This Tuesday, I attended the Montreal NewTech meeting. The topic of the night was “social change”, where four start-ups presented their projects to the 30-people audience. The last presentation by Jennifer Bell, representing the non-profit start-up VisibleGovernment.ca, was the one that caught my attention most. The whole idea behind the VisibleGovernment.ca organization made me think of the MyBo website launched and administered by the Barrack Obama team during the 2008 US Presidential election. Furthermore, even if aggregation (centralization), transparency and democracy were the first words that came to my mind, this presentation also pushed my reflection forward to the concept of citizen empowerment which can be resumed as “the power to the citizens”, in comparison to the concept of customer empowerment, which can be simplified as “the power to the customers”. The concept of citizen empowerment is clearly presented in the talk offered by Internet guru Clay Shirky, especially in the last 3-4 minutes of his presentation, at the last TED conference (See video below; Thanks to my friend blogger Julie Lemonde for the link).
Customer empowerment and citizen empowerment
The concepts of customer empowerment and citizen empowerment are different in many ways. However, I argue that the two most important differences are in terms of benefits and competition structure.
One of the main differences between customer empowerment and citizen empowerment resides in the fact that they respectively involve private goods compared to public goods. For customer empowerment, lowering the cost of a product will benefit each customer who wants to buy this product, but for citizen empowerment, adding a public good such as new “traffic lights” will not necessarily benefit to every citizen, some of them will be frustrated to have to stop at these new “traffic lights”.
Furthermore, the competition structure of private markets is quite different from the one in governmental markets. Governmental markets are monopoly markets, which I agree becomes more like oligopoly markets (2 to 5 competitors) during election time or what we can refer to as promises time.
So should governments encourage citizen empowerment, or should they censor? Answering this question is like answering the question: what is the objective of a government? The objective is to govern. To govern for who? The citizens. So should the government listen to them? I guess Yes. But how to know what are important needs? By aggregating (centralizing) all the information to a single website and by listening to the citizens. What kind of website? Ask VisibleGovernment.ca. Most importantly, how do you win elections? By listening to the citizens. Are you obliged to say “yes” to everything they request? No, show that you care and use common sense such as “the greatest happiness principle” introduced by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Is this sounding like public relations (PR)? Totally. How does this differ from corporate PR? It does not differ. Just listen!
What Can Websites Such As VisibleGovernment.ca Do for Us?
Even if aggregation (centralization), transparency and democracy were the first three words that came to my mind when thinking about VisibleGovernment.ca, accessibility and connectedness are also important words to take in consideration. The website proposes all of the projects the organization is involved in, going from more municipal projects such as fixmystreet.ca to more federal ones such as disclosed.ca (for the complete list, you can click here).
Conclusion, Thoughts and Discussion
Last year before the elections, Canada’s actual Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced small culture cuts of $45 million for Quebec’s artists. Artists protested which culminated with the video “Culture en peril” (in French) that reached more than half a million views. Many political analysts argued that Harper lost his majority because of his indifference to Quebec citizens during that crisis. I just hope that Harper has learned from this mistake and will take advantage of online tools such as the one proposed by VisibleGovernment.ca to listen to what citizens have to say (write).
Interestingly, on my last two or three posts there has been interesting debates around the issues I mentioned in each of the post, but most of these exchanges took place on Facebook, feel free to exchange here on the website, it is more central and anyone (not only my Facebook friends) can join the debate.
To conclude, although the concept of citizen empowerment is an old concept, I think that with geographical distance, the web is the place where all thoughts can be centralized to foster the future of our society. Any ideas of websites like VisibleGovernment.ca in other countries? Am I idealistic when I think that citizen empowerment is good for democracy and for a healthy society? Feel free to join the conversation.
Jean-Francois Belisle
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