Waves: Digital Democracy hits the streets of Camden

Today is a big day. After six months of designing, trialing, debating and remaking, a new digital democratic process has hit the streets of Camden. It will help form the future of one of the most important duties of any government: adult social care.

It’s called Waves, and it aims to include thousands of people in the big, difficult decisions that government makes. From the beginning, the whole point has been to connect the process directly to the formal use of political power. That’s why it will always begin with a significant and specific policy challenge, and the outcome will always tie directly to decisions subsequently made by government. 

It was intended from the very beginning to not just be something dreamt up in a think tank, but a process grounded in the realities of local government. So for six months, officials from Camden and South Staffordshire Councils have joined the technologists and think tankers across the consortium to stress test and reshape every step of the Waves process.

The process itself flows between broad discussion and idea generation, before moving on to narrower, details-focussed deliberative work. The first stage gathers as many ideas as possible from as many people as possible, and uses a consensus-seeking online space to excavate what unites different groups. The second stage brings a smaller group together to turn these ideas into fully-fleshed proposals which the wider group then responds to in stage three, and the smaller group finalises in stage four.

This has certainly been the most involved co-design process I’ve ever experienced; thousands of digital post-it notes, huge Miro boards, hours and hours of workshops. And as we go into field, I want to share a few reflections on things I’ve learned designing a digital democratic process with government, working right, as we have, at that intersection of technology, politics and power.

1. Any digital democratic process that doesn’t reach the digitally excluded has already failed

The clearest recognition from the very beginning was that using technology to bring people in would also create new barriers at the same time. A key question has been, then, how do we include people who are less likely to be involved exactly because Waves is digital? In Camden, our way forwards will be to push Waves into the physical world as much as we can: recruitment via bus shelters and digital screens. The use of libraries who already provide computers and run digital skills sessions, and using human digital champions to promote the initiative and onboard people. But we recognise this is not something that is available to every local government, and we’ll record as much data as we can to identify what really works.

2. The most important technological element is also the least visible 

Waves is designed to unearth consensus on even the most polarised topics by re-wiring the information spaces where these discussions are held. The most important technology to make that happen is called bridge-based ranking. It promotes statements and responses that are most likely to create common ground and positive engagement even across diverse and divided audiences. We’ll be writing an explainer in the weeks ahead to really focus on it, how it works, and why pro-democratic initiatives need to use it.

3. Waves relies on different models of democratic legitimacy

The legitimacy of democratic processes is built on who participates. It’s clear that Waves doesn’t use just one, but actually a mixture of different ideas about what this legitimacy looks like. The parts of Waves that are about gathering ideas and then reviewing them (stages 1 and 3) are ‘wide’. Here the aim is to get as many people as possible participating, by trying to reach a broad cross-section of the community primarily drawn from the local area, but who might be from neighbouring areas as well. This is about scale: some legitimacy comes through the mass participation of, we hope, thousands of people. 

But the focussed deliberations are ‘narrow’, they will involve a smaller group of people who reflect the second idea of legitimacy – which is that they are carefully representative of the local governmental area according to social and demographic characteristics. Finally, the third idea is to ensure that certain groups of people are involved  according to their special relationship to the decision. That might be service users for questions to do with social care, or it might be both developers and social housing renters for questions to do with planning. The lesson here has been to try to thread together the relative strengths of each: lots of people to source new ideas and course correct; smaller groups of people for the sustained, more detailed build out of those ideas into full proposals. 

4. From deliberation to decision-making

Waves was always intended to not just host discussion and collect ideas, but to ultimately join those ideas to decisions and political power in ways that are entirely clear to the people taking part. We thought that was important from the very beginning and still do. People become more cynical and less trusting of government if they don’t see anything meaningful happening with proposals they’ve spent time and effort to create. 

But being specific about statutory decision-making is tough when you don’t know where the deliberation is heading. Any process needs to be both clearly decisional, but also flexible. So, we’ve created some more process at the very beginning of Waves: every iteration will begin with a communication from the local government at the very outset that will be crystal clear about the questions  being asked for the deliberation, the decisions that may be driven by its outputs, and a ‘challenge statement’ giving participants more background about why the deliberation is happening. The council will then provide a political narrative throughout the deliberation, reflecting on the outputs and recommitting to the decisions that the deliberation will form. We know this takes bravery from the participating councils, especially due to the emergent nature of deliberations where we cannot know the outcomes when we start. 

In the spirit of recommitments, here are ours, for Waves. Our project won’t have succeeded unless:

•  Waves produces a major local government policy change from each of its two deployments – in Camden and South Staffordshire
•  At least 1,000 residents taking part in each deployment
•  We create the ability for any local government to run Waves for an external cost of £80,000 or less
•  At least 25 local governments across the UK trained and able to adopt Waves.

Carl Miller
Co-Director of Waves
Senior Fellow, Demos