Trends: Open Democracy and the Future of Government 2030+

Democracy is defined as 'the rule of the majority'. Today most democracies are indirect or representative. You can’t vote for a new law yourself. You can vote for people who become law makers.

Democracy isn’t just about voting, but it’s about everything to protect the best interests of the people.

We created a diagram to simplify and understand the concept of democracy.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index 2017, reports that less than 5% of the world’s population currently lives in a “full democracy”. The United Kingdom is ranked in the highest positions, and considered a full democratic government, however, the rest of the world has been going through a democratic decline over the past year.

Is democracy the best form of government?

Compared to other forms of governance, democracy appears to be the most appropriate, and is opposite to other types of government.

However, it is true that representative democracy alone is a deficient system and in order for meaningful democracy to soar, citizens must embrace a sense of responsibility and agency, and fight for inclusion in political decision-making. I reckon, that there is no perfect form of government, but open democracy could be the most adequate solution for the future of government.

So, what is Open Democracy?

We mapped our own personal vision to come up with our own understanding of ‘open’ and ‘democracy’.

Open Democracy means synergy and cooperation between citizens, private sector, politicians and all interested parties, for a more inclusive and more fair decision making, making those in power more accountable by improving the relationship and communication between politicians and citizens. Working with the people for the people. It should be human-centered, the citizen becomes the consumer and the ‘adviser’ of the politician. Addressing the issues of what people want and people need, and working with them to tackle those issues.

Democracy in the UK

First, we tried to understand the basics of the mechanics of policy making, the stakeholders, the mechanics of lawmaking and how parliament is organized and challenges the work of central government in the UK.

In England we are at an all time low in the history of democracy, with a turnout in the UK hovering around 33% in local and municipal elections and in gradual decline (Democratic Audit UK website, 2018).

Peter Emerson states that majority voting is in fact one of the most inaccurate measures of collective opinion. Because you cannot get the collective will if people don’t express their individual wills, if people only say what they don’t want, if they only vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Emerson’s thinking, inspired us to further the idea of disrupting democracy introducing ‘Citizens as policy makers’, shifting from a yes and no voting system, to actually get involved from the beginning of issues, framing and expressing concerns and solutions in the process of policy making.

Millennial Engagement in democracy

Young people are disengaged from politics, evidenced by the latest issue of the Millennial Dialogue Report. But it is important they get involved to ensure that politicians make policies with the young in mind. Put simply, the system lacks legitimacy without the participation of a key group of voters in it.

This inspired our idea to educate people at a young age so they can learn how to exercise civic rights.

1. What if we equip the younger generations so they get involved in politics?

2. What if we develop critical thinking skills in politic matters for children and youth?

3. What if we engage young and old people in political discussions as informed citizens?

Is there a better way of doing democracy?

Democracy is a system and, as such, it can be hacked. Santiago Siri

How can we render it obsolete by making a system that is truly open? Having built systems such as Democracy OS where you can get informed, debate and vote or Democracy.earth a community of hackers, thinkers and makers distributed around the globe to redefine the nature of law.

Millennials are connected to the internet, and this hyperconnectivity allows them to voice their opinion, and be more involved in new models of government, using the internet. We discussed the possibility of creating a platform or a space, digital and physical, on which people could start getting more interested, informed, and involved in exercising their civil rights, which led us to ask:

1. What if we create a model of government that allows civilians (young and old) to be more involved in the process of decision making?

2. What if we leverage the advancements of technology for a transparent and trustful democracy?

We explored more models of digital democracy, including Crowdocracy, which offers a radical new way forward, one that allows all of us - not just some of us - to participate in how we are governed. Using technology and the insights of crowd wisdom. How all of us can replace our elected officials and ultimately shape and govern our communities.

Another platform is YouGov, a global market research and data company built on a simple idea: the more people participate in the decisions made by the institutions that serve them, the better those decisions will be.

I agree that in order for a political system to evolve, it has to include the interests of everyone, and not just elite groups, it must be inclusive and it must be transparent and fair.

The futurist hacktivist Federico Pistono states that old ideologies are outdated in the face of exponential change; we need to embrace a more holistic and adaptive system. ‘Experiments with unconditional basic income, coupled with the utilization of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies, will help us find the answers.’

But this brings us back to the critical topic of motivation.

1. Why would people want to get involved in politics?

2. How can we motivate them into making positive change?

3. What is in it for them?

These thought provoking ideas that are also relevant to democracy led us to ask ourselves:

What if we rewarded citizens for their service as policy makers as a motivation for their contributions to open democracy?

Citizen engagement

We considered how to accomplish involvement from citizens, from the point they become aware, to obtain knowledge, become engaged and decide to participate and collaborate in policy making.

Future of Government 2030+

The Future of Government 2030+: A Citizen Centric Perspective on New Governance Models, a project carried out by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in collaboration with the Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT), as part of their work, they held workshops in in Poland, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and Brussels, aimed to initiate a strategic debate on shifting power relationships between citizens and other actors and government.

The scenario best suited to our concept, is the Citizen Centric Hyper E-government. In this scenario, “the rise of AI in government and the concept of citizen centrism brought a new design of the government. Governments have a real-time understanding of socio-economic problems; public services can be offered predictively to citizens. Participation in decision making is easily possible. Citizens are the sovereign over their data, privacy is key”.

How could we make citizens more involved in policy-making supported by advanced and realistic technology?

Camden 2025

Since our brief also involved cooperation with Camden council we additionally gathered insights from the Camden 2025 resident and partner engagement report. We could see how Camden council was already involving citizens in finding out the challenges and opportunities for the future of the borough. The fact that a council is engaging with its citizens to set employability ambitions for 2025, and their current challenges and opportunities in the area was used to inform and inspire further ideation of our concept.

Defining our project scope

We decided to direct our project along two key lines of action:

• Conducting speculative design exercises and experimentation to generate concepts for future and models of local government and interactions between citizens and councils

• Developing mockups and prototypes of future models of governance that illustrate these concepts.

Research Through Design

We approached the project using research through design as a key methodology. We have been examining closely the methodologies of speculative design as well as design fiction, and have deployed a mixture of storytelling and objects to showcase our future government model.

Case study: [X]Changing Perspectives:

Our first approach to research through design was inspired by the work of Ambra Trotto, DIS2017: [X]Changing Perspectives: an Interactive System for Participatory Sensemaking. This project instigated our thinking on how we could make a prototype that would reveal citizens emotions and thought process during policy-making, as well as reveal the collective knowledge generated during the policy making meetings. We wanted to show people's emotions within a discussion and visualise these to all the participants.

Case study: Emotive modeler

Our second approach to research through design was looking at the Emotive Modeller from MIT media Lab study by Philippa Mothersill. The project shows that through CAD-technology one can design objects that communicate emotive character.

It also instigated our thinking about how we could visualise emotions and/or consensus in discussions through using objects were policy making-meetings could be visualised instead of only producing written minutes of the discussions.

We also looked into AI-technology, more specifically, semantic sensemaking, and how it may support citizens to engage more with policy decision making and make the discussions more transparent and visual.

Speculative Design. Design Fiction.

Experimentation #1

Our first paper prototype focused on measuring emotions (wearables) and sensemaking of consensus (voice-recognition) in citizen-led council meetings through a sensemaking bracelet and a voice-recording device that made it possible for citizens to take part in a policy discussion remotely.

How could we use this kind of tracking-technology within a policy-making situation and would the visuals of emotions create any value for the discussion?

We tested the prototype with classmates and tutors and had feedback sessions to help us to iterate it.

Experimentation #2

We explored how to visualise people’s inputs as outputs for all attendants to see in a future policy-making lab and more directly our prototype, that would also be tested by participants from Camden council, Academia and from Future Gov at a workshop held by our class at Central Saint Martins.

We first made a brain that represented a sensemaking-AI that would visualise citizen’s inputs remotely, knowledge from expert clusters and insights from people, organisations or governments that have experience in the subject matter. These inputs would in the future be shown in real-time to the people in the physical discussion, with the aim of including people’s voice, knowledge and experience to a policy-making. The Sensemaking AI would pick up this information from a huge database or/and people commenting in real-time through a platform.

We also explored how the discussions could be structured to enhance their efficacy using a matrix divided into Micro (local), Meso (regional) Macro (global) levels of discussion to look at Enablers, Barriers, Challenges and Opportunities of a specific opportunity or challenge from the Camden 2025 report.

We created a canvas, as a newspaper to set the future scene and also present the topic that was up for discussion based on a challenge found in the Camden 2025 report. We made the visualisation of the AI with an intention of showing the participants how it would work under a policy discussion in the future, spite the fact that it was going to operated by us under the workshop.

Before the CSM-workshop we tested our idea with our teacher Dr. Lara Salinas, we were recommended to simplify the newspaper idea, and think of telling the story while simultaneously showing a visualisation of the future discussion and our sensemaking AI, which we made smaller and called it The Camden Gov Semantic Sensemaking platform.

Experimentation #3

The CSM workshop

We made story cards like a physical keynote to tell our future scenario instead of the newspaper due to our time limit.

Prototype iterations

The feedback collected helped us evolve our concept, to adjust it to near future scenarios. We conducted in-group sketching sprints.

From the sketches, we built the first idea of a prototype into a 3D object.

We focused on making a provocation about the possibilities of the citizen-led future. We were looking to merge aesthetics with our concept of policy making.

Iterations

We obtained feedback from Marion Lagedamont on our prototype. Initially we were trying to communicate many different things, with different materials, and we took Marion’s advice to keep our prototype clean and simple, and to color code the 3 main ideas: citizens, policies and data, represented by the circles we are making in acrylic, no need for extra materials on an abstract piece of art. We were also advised to create explain our concept more in detail with printed material. Our idea is an idea of progression, start with policies at the bottom, building up and interconnecting with the remaining elements, citizens and data, representing interactivity and the relationship between them.

Concept

Our concept presents a future scenario where citizens are a big part of local decision making beyond ‘casting a vote’. We explore open democracy as an inclusive way of policy making, shifting from a ‘yes and no’ voting system to one that involves citizens to frame issues, formulate questions and propose solutions relevant to their community.

We address the complex problem of low citizen participation and engagement in local policy making. We have decided to tackle the challenge of democracy decline in the UK, based on commonalities found from real world insights, also present in the personas provided to us by the JRC. Namely, and largely based on younger audiences, such as our persona “Marie” we are looking at disaffection, cynicism, lack of participation, lack of initiative and wanting. Additionally lack of trust in policy and politicians, in which is mentioned in the description of our second chosen persona “Carlos”:

“Carlos is the human face of the digitized world. What has happened is that the democratic deficit has become so big, especially in Europe, local and national level, there is so much distrust in government that the government now must share a bit more power with citizens”.

Project outcome

Our suggested prototype is an abstract visualisation of the future of policy making. We have decided to make it as a work of art. It mixes different textures of acetate, to indicate the overall transparency of the scenario we want to situate it in.

The model represents the multi-directional and rapid flow of information that is at the heart of the citizen led local government of our future scenario. In it, citizens and policy makers are in the same physical space. The information flows uninterrupted, from within the discussion, from other engaged citizens outside the expert cluster and from other related instances.

The installation holds itself steady through the connection of different circles that can be easily assembled to create depth and volume and represents the interconnectivity of the main elements: citizens, policy and data.

5 future trends

Trend 1: Citizens participation in decision making

More and more we see citizens getting involved in the policy decision-making process. Instead of being merely informed and passive or ‘outside the room’ they are engaged and participate directly as problem solvers. This makes the policy decision making process more collaborative, really putting parts of it in the hands of citizens. It becomes more fair and representative, as the citizen clusters are made up of the most efficient, fair and productive combination of stakeholders.

Source: Giphy.com

Trend 2: Hyper-connectivity

In a technology driven world, by 2025 the Internet of things affects how we are all connected to each other and to the things around us. We are dealing with people who have become deeply embedded into a technological culture. Technology is altering our social relationships, but it also enables people to participate in decision making processes even if they are not in the same physical space. It also allows to communicate better the ideas from the government to the citizens. Clearly there is also a synergy between government and news, however discernment is key for citizens when getting involved in decision making. It also enables a more direct communication channel between council and citizens.

Source: Giphy.com

Trend 3: AI in politics: semantic sensemaking

A government which is closely supported by semantic sense-making technology. The technology enables citizens to participate as policy designers in real time. The data of the citizens is used by the technology, but is controlled by its users. They are still somewhat “sovereign” over their data. Privacy is key. The data generated also requires the use of privacy-protective technologies that government already implements.

Semantic sense-making is the value add that tech brings providing:

• Real time processing and analysis

• Almost real time publishing of information in human friendly format and open access

• Real-time sharing and participation in competence unit council meetings

• Real time processing and clustering of citizen inputs and evidence submission to meetings

Source: Giphy

Trend 4: Machine Learning and Econometrics for decision making

As technology has become more complex and further integrated into everyday life, it has also made its way towards politics.

Machine learning centers around prediction, however econometrics  centers around decision-making. And if applied correctly, it helps citizens and government get the insights they need to make better decisions for policy making, focused on the past, present and future, as it enables better and more informed choices.

Source: Giphy.com

Trend 5: Economy: Universal Income

This trend emerges by need and not merely by desire. By 2025, Central Government has approved a Universal Basic Income, as the enabler for citizen involvement in policy making, which opens a new door for potential engagement in politics.

The shift in economy is foundational for a practical approach within the political domain.

Source: Giphy.com

Key learnings

A future worth living in requires transformation in all spheres of human activity, including political transformation. And such change should enable and include people, civilians, as key pieces of decision making processes.

Making material objects out of 'the future of government', had an impact on the kinds of information we seeked, the ways in which we have approached the topics and how we have collaborated, with a high focus on visualising, becoming acquainted with the basics and building a spatial understanding of abstract social concepts set in a speculative future setting.

We researched and looked at many examples of speculative design projects, many of which are works of video-art, installation or storytelling, to understand how the combination of storytelling and objects can deliver.

We have been able to design within a system, building a static prototype that finds itself in a dynamic scenario. Thinking in this system has helped us think from different vantage point and have to account for different people’s perspective to balance their gains and pains with empathy.

This helped us exercise our ability to think iteratively at macro (big picture, globalist) and micro (community, borough) levels, and try to keep both in our mind during the design process.

Building physical prototypes in the process has enriched this experience further through the act of making real life objects from abstract social constructs.

As for the future of democracy there is still a long way to transform the 'undemocratic democracy' we currently live in into an inclusive open democracy', but will this be achievable, only time will tell.

Source: giphy.com

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