EWB's Imagine Campaign: Dreams for 2036

Currently EWB is running a fundraising and awareness campaign in line with the Holiday Season. I decided not to fund raise through this campaign this year but many (most) of my colleagues and many EWB members from across Canada and who are working across Africa are raising funds for the work we do as an organization.

Please visit: imagine.ewb.ca and donate to a dream of your choice.

About the campaign:

"This winter season, Engineers Without Borders Canada is dreaming of the future. A child born this winter will graduate post secondary education in 2036 - and when they do, we want to ensure that the world they walk out in to is a different, better, place.

What is different? What is better? Take a look at the many dreams and imagings of EWB'ers to see what our dream for change is, and how the work that we do works to ensure those dreams become a reality.

But wait - Who is Engineers Without Borders Canada?

Engineers Without Borders creates opportunities for rural Africans to access clean water, generate an income from small farms, and have improved access to the services and infrastructure they need to improve their lives. We harness the problem-solving approach and creative pragmatism of the Canadian engineering sector to address the root causes of poverty in rural Africa."

Despite not participating in the fundraising aspect of the campaign, I did share my dream for 2036. Watch/listen here:

Key hypotheses behind my venture

I thought it might be interesting to share some of the key hypothesis that form the foundation of the venture I am building. If you have any proof or disproof of these, please do share by adding a comment.

1. That the government of Canada will continue to have a role to play as an actor and secondly, as a facilitator of other parts of society on activities within foreign affairs. This sounds like an obvious one but other actors: in some cases centralized actors who have large sums of financial resources, or in other cases where large numbers of individual citizens are connecting in small ways; are increasing the size of their role on the international arena causing the government to play decreasing roles in some areas. 

2. The citizens have something to add - the belief in the ‘long-tail of policy’ on foreign policy is a very central hypothesis to this venture.

What is the long-tail?

The long-tail of public policy strengthens the argument for public engagement on policy. It suggests that there is a sub-set of people for each specific policy issue and that these people can be harnessed to make progress on that particular issue.

In the image below we have ‘number of people’ on the x-axis, and amount of collective power on the y-axis. It shows that a small number of government officials and members of civil society organizations have significant collective power because they are organized. In contrast the image shows the much smaller amount of collective power other individual citizens have.

The concept of the long-tail of public policy shows that we just need to find out how to harness each individual in the long-tail to work together and build something as a collective. The assumption is that these people are interested in the particular issue and therefore want to be involved - they just haven’t been given the opportunity to act as a collective.

This is also where reducing transaction costs come in – we need to reduce the transaction costs for these people to collaborate. There is a massive amount of work being done on this, especially in the US, where many people are innovating around how to engage people effectively online and in-person.

Using the long-tail of public policy concept I am making the assumption that there doesn’t need to be increased attention to educating citizens to participate in foreign policy dialogue and possibly collaboration to make this work at present. It is assumed that there are enough citizens who know enough and are skilled enough (persons A-G below) that we can bring those people together and have them participate intelligently.

3. Lowering transaction costs:

The Coasean Collapse is a predicted phenomenon that the financial and time costs associated with people interacting and collaborating is decreasing rapidly. My assumption is that this will be a true phenomenon built on innovation in public participation practices and in online engagement.

4.That the methods of bringing people together for views, deliberation or collaboration exist already. Therefore we don’t need to create them, we just need to use them. There will need to be evolution because foreign policy issues are unique, but based on partnership possibilities and companies doing public engagement and public participation work we are in a very strong place.

The central hypothesis that lies behind all of these is that these concepts and ideas (lowering transaction costs, that citizens have things to add, that the methods already exist) will also apply to foreign policy. There is fairly wide-spread agreement (or at least not strong disagreement) that these apply to domestic policy (healthcare, roads, poverty reduction, etc), but the assertion that I am making that this also applies to issues of foreign policy is much more strongly contested.

Check out “Open Government” edited by Lahtrop and Ruma for more detail on some of these hypothesis. I specifically draw your attention to “Chapter 12: After the collapse: open government and the future of the civil service” written by David Eaves who speaks on both the Coasean collapse and the long-tail of policy (which is where I first read about these concepts).

I should be clear that Eaves is not arguing that this applies to foreign policy, the application of these concepts to foreign policy is my assertion.

paper on 'online platforms for public engagement'

Great white paper from Wise Economy on "Online Platforms for Public Engagement." 

It comments on the variety of tools available for online public engagement:
MindMixer
Urban Interactive Studio
Delib
Crowdbrite
Change By Us
IdeaScale
PlaceSpeakBetaOpen Town Hall
Granicus
MetroQuest

The paper can be found here.

Understanding open government and its many frameworks and categories

The past several months have included a lot of research – reading, watching videos, talking to tons of people – to develop and explore the ideas and potential of my new venture. Throughout this time I have continually been frustrated by the language used within the Open Government community around the differences between participation, collaboration, open data, open information, open government, etc.

The following ideas are the clearest I have been able to understand this myself. I am currently using these definitions for understanding each of the stages of a broader “Open Government” progression.

Stage 1: Open Data – Open Information
This is simply the government sharing information and data with the rest of society. The data is usually released in a machine-readable format so that computers can process it quickly. The information included within this definition are reports, processes (ex. how are projects evaluated, how do we develop policy), access to information requests, etc.

Examples: IATI, data.gc.ca

Stage 2: Capitalizing on the Public
This is what Beth Noveck (see this blog post) calls bringing “information to the centre.” This includes consultation processes, online discussion forums for citizens, etc. The ultimate goal here is to bring the public’s knowledge, expertise and perspective into government.

Examples: The Foreign Policy Dialogue of 2002-03 by DFAIT is a great example of this. As are initiatives like Ushahidi, paper and e-petitions, the BC and Ontario citizens assemblies on electoral reform (this kind of fits in stage 2 and 3), etc.

Stage 3: Collaborative Policy / Law Making
This is when each of the actors – government, politicians, civil society organizations, citizens, and the private sector use collaborative tools and processes to work together to develop policy or legislation.

Example: Participating Budget fits into this category. The Open Ministry work in the Finland is another great example of this.

Stage 4: Collaborative Action
This is when each of the actors all take action toward a common set of goals that they agreed on through a process of deliberation.

The SSIR work on Collective Impact provides some guidance on this, and the Public Policy Forum has done some really neat work across Canada on this as well.

IAP2 Top 100 Tweets of 2012 - Video on Open Government

I've been slowly getting through the awesome videos, articles, stories, etc. that IAP2 (the International Association for Public Paricipation) shared in their "IAP2's Top 100 Tweets" of 2012.

Here is the most recent:

Open Government from The Academy on Vimeo.

It is a video from the Open Government Partnership. It presents the core ideas as well as some of the really neat work being done around the world when it comes to engaging citizens on important issues in interesting ways.

Afghanistan and Canada's Role

Afghanistan and Canada's Role:

If you haven't been following this, check out the series of stories on Canada/CIDA's work in Afghanistan. Its really interesting to see this debate and a valuable read:

In chronological order (oldest at the top)

#1: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/12/canadas-1-5b-afghanistan-aid-effort-divorced-from-reality-according-to-damning-previously-unreleased-documents/ 

#2: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/10/13/jonathan-kay-a-canadian-foreign-aid-insider-explains-our-1-5-billion-afghan-sinkhole/ 

#3: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/10/17/lucas-robinson-cida-is-hardly-a-wasted-enterprise/

 #4: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/10/22/robert-greenhill-our-real-humanitarian-record-in-afghanistan/

If you are even more interested. The following books are fascinating:
Descent into Chaos (a book by Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist)
The long way back (by current MP Chris Alexander and former UN deputy and Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan)
Struggling for Effectiveness: CIDA and Canadian Foreign Aid.
The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar

vote FOR somebody

Three Phases of Open Government Progress: Who is acting and each stage? What are they doing?

Beth Noveck talks about there being three stages of this open government movement (check out here Ted talk in a blog post below).

We are already in and towards the end of the first stage, which is open data.

The next two phases she predicts are defined as firstly, getting great at delivering information to the centre, bringing information and expertise into government to help improve policy and activity. She uses the example of the patent office (see Wiki Government for more information on this).

E-petitions might fit into phase two as it is getting citizen demands more readily known by government – therefore getting more information in.

 The third phase is getting decision making power out. Noveck uses examples from the Russian and Lithuanian government in having their citizens participate in the creation of laws. She also references the B.C. government on govTogetherBC.

I would also suggest that examples like the government putting a prize out to the private sector to dock at the International Space Station is an early example of phase three.

 I’ve marked guesses as to where we are on each of these phases (as waves in the image below). To fully understand this we need to know who is pushing forward each of these waves/phases, what role they are playing, and progress on each phase/wave. Let’s try and make this blog a bit participatory, who do you know that is acting within each of these stages and what are they doing?

I've just recently attended the 1st International Association of Public Participation North America conference in Halifax. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could glean any understanding of the public participation (P2) sector by doing a wordle of the conference schedule session descriptions and speakers. Unfortunately, the wordle was less useful than expected in increasing my understanding (the conference was really great though), but it was interesting nonetheless so here it is:

Also. You might be interested in the four videos Beth Noveck has posted to her blog about the future of government: http://cairns.typepad.com/blog/2012/09/future-of-government-talks-at-ted-cameron-noveck-pahlka-shirky.html I've yet to watch three of the four but will post any comments I have upon watching them.

Beth Noveck: Demand a more open-source government

Mark Abbott, Engineer's Without Borders Director of Talent just shared a great video with me that I thought I would share with all of you. The video is a TED Talk by Beth Noveck, former Whitehouse staff, and author of a great book called: Wiki Government.

Watch it here: 

There are a number of points that Ms. Noveck brings up that I appreciate. The first is that she points out the importance of not stopping at 'open data.' She says that we cannot  simply throw data out into the public space and expect something to happen - we need to combine it with participation to really make things happen.

The second point I really appreciate, is her line (probably badly trascribed by me) is we need to "combine the hierarchy of institutions with the chaos of networks." The potential of this is uber-exciting to me and is a space where a lot of attention is needed. How do we transform our institutions to meet networks in a space that is productive and how do we funnel the expertise and capabilities of networks to government?

A new EWB venture

By the People: unlocking the potential of a united Canadian society to address global problems

I have just begun a very exciting endeavor. I have just launched the search phase of a new venture with Engineers Without Borders Canada. Some of you will have known me through my work on the aid reform advocacy team over the past two and a half years. I greatly enjoyed that work and the work I have done with many of you and it is out of the participation in advocacy that I learned the lessons and gained the understanding that has allowed me to generate some of the ideas that created the premise of this venture. So here goes...

As a people and planet we are facing increasingly complex problems. The institutions we have built and our way of doing things is creaking under the load of these problems. They are not set up to handle problems of this complexity - problems that cross national boundaries, that include incredibly diverse groups of people, and that require the action of a very diverse set of individuals and institutions.

There is potential in a more collaborative approach where different actors play roles specific to their capabilities. There is also potential in bringing the expertise of groups and individuals together to build our understanding of the problem and generate possible solutions.

The mission of this venture is to change the method by which Canada, and in particular the federal government, determines its direction and action internationally. This means changing and improving how foreign policy is developed in Canada. Because of the complexity of the problems we are facing, the direction and action needs to be determined and taken by many different actors, not just by a narrow group of people.

The key is ensuring we are bringing the right people together at the right part of the foreign policy process so that we can maximize the outcome produced - or the contribution made.

This means determining what potential there is at each stage - problem identification; priority setting; legitimation; the design of policy instruments; implementation and evaluation - for ultimately more effective outcomes towards the resolution of global problems.

The core hypothesis is that by bringing more of the best people together from different parts of society in how we approach our actions, we can contribute more as a nation.

The challenge is then, either figuring out who are the best people; and how and when, and for what purpose we are bringing them together OR figuring out what is stopping us from bringing those people together to collaborate and share, and tackling that issue so that we can unlock that potential.

That is something I want us to figure out. Here are my current plans on how to best "search" to understand the potential in this area.

Current Priorities

•  Understanding, at a very granular level, how foreign policy is developed and implemented by Canada.

•  Finding examples of public engagement/participation or collaborative approaches that have happened at different phases of the foreign policy process in Canada, Europe (there are a number of countries in Europe that I’ll be looking into), and the US. Mapping out who the other groups or people are acting in this space, who is trying to create similar change or who has a similar vision. The purpose of this being that we can define a strategic change to create that will hopefully unlock the potential of this system.

•  Building relationships with public policy, public participation, open government, and foreign policy process experts in Canada, the US, and Europe.

•  Learning though activities

•  Partnering with Samara Canada and the Guelph, McMaster, SFU, UofA, and MUN, and Usask EWB chapters to run discussion groups called Democracy Talks.

•  Participating in the Inter-Council Network Public Engagement Knowledge Hub

•  Working with chapters to do foreign policy town halls with their MP; community dialogues; and panels or other learning activities.

•  Reading a ton on open government, the public policy process, public engagement, etc.

If you prefer specific ideas instead of the conceptual language I am using above, here are some examples of what this might look like. I am still in the "searching" phase of a venture so don't hold me to any of these specifics!

•  Diaspora groups bringing their understanding of their country of birth to the policy process so that we have a well rounded understanding of the local situation somewhere as we are building our direction or approach within that nation.

•  What if we had a "third house of parliament" made up of half Canadians and half citizens of other countries where foreign policy is debated (someone told me today that this is being done in Denmark, I need to fact check it, but either way it is a super cool idea).

•  Canadians who have lived abroad are brought into a discussion group with DFAIT officials to add their expertise to DFAIT's programs.

•  Government and civil society work together to define the problem and generate solutions rather than government issuing what it believes civil society needs to do.

Background reading

A part of my learning process has been to do a ton of reading (I've had massive help on this from Jessica Barry from the MUN EWB / Oxfam chapter). Here are my favorites:

•  Rescuing Policy: The Case for Public Engagement (this is available for free on ppforum.ca)

•  Mapping the Links - a paper from the now dismantled Canadian Policy Research Network

•  The products of and process of engaging Canadians in foreign policy by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham.

•  A North-South Institute paper on engagement in trade policy development.

•  Mosaic Institute paper on Diaspora Engagement in Foreign Policy

Instead of me attaching all of these, please do a quick google search and you'll find these.

I'm super excited to be tackling this issue. I am also pumped for the immense potential of Canada to contribute more to the resolution of the problems that we are aiming to tackle. I believe that we need to bring more people with value to add and a role to play into how we address these problems. I hope this venture can help discover and unlock this potential.

Articles / Books I'm Reading Today

Citizen as Designer in SSIR

Here are some excerpts from Brodie Bolands fantastic article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

“Reducing deficits, addressing climate change, and preventing major security threats—these challenges require creativity and innovation more than debate.”

“This deciding paradigm* diverts institutional resources away from innovation and toward conflict, and fails to tap into the knowledge and ingenuity that we all possess. Our primary role as citizens is checking a box beside our preferred option on the ballot. That the poverty of this notion of what we can contribute does not seem absurd to us only speaks to how entrenched we are in our ideas of what democracy is. In a world where we use mass collaboration to design products, generate knowledge, and create markets, why do we accept such a constrained role in the political realm? This should seem as anachronistic to us as the typewriter or the telegraph—quaint, useful for its time, but ultimately too limited.”

“Currently, our political system answers the question how do we decide between alternatives? Instead, it should ask how could we design better alternatives?”

“Current structures are strained and new ones are needed. We have an exciting design challenge ahead.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David Eaves (who blogs at eaves.ca) shares an important message in an article on Slate.com about the politicization of data and the importance of us not treating successes on open data as our end-game.

Read it here: Lies, Damned Lies, and Open Data

Several lines that resonated:
"We are going to have to find ways to ensure not just the openness of data, but also its credibility and reliability."

"Open data does not represent an endgame, but another step in what will likely be a never-ending struggle for rational debate and evidence based public policy."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Challenge of Direct Democracy - the 1992 Canadian Referendum.

Check it out here.

Citizens uncoordinated voice

Post #2. This is a quick one.
Its a reflection based on the notes from a plenary from the CIVICUS conference held in Monteal this week.  The notes are here: http://civicusassembly.org/rapports/Day1/WA_T1_1_Plenary_Changing_nations_through_citizens.pdf

It is often argued that there is no need for government to directly engage citizens in policy development because members of civil society are the voice of citizens. I do not agree with this sentiment because civil society actors are not just an aggregate of citizens and often have their own goals and agenda (agenda not being a bad thing). Civil society has a crucial role to play and must be a part as well, Im just suggesting that civil society doesn't necessarily speak for citizens.

The speakers on this plenary reinforce my argument by suggesting that increasingly, as we have seen over the past several years with the examples of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, that citizens are acting spontaneously without the need for centralized organizations to speak for them. These citizens are self organizing when their passion flares and the need arises and have the skills and knowledge to express their voice and make a contribution.

CIVICUS World Assembly - Day #1

Post #1

This is post # 1 on this new blog and on day #1 at CIVICUS, although it is actually day two of the main part of the conference. Check out CIVICUS and the World Assembly here: http://civicusassembly.org/

Overall reflections on the day: 

The conference is quite interesting. There is a diversity of content and a diversity of delegates from around the world. I was a part of a discussion yesterday with two brits, a Nigerian, an Australian, and a Peruvian. This discussion was within a session with panelists from Tanzania, India, the UK, the US, and Uraguay.

Hearing their stories of the accomplishments and struggles was engaging and both uplifting and discouraging. 

As ive mentioned, the conference is ethnically and culturally diverse, but what I have also found is that it is largely civil society actors and citizens, but ver few people from the other parts of society. I assume that it does, but I do wonder whether the lack of diversity on that dimension limits the potential for these conversations,

There are a few pieces I want to share in this blog and I'll break them apart because they are distinct concepts or ideas.

Public Participation

One of the most interesting speakers for me on my first day at the conference was John Gaventa. Gaventa is the new head of the Coady Institute in Nova Scotia (the Coady Inst. is co-hosting a conference with IAP2 that I am attending in late September). I suggestyou check out Coady and IAP2, they are both great organizations.

I have a hypothesis that when it comes to foreign policy development there are already enough actors creating change or that change will occur over time at a great enough pace, along two of three dimensions when it comes to bringing citizens and other actors into the policy process. 

The first is the buiilding of the needed knowledge, skills and attitudes of citizens to engage in the policy process. Secondly, that the will is present for many of the right citizens to engage in foreign policy development. The third dimension- the need for venues for collaboration (places where the right people can come together to develop policy) - is heavy on activity for domestic issues, but is lacking attention on foreign affairs issues, or global development policy.

Gaventa's points increased the importance of me exploring the citizens who would be engaged in the policy development and to do more rigorous research on what type of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) these folks need to engage. I shouldn't be making the assumption that the people engaging already have the necessary KSA.

I also realized that I wasn't making the assumption explicit that we could design a venue that helped people prepare for engagement while participating in the policy development. 

Additionally, Gaventa presented research showing that there are four outcomes to public participation. What he shared is that third outcome, being that citizens are engaged in a formal process run by the government, is ineffectual without the actors having the (following two outcomes) deep awareness on the issue that they are engaging with, and the skills which they need to effectively engage.  This seems quite obvious but I hadn't stated it explicitly.

My question for this is: are the citizens that will bring the most to foreign policy development (ex. Diaspora groups, Canadians who live or work abroad) already prepared to have these conversations? My hypothesis is that yes they are prepared but this needs to be torn apart and explored. Right now i'm doubtful this hypothesis is correct but i need to explore it further.

Below the radar civil society

In an earlier session during the day i had a conversation with and got the research paper of Andri Soteri Procto, from Birmingham University in the UK. We spoke about the research she has done on groups that are typically below the radar but that contribute massively to what we consider civil society. These are groups of people who come together to sew, or to provide support for one another, or are members of the same ethnic group that are new to the UK, etc. 

There are two pieces of this that I found quite fascinating. The first is that these groups are tremendous contributors and are at quite a large scale. Each group is not large in itself, but the aggregate is enormous. 

The second part that I found most interesting is their interaction with the rest of society, and government and civil society in particular. Andri and her colleagues mentioned that these small community groups use the community halls/centres/etc that are owned by large members of civil society. These large members rent it to these smaller groups at a low cost or for free. 

The hypothesis that they are now testing, or hoping to test, is whether the dwindling financial support for larger civil society actors will impact the smaller community groups that I spoke about above. If these larger groups lose money and close down their community centres, do the small groups then lose a space to meet? What if this was the only space that they could meet? What happens to this important component of society if they no longer have the resources required - in this case the resource being as simple as a room to meet in - to contribute to society in the way that they have?

You can find the research here: www.tsrc.ac.uk/publications/tabid/500/default.aspx

As a closing note, you might also want to check out the activity reports from the day. CIVICUS volunteers have been doing the very useful work of taking notes and each and every session and publishing them online for all to see. I'll be working through these notes soon to better understand them and may post about them, but i suggest you take a look here: http://civicusassembly.org/Reports.php