Can we trust Government to talk to us directly online?

In Hypothesis: official feedback sites don't work William Heath of Ideal Government suggests:

Official feedback sites get muzzled or perverted. This means they're not sustainable, and don't work.

I recall this happening to the Number 10 web site in the Mandelson years where the engagement section became spun and then closed. Miliband had his famous recent blog problem. I found out earlier this year the Barcelona project we saw a year ago has become (I gather, and to the intense disappointment of the officials who started it) subject of political spin and dispute. The Hungarian "target practice" site we wrote about a year ago has disappeared (not sure why, but I still have a slide somewhere). My new Bulgarian friends want feedback, but are smart enough to realise it needs to be independent of a political process.

I think William is referring to the Defra wiki, rather than the Miliband blog ... and I don't know the other references, so it is difficult to agree or not on specifics. I can understand his general concern, but don't agree with his conclusion:

If my hypothesis is right, feedback is definitely a job for the NGOs. I'd be very glad of any further empirical evidence.

What William seems to be saying is that Government can't be trusted to engage directly online with citizens, and so this has to be left to nonprofit organisations. But nonprofits have their own agendas. There may be strong arguements for independent organisations to host discussions, but I think we should be looking for more, not fewer, ways to engage directly with politicians and officials.

The webcameron site launched by the Tories is one route ... while over at the Department for Works and Pensions, for example, the Minister for Pensions Reform, James Purnell, is running a less glamorous but very worthy initiative collecting people's views through a blog and forum.

All forms of engagement are open to manipulation if the process is not transparent. Market research results can be massaged, feedback forms ignored. It's not peculiar to engagement online. The more open, social networking approach hopefully means that more people are watching what goes on, and are more likely to sniff out when "official" results don't reflect diverse conversations.

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[Graham Lally]

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