FW: Citizens' Assembly Pre-mortem
Dan Doherty
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Simon Zukowski <simonz...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:54 PM
Subject: Citizens' Assemblies Pre-mortem
To: victoria-c...@googlegroups.com
I hoping to use this group's brainpower to help me with a project I'm working on. As some of you know, I've been exploring the idea of creating a non-profit society to organize citizens' assemblies in communities around BC as a way to strengthen our democratic institutions. At this early stage, I would really appreciate getting a reality check on this idea from the group. Here is what I'd like to ask you for:
1. Read my project "Overview" (attached) and watch my short video.
2. Now, imagine the following: it's been 2 years since the nonprofit was launched and everyone agrees that it's been a failure.
3. Take 5-10 minutes to write down why the project has failed.
4. Email me your answers at simonz...@gmail.com
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4xzJroC1Pk
This type of an exercise is called a "pre-mortem." It is done before embarking on a significant project and is meant to counteract the psychological biases (like confirmation bias or groupthink) that can so easily blind us to the project's flaws. By pointing out significant problems, it helps avoid investing huge amounts of time and energy into projects that are likely doomed to failure, or reveals what obstacles must be overcome before the project can succeed.
I am giving you permission, nay, I am asking you, to be as brutal in your assessments as possible (within the boundaries of good taste! ;). This is the time to put your critical hats on. If there are serious problems with this idea, I'd like to know about them before I've invested a ton of time into it.
We'll discuss everyone's responses in a few weeks at a potluck at my place :)
Thank you, and look forward to reading your thoughts!
Jim Rough
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<BCspeaks pre-mortem (Jul 08).docx>
Dan Doherty
If you are interested in responding to Simon Z's request for input, you may need to log into https://groups.google.com to view the attachment from my prior posting. I am posting the contents as a separate message to make access easier.
---Dan
BCspeaks Overview
What?
I propose to set up a non-profit organization, called BCspeaks, which will organize citizens’ assemblies in communities around B.C.
A citizens’ assembly is a group of people brought together to deliberate and produce recommendations on a topic of importance to their community.[1] The assemblies I am proposing will be modeled roughly on the 2004 BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform and will consist of 100 randomly-selected local residents. Assembly participants will be supported by facilitators and subject matter experts. At the end of the process, BCspeaks will deliver the assembly’s recommendations to the appropriate level of government and lobby for their implementation.
Why?
Although many people tend to see modern democracies like ours as the highest and ultimate expression of democratic ideals, the truth is that the correspondence between our current political system and those ideals is far from perfect. In other words, there’s still some work to be done to make our democracy, well, truly democratic.
We can think about our democracy’s problems in terms of democratic deficits. Three of the most significant deficits relate to representation, deliberation and participation.
1) A Deficit of Representation
It is a fundamental democratic ideal that every person’s political voice should carry equal weight with decision makers, yet:
· Our “first-past-the-post” electoral system often produces strange results that can leave large segments of the population without any substantive representation. For example, during the 2001 provincial election, the party that won the most votes actually lost the election, and in 2005 one party won almost all the seats in the legislature with just 57% of the popular vote.
· Nor do equal voting rights always translate into equal representation. The wealthiest and the best organized of us often get a disproportionately large voice in politics. According to Integrity BC, a non-partisan non-profit that seeks to reduce the influence of money in BC politics, the BC Liberal party gets over 60% of its funding from big businesses, while the provincial NDP gets 21% of its funding from unions.
But the problem goes even deeper than this. Even if we fixed the electoral system and took big money out of politics, how would our politicians know if their decisions were genuinely representative of the interests of the people they represent? As a society, we have few good mechanisms for ascertaining the public interest. Voting only provides a very gross indicator of what the public interest might be and happens too infrequently to be much of a guide for public policy. Relying on other sources – such as public opinion polling, the government bureaucracy and special interest groups – to represent the public interest to government is also problematic as these sources all carry their own distortions and biases. As a society, we need a better way to discover what the public interest is, forge agreement around it, and relay that information to government.
2) A Deficit of Deliberation
A related problem is a lack of deliberation within our legislatures (though this is especially a problem at the provincial and federal levels, and less so locally). Many of us would like to see our elected representatives engage in more collaborative, rational discussion of the kind our complex policy problems require. In reality, however, our legislatures too often seem to focus more on scoring political points than about deliberation. This is because:
· In our competitive political system, winning elections normally involves convincing voters that your party has all the answers, while the other side is hopelessly misguided and incompetent. Engaging with your political opponents as peers undermines this impression. No one party has all the answers, but our competitive political system drives the parties to behave as if it did.
· Politicians have huge jobs to do and deliberation is very time consuming.
Lacking the incentives and the supports they need to engage in meaningful deliberation, politicians sometimes fall back on ideology, opinion polls, the media or a select circle of advisors to guide their decisions. These sources of information all have their place, but they are a poor substitute for the type of informed and inclusive deliberation that’s needed to address society’s complex problems.
3) A Deficit of Participation
Across the Western world, citizens are becoming disengaged from traditional political systems and B.C. is no different. Trust in government is declining, fewer people vote and fewer join political parties. This further polarizes the party system as only the staunchest partisans are motivated enough to stay, while the moderates leave. Over the last 30 years, the percentage of eligible voters who actually turned out to vote in provincial elections in B.C. has declined strikingly, from 71% to 51%.
It is these three deficits – of representation, deliberation and participation – that citizens’ assemblies aim to address. When surveyed in 2004 and 2006, around 40-45% of Canadians said they were not satisfied with how democracy works in this country. We can and must do better.
How?
The high-level mechanics of the process would be as follows:
1) Residents go to the BCspeaks website and post, comment, or vote on an idea for a citizens’ assembly in their community.
2) Once a threshold of interest is reached, BCspeaks organizes an initial community meeting at which the community votes to (or not to) formally authorize the assembly.
3) With the topic chosen and the CA authorized, BCspeaks invites a random sample of 100 local citizens to participate in the assembly, which will consist of 4-6 one day sessions held over as many weekends. The random sample will be selected with the aid of a public opinion research company (invitations will be sent out to several hundred people because only a fraction will accept).
4) In the lead up to the CA, BCspeaks will work with subject-matter experts in academia and elsewhere to prepare ‘homework’ materials for participants ahead of the assembly and to design the sessions.
5) At the CA itself, participants will continue to learn about the topic (great care will be taken to ensure that participants receive balanced and objective information) and engage in discussions. Participants will be invited to take the perspective of the community as a whole in their deliberations rather than to advocate for a pre-determined set of interests.
6) After deliberations conclude, the assembly will vote on the recommendations.
7) BCspeaks and members of the assembly will deliver the recommendations to government and work to publicize them.
8) BCspeaks will continue to advocate for the recommendations until they are implemented.
Funding:
This is yet to be ironed out (surprise!) but I hope that funding will come from a mix of philanthropic donations and crowd-funding. Residents who vote for a particular topic on the website will be asked to make an (informal) small pledge which will become due if their topic is selected. We will probably set a fundraising threshold that the community must meet before the assembly is organized. If the community really wants the assembly on a certain topic, they will be willing to pay for it.j
[1] The topics will at first be local, but eventually BCspeaks will organize assemblies on issue of provincial or even national importance.