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.