 full!, here are some thoughts:

1. U.S.A. - Online advocacy and campaigning - we excel.
2. UK - Funding local _government_ e-democracy pilots in previous years, e-petitioning, reused of government/other data for disruptively ingenious e-democracy services online (mySociety.org)
3. Canada, Finland, and Estonia - E-consultation by federal ministries (ebbs and flows, but Canada's laws require consultation of one kind or another), Finland has a second generation e-consultation platform and Estonia is working on version two of Today I Decide
4. Australia - Queensland in particular figured out the policy framework to support e-democracy across the whole of government and actually had/have staff who have the e-democracy responsibilities every day - almost completely non-existent elsewhere
5 , EU - Funding projects and consortiums - this is the engine with millions of Euros going into "e" related initiatives every year. Every country that calls itself a democracy, needs to invest in a similar fashion or risks

The UK remains a center of e-democracy interest. There are a number of key centrally influential people who keep pushing the envelop.

This is an independent online discussion about how the UK government might engage lots of people online about potential British Statement of Values tied to a Green Paper on Governance.

How would you engage one million people online? Imagine if the next President of the United States asked that?

Here is my blog post on my submission:
http://www.dowire.org/notes/?p=401

Libraries are clearly the main public access point for people in communities without access at home. I'd like to see starting pages on library terminals with print support materials that treat the computer like an introductory "democracy station."

I'd also like to see all of our state legislators and members of Congress outfitted with webcams (or at least have a webcam room using Skype/SightSpeed/etc.) that would connect to special webcam outfitted computer in every public library in America ... heck, the world. :-) Then assuming you schedule the meeting, every library can be a place from which a citizen or group of citizens can meet with their elected officials.

One more thought about those without personal computers - as more and more cell phones do e-mail (SMS/Text is too short form IMHO) that is one angle to reach more people. E-Democracy.Org has a grant to establish two online neighborhood forums in high immigrant areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul: http://e-democracy.org/nf. We will be working with local computer access centers to make sure people who use them know about this locally relevant online resource.

Great question.

The truth you need to share with decision-makers is that the government website is now the number one interface governments have with their citizens. If it doesn't work well or look good, you don't look good. For small government's it might make sense to use a hosted service like Government Office or pick an open source content management platform (lots of larger governments use Plone international, non-profits use Drupal ... which could be more similar to your scale) to access new features/modules at a lower cost.

I am so glad you pointed out e-mail.

E-mail communication is the number one issue all elected officials bring up with me around the world. Deploying tools for your council members and staff to use to make sure they can receive, understand, and respond to e-mail in a timely fashion should be a top priority.

One key recommendation is that every government website should have a one-way e-mail newsletter that goes out on a monthly or more frequent basis telling people what is new on your website. If people can't leave their e-mail, you can't enter into a relationship with them ... only the most interested will return while what you really want is the person who came to site once to sign up for a Park and Rec activity to come to learn about land use changes they also care about. Also, like they do in Minneapolis, every council member should be given an e-mail announcement list function as well to better inform the people they represent. The list should stick with the district when the council member changes.

Thanks Dave and everyone who participated.

I invite you to join me on my DoWire blog - http://dowire.org/notes (e-mail sign-up here - http://groups.dowire.org/groups/newswire) and in the various online communities of practice - http://groups.dowire.org/ - on that site. (Note the new US Democracy Online Exchange - http://groups.dowire.org/groups/us - for e-do-gooders like us.)

You can also follow E-Democracy.Org's project blog - http://blog.e-democracy.org - and join others interested in starting Issues Forums for their area - http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/liftoff.

Let me conclude with this ...

We are experiencing the most dramatic "e-election" in history. (I helped create the world's first election website, so I've been paying attention).

As the Democrats settle on their nominee, the empowerment of the primaries may lead to something so nasty online that most people will view the Internet as the cesspool of democracy. We have to defend ourselves against that and ensure that the story of positive uses of the Internet to improve communities and democracy is told.

I do believe the expectations among voters for something transformative online in terms of their relationship with government and politics will continue after the election. In past cycles, candidates interact, gain power then turn off the two-way tools that helped them gain power. We need to instead ask the question, will you engage us online as citizens after the election, and demand a White House 2.0 come January 2009.