A Report on the Santa Barbara Community Network (circa 1991)
I'm back from talking with Ken Phillips down in Santa Monica and am ready to report. Ken is the director of the Information Systems Department at the City of Santa Monica and the primary driving force behind the PEN system's creation. I visited with him in his office for about an hour and a half. He's a very soft-spoken, unassuming guy who sits at a messy desk in city hall. Not the image of a revolutionary, but what he has pulled off is epochal in its implications.
The PEN system is not perfect, but that's to be expected. It's not in the nature of systems that promote the hurly-buirly of democreatic discourse to appear perfect. There is much hot-headed flaming that occurs in the conferences but not so much as to disrupt the basic functionality of PEN. And according to Ken most of the pointless and worst flaming occurs in conference topics where you'd expect it to occur--that is, conferenceswhere there's the least likelihood of discord being resolved: abortion, religion, etc.
I should mention that the system offers many other services besides conferencing. It posts city business like city council minutes, staff reports, city job listings, information about city services; there's tips posted on earthquake and fire safety, recycling, xeriscape landscaping; you can register to vote online and apply for a business license; the city library's card catalog is online; and free e-mail is offered to Sant Monica citizens. (All city department heads are required to respond to e-mail from citizens within 24 hours.)
Ken claims that most resistance to the inception of the system came from within city hall. And it was not elected officials who were resistant--they are generally very suppoortive and appreciate the opportunity to interact with their constituency at the convenience of their office PC's. (Even local congressman Mel Levine maintains a conference on the system.) The resistant folk were city hall bureaucrats. Ken as a bureaucrat knows of which he speaks. He said the system created terrible divisiveness within city hall and nearly cost him his job.
Essentially the bureaucrats just wanted to do their jobs without being bothered by "inexpert" citizens.
The modern discipline of "public administration" could be blamed for such arrogance, but it's also understandable that someone wouldn't want to spend a lot of time responding to habitual e-mailers. Although Ken feels that "civil servants" need to be more responsive to the public, the public also has to show some restraint aginst excessive e-mailing. He is still trying to figure out a system to guard against the e-mail addiction of some.
The PEN system is very popular. There are about 4,000 registered users in a city of about 95,000 people. Although half of those users only login once or never, Ken claims about 50,000 logins a month. That means the other 2,000 people are very active participants. All users must register, but you can register online of by filling in a card at city hall. You have to register using your real name--no pseudonyms--and you must live in Santa Monica. There are about 25 public terminals scattered about town, but again you must be registered to use them. This fussiness about registration seems to guard against electronic graffiti. At the end of our talk Ken brought up the system on his Mac and walked me through it. The conference dedicated to discussing the homeless issue was pretty active so we entered that to check out the action during the previous 24 hours. There were 15 to 20 postings from a number of people that Ken recognized, including the mayor, a sociology professor at UCLA, a homeless advocate, a conservative fiscal watchdog, a city council person, and several others. I was impressed. Although public participation is not yet widespread, there definitely is more public discourse on the system than there is discourse in the vast majority of American cities.
Commentary on Electronic Conferencing/Democracy from The Well
"If a congressman, to give an example, joined PEN, and responded to a flow of political stuff by asking different people to summarize the discussion on key issues, ant then respond to each other's summaries, the level of discussion would go up, and the congressperson could then relate to the more developed conversation. When running a meeting, it's much easier to get members of the audience responding to each other thatn to play the need to respond to each speaker. If ten people in the audience speak before the leader responds, most of the work will already have been done. This could be a very creative use of conferencing and I look forward to its happening." Doug Carmichael
"Systems which fail, e.g. the non-technical Usenet groups, and from previous discussion possibly PEN or CM, do so because the people they are trying to attract (city officials) don't find an ambiance which attracts them due, partly, to the civility of the participants. While it would be nice to redefine codes of behaviour, and while it is appropriate for any system to try and encourage/ enforce those codes, it is in many waysimportant for system designers to understand the behaviours of users and design systems to attract the users/behaviour they want."
There are at least two examples working now (as far as I know) of what "electronic democracy" might be. Reading, PA has a city council that televises all of its budgetary and community develoopment hearings over TV. Through Berks County Community TV, there a few "interactive" TV origination points throughout town. Citizens can present testimony from those points as well as follow the progress of the debates. This has been going on for close to a decade.
Alaska has had a Legislative Teleconferencing Network since 1977. This is similar to the Reading model with legislators having open mike time to talk with their constituents and citizen groups having a chance (I think) to use some of the time for their own purposes. (I may be mistaken here.) They have also experimented with an Alaska TV Town Meeting in 1980 to determine what Alaskans wanted for a transportation policy.
This is how the experimenters I know of characterize Electronic Democracy: it is not for declaring war in the heat of the moment, it is for ongoing agenda setting discussions and the generation of "consensus" of some kind. By thinking of electronic democracy in terms of only "hot button" issues, the discussion narrows into unreality.
I think the online system should be conceived of as one of a number of tools used in a public campaign to address a community problem. For instance, after you've chosen a particular social problem you wish to deal with, you could announce the beginning of a public dialog on the subject by publishing a background article on the subject in the local newspaper. This would function much like a staff report presented by a city government to a city council. It would define the problem, provide basic information on the subject, and would announce the beginning of a dedicated area on the online system devoted to public discussion of the subject. And to encourage serious attention to the discussion online the kick-off newspaper article would say that the discussion would continue online for so many weeks after which time an online vote would be conducted to gauge people's opinions. The results would then be published and forwarded to elected representatives along with the transcripts of the discussions. Highlights of the discussion could also be published in the newspaper.
I will give you the one, obvious reason why Qube (interactive cable television system in Columbus Ohio in early 1980's) failed. It was based upon everyone just being able to 'vote' on public issues. The essence of politics is *discussion*, with the final vote a kind of necessary, legal, ritual. Qube had the ritual without the substance!