Introducing Civility

Context

This paper outlines the thinking behind the Civility, an iterative project with the potential to build a collaborative public interest network to better connect government, civil society and citizens.

The project is both practical, building better tools for stakeholder and community engagement, and political, constructing an alternative medium for engagement to the commercial platforms that regard user activity as an asset to be exploited.

It marries my business interests as executive director and majority shareholder of Essential Media with my civic work as founding director of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.

It stages out my thinking on the sort of business I want to build as well as the broader ecosystem I want to be operating in, coalescing around the insight that out of the disruption of the pandemic there is a technology hole to be filled that just might unlock our better angels.

It also speaks to the political moment we are in, when a new Labor Government committed to more collaborative decision-making has the opportunity to lead by sharing power with other elected representatives and with civil society.

In short, it proposes three discreet but inter-dependent initiatives:

· A set of digital tools to support collaborative engagement at a stakeholder, member and public level

· A public database of agreed insights to base collaboration around

· A community of registered users who would build a civic network of engaged citizens from the ground up.

It is being shared in the spirit of collaboration, with an invitation to actively engage as we work through the critical the process of testing these assumptions.

The Hole We Are In

Let’s start with the big picture: we are living in a polity that is becoming untenable: more of us are alienated from the political process; when we do engage it is as spectators of a gladiatorial contest rather than participants in civic life.

An increasingly professional political class surrounded by a technocratic bureaucracy and well-organised sectional interests have widened the gap between the public and their decision makers.

Meanwhile, the social platforms we entrust to host our public discourse are driven by secret algorithms designed to divide us.

The business models of social media platforms to render and monetise user behavioural data (as brilliantly described by Shoshana Zuboff https://shoshanazuboff.com ) groups people into self-reinforcing filter bubbles rather than exposing them to complexity ( as revealed by Eli Pariser https://www.elipariser.org ).

This is not just an academic argument. Globally we are seeing the hollowing out of civil democracy where performative culture wars are waged, disinformation is rife and common ground is elusive. We are also seeing the rise of populists and dictators across the globe, whose mastery of these tools of outrage and division have been harnessed to roll over the voices of moderation and civility.

As whistle blower Frances Haugen has exposed, the largest social network, Facebook (now branded as Meta), has been fully aware of the impact of its model and brazenly blasé to its implications on the well-being of its users.

Despite these deep structural flaws, digital platforms are increasingly responsible for civic engagement. Paying platforms to ‘reach’ citizens is baked into community engagement plans, some government departments actually require citizens to have a Facebook account before they can even participate in community consultations.

Civil society uses Facebook as the preferred tool to ‘find ‘supporters, using the micro-targeting and list-matching capability to pay their way to target audience news feeds, with suitably stark and emotive messages to cut through the noise. As I argued in a 2020 paper co-authored with David Parris <linkto: https://medium.com/@peter.lewis_91010/an-awkward-conversation-campaigning-in-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-cc54454cc85a> this creates real disconnect between mission and method for progressives, with all the self-reinforcing user engagement data hiding the fact that we keep on losing.

This all leads to a compelling argument for the development of civic networks that are not reliant on the algorithmic architecture of the Big Tech companies but are designed for a public purpose in support of our liberal democratic values. In work for the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology < https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/theausinstitute/pages/3479/attachments/original/1619644705/210428_-_public_square_paper__WEB_.pdf?1619644705> I have proposed a strawman of reimagination of the ABC to create such a network.

The logic of a publicly funded, independent civic network built on the Reithian principles of civic duty and cultural stewardship that underpin the national broadcaster are compelling. Meanwhile the need to ‘de-platform’ our public square from Big Tech is urgent. But I recognise the chances of reforming such a politicised institution are slim, expecting it to reform and reimagine from the inside in the midst of a culture war is wishful thinking. If we are serious about building alternative spaces we need it do it from the outside. And we need to do it from the ground up.

The Covid Disruption

One of the really striking things to me about the pandemic was how useless social media was when the world seemed like it was imploding. Rather than providing the infrastructure for a united community response, the platforms were the vessels for the spread of fear and disinformation, anxiety and obsession: the platforms became a problem to be solved, with public health warnings for a doom scrolling public to disconnect for their own mental well-being.

Thankfully, there was other technology that was more useful. On Day One of the first lockdown I was invited into a community briefing organised by the Centre for Australian Progress to be on a new video platform, Zoom, that I had never previously used. I had rarely even used Skype but seeing all these faces, in a single field, with the capacity to communicate with each other on multiple planes (on camera, on chat, via direct message and later in smaller break-out rooms) felt to me like a safe harbour.

I determined my business could do something useful through the disruption by embracing this new toolkit and creating a daily point of connection for the people working across progressive civil society. For the first 13 weeks of lock-down 1.0 we convened a daily lunchtime talk ‘Australia at Home;’ inviting different organisations, pollies, civil society actors to enter the space. We regarded each session as an event, a chance to listen to some ideas, be heard and just be together. Rev Tim Costello conducted an Easter service, Billy Bragg zoomed in on May Day to sing Solidarity Forever, Sharan Burrow jumped in from Brussels, Malcolm Turnbull even turned up to flog his book.

This sense of creating an event in shared space took hold and, like many others, we started hacking the technology for different uses and creating a new business line which helped sustain us through those early months of uncertainty. We ran a conference for young people with disability, we facilitated roundtables with aged care homes and the families of people. We ran focus groups where participants simply logged in and shared their views from their loungeroom. We helped unions convene formal meetings complying with archaic voting rules,

Along the way we created a new aesthetic: not so much a show to be streamed on cheap TV, but a space to be filled by the participants, where active curation and ongoing connection with a live audience smashed down the fourth wall of politics and welcomed everyone onto the stage. It seemed to me we were not just creating a new way of connecting in a time of distance, we were building a new medium, where participants were closer to the action. Barriers to engagement were broken down — no longer was participation determined by physical proximity. You could feed the kids, do the dishes, and log in for an hour of civic engagement before the passive Netflix experience.

While Mark Zuckerberg was imagining and then hyping up his Meta-verse, a virtual online realm where we would give up even more of ourselves through his oculus headset, we were building a civic virtual reality. Zuckerberg is wrong on so many levels, but he is right in the sense that the web is becoming deeper. When we were running a lovingly-curated Virtual Town Hall, we weren’t just on the internet — we were in it — and shared space with other participants was real. If the Meta version is realised the need to have a public square for civic engagement free of his model of the monetization of user behaviour will become even more urgent. But regardless of Meta we are all going in deeper.

The Second Screen

Two years into the pandemic and we are moving to the ‘living with covid’ stage and our fatigue with mediums like Zoom is real and growing. We are keenly aware of the benefits of face-to-face interactions and the pitfalls of a purely virtual existence. As many organisations moved to a hybrid model, where typically some participants will be in a physical location and others will be joining virtually, there is a further design challenge in equalising the experience of participants.

Additionally, there is an ongoing realisation that the cost and carbon required for routine interstate and international travel creates a real onus on virtual connections as the baseline interaction. The limitations of the existing video-networking technology are also becoming more apparent. The basic tools of chat, QandA and share screen are fine as far as they go, but they tend to shape flat, one-dimensional transactions.

It is unsurprising that we have adapted these interactions to fit with the available technology and this approach has served us well through a once in a century interruption to transmission. But now we have a chance to design a suite of engagement tools to meet the needs of civic and civil society organisations and, critically, to capture more actionable insights from these interactions.

The best virtual interactions will be supported by bespoke tools that sit separate from the video platform, like the Miro virtual whiteboard and research visualisation tools like the Menti suite that can add texture to the interactions. But until now, there hasn’t been real thought about building a toolkit to support the specific collaborations that give civic society, and its relationship with government its real power.

Neither has there been a systematic process to capture and analyse and better understand the feedback from participants in these events. Apart from cumbersome Xcel spread sheets of chat and the guest list, these events are ephemeral; they occur and then they are over. And while there is much to love about the moment, there is so much more magic that could be tapped.

It starts with building a methodology to tap the potential. Not just holding online events, but designing interactions to achieves clearly articulated objectives such as:

· building a shared understanding of an issue

· building trust between stakeholders

· co-designing better solutions

· extracting deeper insights

Over time this gives us the potential to build a replicable and scalable base of tools that can be adapted for different collaboration process between government, civil society, members and citizens.

· Stakeholder engagement tools — user-centred design processes to identify and interrogate policy issues

· Community engagement tools — toolkits to support public consultations

· Public research tools — integrating existing real-time and over0-time qualitative techniques to provide richer insights.

It starts with imagining a ‘second screen’ experience for all events that would be designed to support a user-centred methodology that improves the experience of the participants and better captures the insights gleaned. Before a virtual, real-life or hybrid event participants would download a Civility page specifically designed for the event.

This would be anchored by a series of modules designed to support event facilitators fulfil specific functions:

· User introductions — forums to allow participants to share basic information, interests and postcode

· Temperature check — research tools such as word-clouds and basic surveys to gauge the mood of the room or attitudes to a specific issue or proposition

· Feedback loops — sliders to monitor in real time reactions to ideas, concepts or creatives

· Reflection tools — feedback surveys and forms to better understand the participant experience

Nicholas Davis, an Australian who spent more than a decade leading thinking on innovation for the World Economic Forum, — including co-authoring the Fourth Industrial Revolution <https://www.weforum.org/focus/fourth-industrial-revolution> has been working through a similar hypothesis. Over the past two years he has developed a series of simulation tools that allow government and corporate leaders to imagine future scenarios and build hypotheses. These are available to adapt for the Civility project.

Over the past months we have begun piloting these ‘second screen’ modules in trial consultations including a series of Virtual Town Halls for disability advocates to coordinate activity. This has reinforced our hypothesis that capturing more information at the event leads to better user experience.

We have begun to incorporate the second screen into our qualitative research particularly where we are running a large number of groups through an ongoing project, such as a federal election campaign. Currently each group exists as a standalone, participants largely talk on screen and rate creative in the Zoom chat. Each report is reported on individually to the client. Incorporating second screen tools into these groups, would allow for feedback to be aggregated, especially when rating mood, identifying issues, sharing impressions of leaders and testing creative. This would allow us to build a ‘client dashboard’ which would provide access insights form all groups, potentially with rolling feedback on individual creative and its iterations.

During the pilot phase of the project we are deploying existing tools and manually entering relevant insights during the course of the event. However, should the pilot show there is benefit and appetite we would look to build a standalone software.

In this future, the collaborative tools could be licensed to government departments, organisations and individual consultants, who could be trained in the facilitation methodology. A free version could also be made available to local community organisations. If successful, we would be in a position to provide government, civil society and local communities with the tools to better collaborate and truly understand each other.

Creating a framework to give representative bodies and their members real input into issues that effect them would also fundamentally change government from transaction to collaboration. For example, using the toolkit a Minister could design a process that starts with a stakeholder roundtable to identify issues, convene community forums involving members of stakeholder groups and members of the general public and then test messaging through members or general public. This would provide quantum improvements in the way in which policy is designed, iterated and communicated with the public. The second screen tool could also be utilised by representative bodies to better engage their members in the collaboration process and the specific workings of their specific institution.

But it’s what could go on under the surface that is even more exciting,

The Insights Engine

Building a better engagement tool kit for government and civil society is just the first step.

In answering the recurring baseline question: What do we already know? there is the potential to build a valuable base of shared knowledge to better drive these civic engagements. Rather than looking at research and insights as transactions can we think of them as a renewable resource, each project building on the next?

It is important to stress here that this is not a data acquisition enterprise. Government and civil society are awash with data, too much of it collected and fashioned to target individuals with ads or political messages. The triumph of the social media platforms has also been the triumph of marketing over genuine engagement. What we are missing is agreed insights, information that explains the ‘why’, rather than the ‘what‘ and the ‘who’.

It is this sort of information that can be gleaned from virtual engagement projects — how are people feeling about their world? How does this differ from other sections of society? What things move people to shift their thinking? What ideas inspire them to become more active within their communities? By capturing the insights from our stakeholders, community and public collaborations is only the tip of what could be a giant insights iceberg that could guide our work.

Going back to my original proposition, if the breakdown of agreed facts lies at the centre of much of our civic discord; when people are served different virtual realities is it any wonder they end up living in parallel universes?

But even our own progressive consensus tends to be fragmented and elusive. Because political engagement has been transactional, the evidence base that drives politics becomes compromised:

· Public opinion research to persuade pressure decision-makers with performative public support, including fatally compromised robot-polls that simply harvest the most superficial of data from improbable samples.

· Economic modelling and policy analysis from a phalanx of progressive thinktanks, with different methodologies and finding models.

· Academic research — produced and represented in a manner that sometimes appears designed to render the insight impregnable.

· Previous government reviews and inquires, with varying degrees of robustness and political imperative.

Currently each project exists as a single transaction, the findings may be public released via a media or a webinar, sometimes even given a home online, but each piece of research sits alone. When embarking on a fresh project, gathering the available information becomes a hunting expedition where a Google search finds you the links to the relevant papers, there may even by a Wikipedia entry offers the ‘wisdom of the masses’.

Imagine a system where all this intellectual energy was processed and archived, using an agreed ontology that meant that they could be more easily accessed and understood. Rather than being managed by SEO strategies, information could be sorted and managed by (human) archivist and analysts who would build a standard ontology and then capture and codify information with that framework.

A standard ontology increases the values of insights exponentially. Collecting information in a common format means that it can be archived and sorted, compared and analysed to understand differences and similarities. For example, a standard ontology would allow governments speaking with people in different regions to better compare perceptions, or decision-makers to understand when an issue is running ‘hot’.

Critically it would also provide an evidence base to commence each collaborative project which would start with the simple question — what do we already know? The focus would then identify gaps in understanding and then agree to jointly interrogate them with a co-designed stakeholder, community or public consultation. Of course, there would be different perspectives and conclusions, but if these emanated from an agreed baseline of evidence, at least the discussion can remain focussed.

The findings of this process would then feed into the existing evidence base. I’ve conceived of this process as being akin to a renewable resource — driven by an ‘engine; of agreed facts, which is constantly building on itself. How would the engine work?

· Provides agreed base of facts to inform a project

· Participants identifies gaps or change sin external environment

· New research project is co-designed

· De-personalised findings/insights feed into Engine at completion.

What could sit in the engine? A few simple examples:

· Public research: My company Essential runs a fortnightly public omnibus on political and social issues, n = 1000, ABS weighted in partnership with Guardian Australia. We have more than 15 years of back work sitting on file. We have conducted hundreds if not thousands of standalone qualitative and quantitative projects over that period. While we always endeavour to use best practise research designs (five-point spreads, non-leading design, creating benchmarks wherever possible) we have never systematically ordered this information. Imagine the value to any new project if we had a robust base on attitudes, demographics and trendlines over time. Now imagine if the progressive research companies we compete with for work did the same, recognising that sharing research outputs in a common ‘data lake’ would offer far greater insight.

· Progressive thinktanks — we have no shortage of progressive thinktanks (Aust Institute, Per Capita, a phalanx of bodies named after former Labor leaders ( Chifley ,Whitlam, Curtin, McKell) the more centrist Grattan Institute , The Centre for Policy Development, university initiatives like Sydney Uni’s Sydney Policy Lab and a range of smaller outfits like my own CRT. They produce a mix of commissioned, philanthropically-funded and self-directed research. While individual think tanks no doubt house their research, there is no common approach to present insights, modelling or other data that would allow each project to inform the next consolidating this formidable body of work into a searchable issues database would provide a starting point for any policy collaboration.

· Academic collaborations — long-term projects like the ARC Centre for Automatic Decision-Making and Society, a seven-year process to build an ecosystem of research into the impact of I on broader society is currently focussed on producing a series of PhDs. Building a model where field research is conducted within an agreed ontology and findings are regularly fed in would significantly increase the value of this research by making it accessible in real-time to policy collaborations.

· More broadly, laudable attempts to connect academia with broader public debates though projects like the Conversation have ended up with issues-base reportage of research. Ordering and codifying the work underpinning these interventions would be of more enduring value.

Staging this thinking out shows how with investment and over time, it would be possible to build a compelling bank of agreed, evidence-based knowledge, offering up a more granular and manageable wisdom of the masses. With focus and care, this could become the central civic evidence-base we are currently so sorely missing.

Re-Awakening the Netizen

In 1993 internet theorist Michael Hauben coined the phrase: Netizen, recognising the collaborative underpinnings of the world wide web.

There are people online who actively contribute towards the development of the Net. These people understand the value of collective work and the communal aspects of public communications. These are the people who discuss and debate topics in a constructive manner, who e-mail answers to people and provide help to new-comers, who maintain FAQ files and other public information repositories, who maintain mailing lists, and so on. These are people who discuss the nature and role of this new communications medium.

Hauben was describing people whose notion of citizenship was separated from geographical bonds, part of the idealistic imaging of a web without borders.

The active collaboration of users has given way to a more passive online consumer, whose online experience has been shaped to click and share voraciously in order to produce more and more user behavioural data to drive the platforms’ business models.

An active model of civic collaboration as outlined above, supported by all level of government and a vibrant network of unions, industry associations and NGOs could re-awake Hauber’s vision. Through this project there is the opportunity to create a network of participants who want to engage civil, civic discussions and build an online citizen identity.

The starting point would be the idea that any individual to takes part in a collaboration — be it a community consult, a public meeting or a policy roundtable would be required to register for the event. Registering as a real person is, I believe critical, in building a culture of civility online; an antidote to the false personas and trolls that pollute other networks. (This is not to say there is not a place for anonymity of real identity where someone does not feel they can express themselves freely. But this should be by exception rather than rule, with clear frameworks and protocols built to protect identity while building personal accountability).

Different social platforms have different norms and rules; it is clear the anonymity of Twitter breeds a different culture than the professional visage of LinkedIn, where people have a real stake in the way they conduct themselves. Following a collaboration these registered users would be given the option of ‘exhausting’ their registration details or keeping it as a public facing profile of users of the not-for-profit insights engine described above.

When I think of what this network could look like it feels like a civic version of LinkedIn, our interests and interactions as a citizen captured in the same way many of us manage our professional connections on LinkedIn.

· Registered users would have the option of listing their civic interests and build an archive of the events they have attended and, critically, have access to the insights gleaned from these interactions.

· They may have the option of participating in discussion boards or ongoing policy forum around issues that interest them

· They would receive forward notice of upcoming collaboration in areas of interest.

· And critically, they could be given access to the collaboration tools to organise civic events in their own neighbourhoods.

Of course, the barrier to overcome would be the network effect: would there be sufficient participants to make this a viable and self-sustaining community. There are a range of possibly complimentary strategies to build this network:”

· organically though civic collaboration projects — which have the potential to reach tens of thousands of users assuming the tools work scale.

· a collaboration with an existing social network like Linked In or Nextdoor where existing users are given the option of building a civic profile that could even integrate with their existing network identity.

· a co-venture with a government-funded public broadcaster. As outlined at the outset, the idea of partnering with the ABC and its network of x million users, millions of whom will soon be registered through IView (albeit for pure content marketing purposes) is attractive but, given the febrile political environment, not practical; that said, seeking a small scale collaboration such as building out a qualitative element around the currently qualitative Australia Talks project would be an opportunity to test assumptions.

· An alternate partner could be SBS, which still has a significant user base and has greater freedom in operating in a commercial environment. Pointedly, SBS has a charter to actively engage in its communities of interest, particularly those CALD and other marginalised groups. Imagine a process where the Civil Space tools are deployed to drive an ongoing process of community engagement could provide the anchor this project needs to scale.

A Model to Support a Civic Network

While there is a clear opportunity to commercialise the engagement tools outlined in this paper, it would be critical that the data is held and controlled by a not-for-profit, public interest organisation working to fulfil this charter, rather than a for-profit enterprise looking commercial the insights.

Much like the Guardian is established as a trust with the purpose of promoting the interests of journalism, this base of data would be maintained, indexed and built on with the express purpose of building an evidence-based consensus and supporting civil discussion, embodied in a public charter.

Any business model in providing access to and analysis of the insights engine for government and civil society organisations would be designed to fund the team of human archivists, analysis and technicians who would manage the engine.

The rules and structure of this pool of insights would itself give rise to a project in building a best practise public interest data resource, drawing on the best thinking around ethical and responsible technology.

This could include:

· Privacy rules that give users real agency into how information was used, with explicit limits on the individuation of insights and their use for commercial purposes.

· Data trust structures that ensure that any benefits from insights and information is accrued for the benefits of the users of the platform

· Commitment to and ongoing development of best practise moderation frameworks, with a bias to human facilitation and archiving rather than automation. I particular building on the work of Australian Community Managers to build industry-wide standards in online facilitation that build and nurture online community rather than exploit it.

· Development of information tools and algorithms designed to create friction and exposure to other ideas rather than simply providing more of what we already like. This would draw on Robert Elliott-Smith’s thinking around the ‘edge of chaos’ and the way systems are stronger when there is noise and nuance rather than certainty.

The development of these systems could themselves be both a test of and a product of the project’s virtual collaborative models with policy makers, academics, civil society and members of the broader public invited to play an active role in the design process.

Over time the Civility could become its own civic engagement sandpit, with each of the individual projects building insights to inform the next, embracing that idea of knowledge as a renewable resource yet again.

Supporting the Vision

Working backwards what we end up with is:

· a self-sustaining civic network that delivers real value for governments, citizens and civil society

· anchored by a network of engaged citizens who see politics as a form of civic responsibility rather than a spectator sport

· built on a common evidence-base that gets stronger with each new collaborative project.

· fed by best practise engagement tools that allow institutions to share power with their publics.

Civility could be a place for developing a civic consensus, building social cohesion and reawakening faith in our democratic processes.

For those who see value in this vision, there are simple ways you can support this project:

· if you are a member-based organisation or not for profit you can start using our engagement tools — I promise it will make for better user experiences

· If you are in the research or consulting game you could join us I thinking through how to create more value by sharing insights more broadly

· If you are in academia or policy you could embrace the project to design a civil network

· If you are in government — whatever level — you could think how you could support this work.

This is only a conversation-starter but the project has begun and it will only be stronger with your active participation.

Peter Lewis

June 2022