26 July 2004

Delivering ICT in Local Communities

By William Davies, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research

Last week Phil Hope, the Minister responsible for local eGovernment, announced that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister was to produce a "10-year vision" for the future of eGovernment. Priorities for the future included online schools admissions facilities, data sharing among youth justice organisations and local transport information.

Local government is in many ways the natural home of eGovernment. Some 80 per cent of citizens' contact with official bodies occurs at a local level, and despite media fascination with gimmicks such as Tony Blair's email, genuinely interactive services are far more plausible at smaller political scales. The problem touched on by Phil Hope's proposal is that many of the public institutions that have most to gain from the internet are barely governmental institutions at all. And yet Government needs to ensure that they reap the benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

People often use the distinction in politics between 'top-down' and 'bottom-up'. Political uses of the internet have traditionally fallen into one of these two camps. In the run up to the 2005 targets, eGovernment tends to be a 'top-down' affair: existing Government services are to be shifted online, under ongoing pressure from the Cabinet Office at the absolute centre of Government.

Meanwhile, voluntary and grass-roots uses of the internet are described as 'bottom-up'. Decentralised civic organisations - fuel protestors, the Countryside Alliance, Stop the War - take full advantage of ICT to co-ordinate themselves in a strategic fashion. These tend to be in direct opposition to government, and expend their energies trying to out-think and out-manoeuvre 'top-down' politics.

Yet this clear-cut distinction has little to do with the technology itself. The internet enables both one-to-many publishing (as top-down eGovernment tends to be), and few-to-few interaction (as civic associations tend to be). But it also enables a host of communication models in between. BBC's iCan, for instance, represents an official publishing website enabling interaction by its audience. Similarly, weblogs are part-publishing mechanisms, part-socialising spaces. There is a technological tier between the 'top-down' and the 'bottom-up'.

More importantly, this is matched by a political tier of growing significance. Between 'top-down' Governmental politics, and 'bottom-up' civic association, a middle ground exists that plays a critical role in New Labour policy - institutions that are official and public, but not part of Government as such. Think of Foundation Trust Hospitals, Schools, Neighbourhood Management authorities and public sports facilities. These are not voluntary, fragmented networks, but nor are they part of government. They are somewhere in between the two.

Where eGovernment needs to go next is the wiring up of this tier of the public realm. These are bodies that are small enough and yet public enough to conduct themselves in a fashion that is simultaneously accountable yet interactive. This is the greatest political promise held out by the web. The Government's commitment to greater use of 'intermediaries' represents a step in the right direction in this regard. Voluntary and private sector organisations can now step in to manage interaction with the citizen, but users will still receive the guarantees that they expect from public services.

The biggest questions hanging over local eGovernment are not technological but institutional

However, questions persist over which bodies should take responsibility for what. Between Whitehall and the most grass-root, DIY uses of the internet, a vast range of bodies exist. These include, businesses, voluntary sector, technology experts, social entrepreneurs, and media institutions such as the BBC, not to mention users themselves. The biggest questions hanging over local eGovernment are not technological but institutional: Who should do what? When should we prioritise accountability, and when should we prioritise interactivity?

A new report published this week by iSociety addresses these questions. The report, called Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm, looks at the variety of bodies involved in making the internet work locally. It argues that the internet's greatest technological asset is also the source of greatest institutional uncertainty, namely its intrinsic flexibility of use and scale. This is why we are unsure when to treat the net like a public service (and make it the responsibility of government), when to treat it like a newspaper (and leave it to media institutions) and when to see it as a purely private matter for the users themselves.

The report concludes that the most important piece of the jigsaw is missing. There is a long history of designing and implementing technology in the public interest, in a decentralised fashion, and without direct government intervention. And what are the bodies responsible? Vocational professions.

Civil engineering, planning and architecture are all areas in which technological expertise is taken control of by a single, formal and voluntary association. In the case of architecture, the profession is complemented by a wing of central government - CABE - that is also peopled by experts in the field, rather than politicians. It is not that technological expertise creates an authority to govern, but that it must somehow be united with a clear understanding of what the public interest is. Only this way, can accountability be provided for the way that services are delivered in a area of the public sphere that is neither private, nor the responsibility of government.

In the same way that government can't design every public park - but must somehow encourage that it be done well, and celebrate successes - it cannot be responsible for many of the most important public and interactive spaces on the internet. Professions and guilds exist within the ICT industry, but they are inevitably less developed than their Victorian counterparts. A greater sense of vocation on the part of technologists for how the internet can improve public life would be an important complement to eGovernment debates.

At some point in the future, we should expect the internet to be used to support more interactive, more local forms of governance. It is not inconceivable that individual streets could have email lists, once home internet penetration hits a certain level. But for this to happen, it is not enough to wait for individual do-gooders to rally people together, and set about making it happen. Institutions and brokerage bodies are required, which can help this happen in a trust-worthy fashion, perhaps something like mySociety.org. This is how the internet will truly enhance a local public realm.

Proxicommunication: ICT & The Local Public Realm is published by The Work Foundation's iSociety project on the 29th July (a pdf will be free to download from the web site).

William Davies is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research and an associate of the iSociety programme.

Readers are reminded that any opinions and commentaries expressed in this article are solely those of the contributing author. They do not reflect those of eGov monitor Weekly nor represent an agreement, endorsement or approval of any kind.