Little Side note: What is the role of the Government in this Bottom-up Open Care project?

Knowledge Collection Political Innovation
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4

“giving back the floor to those who act”

@Philippe_Drouillon welcome back! This ethical suffering idea of yours reads really interesting, I can see your point and will try to add something to it.

By new ways of giving back the floor to doers, do you mean new decision making models? Or more tolerance for the doers in an organisation run in traditional way, a way of compromising?

Our community conversations so far mention burnout in entirely new kinds of organisations growing from bottom up movements. You’d say these new orgs could be better candidates for diminishing that tension and ethical conflict. I myself am an exhibit of that. But you also see people like @marcoclausen reporting cases of community activists lost in simply too many requirements which they hadn’t signed up for.  They come with the “job description” so to speak, especially in a non-sustainable environment where you have to compensate for roles you can’t afford to pay for. So you have cases of burnout because of simple overwork, even with passsion and alignment between what is required and what you want to do.

Curious, from your experience of working with both co-ops and more traditional businesses: is sustainability of an organisation correlated with healthiness of work? Here I mean the quality of what it produces, its impact. Maybe if there were some roadmaps or a system of sustainability rewards that come with keeping healthy at work, at the expense of some other things, we’d get better at moving our work forward.

5

Shift away from political activism

Nice input from Ginette and valid points.

Last week I had several conversations with philosophy friends of mine who noted the same in their research or otherwise. They made some interesting points. I tried to reconstruct them, but there might be some holes in it.

Most ‘activism’ today is done by do-ers. Bottom-up initiatives that took it upon themselves to solve problems that governments should take care of. They noted that this shift to just getting your hands dirty and not wait for government action is actually quite a neo-liberal way of solving problems.

The ideal of May '68 has become ingrained in the way the mainstream thinks. The loss of faith in government and institutions has become part of a normal way of thinking. Management and corporations have adopted it in a way: they want to get rid of the old and slow processes, they want radical disruption asap and would like as few interventions by government as possible. Government is mainly seen as an obstacle at this point.

Bottom-up initiatives follow the same reasoning to a large extent. Government is one of the obstacles to be overcome, because they’re perceived as ingerently part of the problem, almost an external factor that is unchangeable. But they have to do it with less means, less people and less power (leading to the burnout problem). Additionally, the whole neo-liberal side will see these projects and initiators as ‘one of them’, because of the shared ‘entrepreneurial activism’. For an outsider, the difference between both fades.

One of their conclusions was that there is a need for political activism by these bottom-up activists right now, rather than only acting boots on the ground. Otherwise real systemic change may not follow, as politics today is mainly politics for the sake of politics, heavily influenced by big economy.

What do you think about this?

6

I see similar things

I see people in today’s fairly young generations building professional paths along these lines. One of the latest political party in Romania running for national elections is a formerly local political party founded by civic activists. Now they’re going national, after the founder has seen 25% support in the local elections. However it looks like titanic work, their lack of experience shows many times, and funding missing. The road is uncertain, but attests to the idea above.

Also, my story of a grassroots innovation in the medical system which a few years later contributed to the founder being appointed Minister of Health also makes the case.

7

Interesting outcome

That’s an interesting development! Thanks for sharing.

I’m actually trying to send some medicines to a friend in Serbia at the moment, because he got the meds prescribed for Lyme but cannot buy them over there. It really doesn’t make any sense at all.

8

Aw :frowning:

Probably the easiest is to find a human carrier, you never know with medicine across borders.

9

Giving back to floor to those who act

@Noemi, My two cents about your questions. The ethical suffering can occur in any organization where it is required to do things that are too far from what actual work should look like in the eyes of the concerned people who are passionated about what they do.

I’ve observed such situations in not for profit AND in for profit organizations even though the purpose and the values behind the organization were sensefull for people. It is about the meaning of the work to be done and the way it is asked.

Indeed distributed decision making processes (cf the integrative decision making process), spaces where people can share practices in order to improve them (which supposes that they have an influence on them), the autonomy of each team and individual in his/her area of competence and responsibility (where each person is sometimes leader and sometimes follower) combined with a results-oriented work process (instead of an effort-oriented culture giving more credit on hours spent then on results) are cornerstones to move forward in the right direction.

What is meant by heath at work ? Do we speak about fitness, yoga and mindfulness ? If so, it is just an approach to relieve people and allow them to go on in an unsatisfactory environment. If it comes on top of the characteristics I mentioned hereabove, it will be the ice on the cake.

Last but not least, working for a purpose-led organization that strives for a better world will surely help at the condition that the way this organization works is consistent with its aspiration.

10

Discussing about “policy for opencare” tight now

Hello @Yannick , @Philippe_Drouillon , @WinniePoncelet . Just letting you know that @Rossana_Torri , @Franca and their colleagues of the City of Milano are considering creating a challenge on policy for opencare within this conversation we are having. They hope to report on some experiences they are having now in Milan and (hopefully) get feedback, both from their local community in Milan and from the more global conversation here. They are smart, well-meaning civil servants serving under relatively enlightened political leadership (though this is Italy, and government is quite fragile and operates under a lot of constraints). I have now pointed them to this thread, hopefully they will have something to say.

11

Open policy making process

Thanks @Alberto!! This story and comments are REALLY interesting, also as a starting point for our challenge and the discussion that we would like to share here. Starting from Ginette/@Yannick perspective that identify these 2 main forms of Care: 1. Care that cames from love and friendship: 2. All other forms need to be done by the Government.

So the problem of scalability. We are seeing in our City and in Edgeryders, a lot of interesting care projects, community driven, but the idea is that the role for Government is to guarantee the scalability.

What is the scalability?

In my opinion the scalability could be possible only if these new solutions, new approaches became part of an open policy making process.

So, in our case, the Local Administration has to became an observator, a facilitator of these initiatives, helping them to evaluate their own effectiveness and impact.

In our experiences we’re observing many interesting care projects that are developed by communities, using new approaches to care, involving new actors (makers, hackers…)

These experiences are helping us to change also our services directly, to manage our services in new ways, trying to recompose the fragmented network of Care.

I think that Government could be not an obstacle, or a part of the problem, risk that @winnieponcelet reported, but  (hopefully!!) a part of the solution: if tha PA can change its perspective and tries  not to be THE actor, the only care provider really allowed to do something, but one of the actors.

Also, maybe, to guarantee not to fall to a neoliberalism way to solve problems…

But in which role?

We’are thinking to develop this idea: became an enabling platform that can facilitate the dissemination of some solutions, and create the conditions to replicate in a large scale what has been evaluated effective.

But it’s not simple, and of course we’re talking in general.

We want to open a challenge about this topic because we would like to stimulate a debate and also find concrete examples about the role that in each project could/should be done by a Public Administration (in particular Municipalities).

We‘ll share also some stories of our administration that in our opinion are going in this direction, to rethink traditional services in the new context of Care.

This conversation could maybe became also a way to create a path for discussing how civil servants could continue to believe to do a “real work” and not just a prescribed, traditional work, @PhilippeDrouillon.

What do you think?

12

Meet Franca, everyone

Ping @Philippe_Drouillon | @Yannick | @WinniePoncelet

Everyone, meet @Franca . What she is not saying is that she is government, or, better, that she works for the Milan City Hall. I showed her Yannick’s post and your comments; it resonates with her and her colleagues, because, just as Yannick probably imagined when he first wrote the post, they crave this kind of frank-yet-constructive dialogue with citizens.

It would be interesting to challenge the opencare community to find actual policies of care that “give back the floor to those who act”, to use Philippe’s very nice phrasing. What do you guys think? How would you see it happening?

13

“We’are thinking to develop this idea: became an enabling platform that can facilitate the dissemination of some solutions, and create the conditions to replicate in a large scale what has been evaluated effective.”

From the perspective of our organisation, this is exactly what we need. We follow this strategy internally in our organisation as well: test lots of things in a small cheap way, evaluate, scale, evaluate and so on. In my city this is done sometimes, like with the Living Streets project. The city was cooperative enough to let them test the idea. These are exceptions sadly.

I’ve been to a few city organised or backed ‘workshops’ meant to shape the future of the city. The workshops all lack the same: citizens present. Generally, they are organised during working hours and the only participants are civil servants and companies/entrepreneurs that have an economic stake in the issue. The details of how these workshops go, are pathetic. And it’s packaged and sold to the citizens as ‘co-creation’. Last one was most striking. A workshop on urban planning, commissioned by the city and organised by the same organisations that were involved in an ongoing massive real estate scandal. The workshop itself featured only entrepreneurs and project developers, talking about matters that affect everyone. Already at this basic level, the city fails. How can anything good come from such a basis?

Maybe this is how at least a little good can come from it. Our city has an image of being progressive and there are lots of projects that prove this. In the end however, politicians mainly want to get re-elected or get a better position next term. This means they need to live up to public expectations and produce impact in the short term. The fact that people here expect politicians to be more progressive, means the politician’s output will have to be more progressive in order to make a career. As a result we have a pretty awesome city. However, it’s a sugary coating that hides the broken way in which we are governed.

I’ve been advised by a project coordinator to stay away from help from the city. She described it like this: if we were to receive support from the educational department under politician x from party a, next term all support could be gone under politician y from party b. Because politician y needs to have their own projects for their curriculum, so the limited means need to go towards launching new initiatives from scratch under their term. Also, draining a project from a political opponent diminishes that opponent’s credibility. This is such a waste on so many levels: money, knowledge, time, … Not to mention the competitive atmosphere this actually creates between projects that otherwise share a similar purpose.

My own experience: I contacted the city anyway a few months back. I mailed with the responsible politician and she directed me to the civil servant at the bottom of the ‘food chain’. We met, she was impressed by our project and clearly wanted to help. She promised me to take the message back up the food chain, but assured me it would take a while, and keep me updated along the way. The department got restructured, so this was slowing things down. Fast forward 2 months, no news, and our project is already in a different stage. Time flows differently for the government, I hope people age slower as a perk for working there.

A government platform for projects to grow at their own speed would be a major improvement. De-coupling this platform from political incentives is a priority.

14

Great to read this :slight_smile:

Hey @Franca and @WinniePoncelet thanks for these comments.

What you wrote Franca is really great to read, because it is the first time actually having a policy maker understanding so well the principle of an open care system, but also discribing the role a governement has to play in the futur. He is there as a facilitator, giving the right tools to test and later on help scale the bottom up initiatives. In such way the governement becomes a currator, not simply a gatekeeper of the funds, but the person who helps grow the talented projects.

Winnie i know what you are discribing, with my years of activism i had mostly the same kind of experience  with policy makers in Brussels. Getting funds is tricky because you need to behave a certain way because ‘they’ have the power in hand, you have to calculate who is going to get the portefieulle in next couple of years and so on.

But a couple of days ago a kind of epiphany came accross. In fact like what edgeryders does on care, we can create locally on any topic, creating an easy swarm of projects that can become a lever to not wait till policy is written, but to shape what it is going to be without having to play the political game. We are going to do this exercice with the Brussels makers scene through the FabCity platform of Barcelona. Bringing projects towards organisations and spaces and coordinating these spaces to communicate as one about their needs towards politics. In such way that we don’t have the proposal from politics: let’s just build 170 fablabs for 2020, but that through the swarm of knowledge know what are really the necesities.

Hope i could contribute to this nice debate;

15

Swarms are great! But…

I totally agree, @Yannick , we can do many things on our own. The “smart swarm” model we pioneered with Open&Change has a lot of potential and, like you say, it can be applied to mamy things beyond care. It is a potentially powerful tool.

But I would not underestimate policy. A determined policy maker can make stuff happen. In 2012, Milano invented a new policy that works like this: they put out a list of 100 entire buildings, and 1,000 smaller spaces, that the city owns. You can have one of them, for free and for up to 30 years, as long as you (1) fix it and maintain it with your own money and (2) use it for activities that have social benefits. The city is being quite proactive: in one neighborhood it might encourage activities that interest young people, in another the focus might be on migrants etc. (see here, in Italian). It’s the same thing you are doing at VDH, Yannick, but on a much larger scale.

I, for one, am very interested in having a discussion on policy with you guys. I would be more than willing to reach out to other policy makers too. What do you think?

16

great!

Hi @WinniePoncelet, “A government platform for projects to grow at their own speed would be a major improvement. De-coupling this platform from political incentives is a priority.”

 

in my opinion you have touched a key point. When you work in a public administration the relation between technicians and politicians are crucial, in particular if you want to do something, if you want really realize new and innovative projects. In many situations for example the fact that a politician is engaged in a project became the only possibility to realize the projects.

 

In many situations I saw terrible fights ‘politicians versus technicians’, but also collaborative approach, with a sharing of knowledge, working together for the same objectives.

 

Also the project of @Yannick seems very interesting and I would like to know more… could you give us more details?

As we announced we launched a challenge.

Could you read it and tell us if you think it’s interesting written in this way or if you want to change something… Every your suggestion will be precious!!!

 

Now we are starting to disseminate the challenge among some local partners, NGOs, associations that are working with us, but also among other local italian municipalities.

 

Could you help us to engage other political actors, as @Alberto suggested??

 

It could be really great and potentially of huge impact… what do you think??

 
 
 
17

Great

@Franca I think having this conversation is a great first step. It’s going to be a very complex problem to solve. Its tentacles go so far into other domains that are even more fundamental to our society.

When we set out to solve a complex problem in our organisation, we start with small actions that change the context a little. Small experiments that can fail, but the lessons of which can scale big. A great example in government is a challenge this month of my own city where they will distribute 1,300,000 euros among civilian projects that aim to have a positive impact on the city. Citizen vote will account for 70% in the decision where the money goes. I don’t think popularity contests are the best way to do this either, but it’s a beginning and will change the playing field.

Yet this is already at the interface with the public, at the policy level. Most possible small experiments I can think of would all very likely fail at another point: the government itself. The processes, people, time perception, incentive structures, … Seperately these things are not huge problems, but together they form a problem where there are little starting points to start solving it. I’d say the most important problem for the government to solve today, is the government itself, not the policies it produces. So we need small actions in that aspect, eg. hiring a few recruiters that recognise the skills needed to implement change. And then you can sustainably keep producing good policy, even parallel while changing the internals.

18

Low level rules are the most important

@WinniePoncelet I completely agree with your point of view. The political process (and media) focus on high-level strategies, but the greatest impact reforms would come from reforming the govt’s operating system: quite simply, the affordances of people therein. Example: my sister works for an Italian municipality called Modena. In a drive to contain costs, some genius passed an internal regulation that employees travelling on business (“missions”, as they are known in the public sector) need an authorization from the highest political level (giunta in Italian, which means the mayor and her close collaborators). This is such a hassle that in 99.9% of the cases managers renounce. Employees do not get to go to conferences. As a result, over time the whole workforce becomes isolated and its skillset depreciates and withers.

Changing this does not require a strategy. A workforce that stays up to date would help any mayor, be she conservative or progressive. It does not require changing the law, either. The city council could simply vote a resolution allocating a modest budget that each employee can use to go to conferences and events they are interested in. This would have a massive impact, in my opinion. Maybe @Franca has an idea of how these decisions are made (or, in the case of Modena, not made).

19

Nice example

@Alberto That is a beautiful example of this harmful shift towards ‘control’ and ‘planning’, inspired by uncertainty and distrust, while we should be shifting towards a dynamic interplay between ‘noticing’ and ‘steering’, inspired by best estimates and trust.

I do think that institutions and companies are (perhaps unknowingly) looking for these qualities when you see trends in expectations set by job offerings, although they use different words. Yet ironically, those companies and institutions seem to lack the ‘noticing’ and ‘steering’ qualities to realise what they are actually looking for and thus be good at recruiting the people who have what it takes.

You have a good point about isolation and depreciation of skill sets. Keeping your workforce up to date entails both education and turnover.

20

A new point of view perhaps?

Hi everyone, this is to introduce @mariam1313 and also draw her attention to this conversation. She’s working in Georgian public sector in areas of innovation. Mariam can we quickly pick your brains on this? Above Franca (Milano), Yannick (Brussels), Winnie (Ghent) and Alberto whom you know are sharing experiences about what it takes for accountable and efficient gov programming to happen in order to better support citizens and initiatives. Franca (working on the inside of the system) said that the public administration needs to learn to become a facilitator and enabler of solutions, not necessarily THE solution provider which fails in so many cases. Do you have an example of good governance from your office? Or healthy collaboration between policy makers and technicians/ citizen experts/ creative people etc? Thanks, and officially: welcome on the platform!

21

In response to Naomi…

Hi everyone,

Naomi and I continued the discussion on e-mail a bit and she asked me to copy my response regarding some examples of citizen participation in Georgia. Again, these are just a few examples off the top of my head - I didn’t have time to do full scale research of this topic.  but if needed, I can carve out some time to look into it more, if it’s for a specific purpose. Here it goes:

One such example that comes to mind is when the Ministry of Agriculture had public consultations during the development of the National Rural Development Strategy (I was a part of this working group from the Ministry of Justice side, this is why it comes to mind, but I am sure other examples are out there too):

http://enpard.ge/en/public-consultations-on-rural-development-national-strategy-of-georgia/

Also, Georgia is a pretty active part of the Open Government Partnership, and as evidenced in the Action Plan, “1.3 Empowering citizens to engage in the legislative process”, the Government of Georgia (GoG) has been working towards opening up the process of legislation and policy-making, to be more open to citizens.If you want, I can ask my relevant colleagues, who were involved in OGP processes to contact you with some more information.  http://www.parliament.ge/uploads/other/37/37370.pdf

Also, the Public Service Development Agency (with the support of GoG, EU and Sida) has been building Community Centers (CCs) in rural areas in Georgia, where local population can receive over 200 private and public services in one space. Additionally, these centers have conference rooms, which can be used by the local population/government/any interested person or group to host meetings and public discussions on any topic. The CCs are very active and there are lots of events in the centers organized by CSOs and local governments.

www.centri.gov.ge

Additionally, the Rustavi municipality, which is involved in our UNDP-UNV project, has an ongoing participatory budgeting project, which is a good way to involve citizens in decision-making. http://www.vng-international.nl/blog/rustavi-city-starts-involving-citizens-its-budgeting-process/

Finally, the Office of the State Minister of Georgia for Reconciliation and Civic Equality developed a Civic Equality and Integration State Strategy and Action Plan with active involvement of NGOs, like United Nations Association of Georgia, European Center for Minority issues and Public Defender’s Office. http://smr.gov.ge/FileList.aspx?ID=34

As mentioned, these are just a few good examples that come to mind.

22

The limits to participation

Thanks for chipping in, @mariam1313 !

Like you, I am interested in participation. My own work has been about ways that the Internet can enable more effective forms of participatory democracy. I even wrote a book about this. My point of departure was that participation as we inherited it from the 20th has not made a substantial impact on decision quality or societal cohesion, at least not in Italy, not even in the best cases. There are many reasons why this happens. Some of them:

  • Participatory processes are designed by civil servants, with other civil servants and "usual suspect" stakeholders (like professional business and trade union representatives) in mind. In your rural development example, I see that they worked through offline meetings, convened in cities and on weekdays at 11.00 am. That choice is going to prevent the most interesting potential participants (the local entrepreneur, the teacher, the parent of small children...) from showing up. People who reliably do show up are the people paid to participate, like representatives and lobbyists... but those already have channels to talk to the government. The other option would be to convene during the evenings, but, at least in Italy, civil servants do not like this at all. The option is almost never even discussed. So, most of the collective brainpower is ruled out before the process even starts.
  • The "technology of participation" (the town hall meeting) is non-scalable. This means (a) every participant will spend most of her time being talked to and (b) people will need to keep any intervention short. This means there is no time to explore issues and scenarios. This is why I like so much online forums like Edgeryders: you can participate in your own time (when you are off work, when your children are asleep...); take time to make your case; and no one is forced to be reading anyone else. We choose to engage with contributions we find interesting.
  • The social contract underpinning participation is often not clear. I participate, then what? What we suggest gets implemented? What we suggest gets considered? How do I know decisions have not been made beforehands, and the decision maker ris just looking for a rubberstamp? Recent example: after an online and offline consultation with 1.8 million participants on Italian schools, number 1 request that emerged was to have teachers evaluated by independent experts, and not by their own headmasters. The government, nevertheless, decided to reject that request. Assuming the average participants spent two hours participating (very conservative assumption), that means the waste of 3.6 million hours. In European standards (1,732 productive hours in a year), that the equivalent of about 2,000 years of human work. Not cool. The social contract issue is the easiest one to fix.

I have recently been involved in contributing to Italy’s 3rd action plan under the Open Government Partnership (as an activist, unpaid). My brothers-and-sisters-in-arms and myself made these points quite forcefully, and they have been adopted by the government. Here’s to hoping for better times. :slight_smile:

23

An optimist?

@mariam1313 thanks again for being so responsive, I can imagine a long thread like this can be somewhat confusing :slight_smile:

For myself, the lessons - far and beyond the existance of institutional policies per se - are those which are carried by the people involved: civil servants or citizens directly involved in these processes. For example I remember the story about Rustavi’s participatory budgeting and Revaz’s enthusiasm to be involved in implementation. However, there is more to learn about the outcomes of it - for example, in Cluj where I live they ran a 3 step process starting from the neighborhood level. But it involved a lot of deliberation - as Alberto was writing above, that means showing up at neighborhood meetings (physical). They nonetheless got to testing it at the city level, but a lot of the energy got dissipated in sending in proposals to compete for online votes (>400 projects)! and ending up funding very few with little money (1000 eur per winning project - about 50 of them).  I don’t want to think of the amount that went into the administration of it, but you see where this goes. That was in 2014-2015, no news since, and more importantly, it’s unclear whether it was considered successful or not in order to move further in an upgraded version. Anyway, this is just an example…  hope Rustavi will do much better, but also that people running it are considering risks too.