What the Readers Want

People usually don't much care how you, the elected official, make a decision. They just want to know whether they agree or disagree with you.

That insight was a surprise to me. I didn't begin this blog thinking that. I began my city council blog years ago sort of naively approaching my content as a former newspaper reporter. "People would appreciate a window into the decision-making process," I thought. "People would participate in the decision-making process," I thought, and appreciate the chance to do so.

There's no question people do want to participate in their democracy through town halls, committees, even blog forums on news sites. But they don't necessarily want their elected officials involved. They just want to know whether they disagree or agree with the elected official.

What I found over time was that after I described how I was making up my mind, and asked for feedback, people said I was being wishy-washy or indecisive. Sure - if you asked people in the abstract, they'd say they want their politicians to be open and thoughtful. What people have been trained to expect is for politicians to manipulate and deceive them. So it's a pretty long road to take if you try to involve the public in your decision-making process.

This comes to mind after reading a fascinating exchange on the blog of a fairly new city council member from Massachusetts, Ari Herzog. He's clearly a bit frustrated, and titles his blog "This Blog is for You, Not for Me." I'm not familiar with the specific issue referenced in the post, but it sounds like Ari had to vote on something where he had not heard from citizens. Apparently some citizens did not approve of his vote, and contacted him. He writes:

If you don’t share your thoughts with me before votes occur, it’s harder for me to appreciate a complaint after the fact ... if you don’t tell me what you think I need to know until after a vote occurs, how should I respond?"

His point in the blog post is, If you want an elected official to know something, tell them. The idea of a blog is to have one more way of exchanging information.

If you read down the page a bit, you see one of the comments to the blog perfectly summarizes what I've heard from a lot of citizens here on the other side of the United State:

In the end, we voted Councilors into office to make decisions even in the absence of our input. We don’t expect you to vote for each item based on a poll. We want you to make a conscious decision based on fact and then if/when appropriate explain your reasons. We reserve the right to disagree and obviously we’ll let you know! If we agree more than we disagree by the end of your term, maybe you can stay

Isn’t that how this works?

The citizen is right. That's how this works. Citizens have been trained to think that a politician asking for feedback is taking a poll - not honestly asking for help or collaboration.

That's how this works. Those of us who blog often wish there was another way.

Why We Do This

Preparing for the recent talk to other city council members in Washington, I hit up one of the best council bloggers in our state for a testimonial. Councilman Jon Snyder invests a lot of time into his blog for Spokane. Here's his well-spoken words about why he does this stuff:

The reason I blog is to be proactive in communication with citizen.

As a councilman, I am very close to the issues and engrossed in the nuances of policy, but if I forget to take the time explain those nuances to my constituents I leave the door open for other interpretations that may be based in ignorance.

My blog, my monthly email, and my Twitter and Facebook feeds have been invaluable in focussing attention to this issues I think are important and getting my message out. It also shows my constituents what I'm doing with the immense amount of time I put into public service.

Ultimately how you spend your time is one of the most important decisions you make as an elected official. My electronic communication helps create a story of that effort that people can understand and respond to.

Some of the biggest reaction I've ever had to blog entry would be a very detailed response I wrote about a very expensive and controversial downtown real estate purchase. You can see it here:

http://councilmanjonsnyder.com/?p=223#more-223

Most of my entries aren't this involved, but there are times when the blog is the best way to get complex treatment of an issue out to the public. I've found citizens respond positively to being talked up to instead of being talked down to. My weekly recap of our City Council meetings is my most popular regular blog feature. A lot of folks have thanked me for writing about Council meeting content that isn't being covered anywhere else. I usually announce new blog entries on Facebook and Twitter.

The biggest piece of advice I would give about blogs is settle on a minimum posting frequency and stick to it.

Jon writes something worth repeating for someone considering elected office or someone in office: "Ultimately how you spend your time is one of the most important decisions you make as an elected official."

That's a point worth contemplating often. It was astonishing to me, once I got elected, how many times people expected me to come to events in a ceremonial role. These things, and many other aspects of elected office, public service, and public policy, all take time. I've found when I spend time too much time communicating, it takes away time I would otherwise spend on research. However, besides all the advantages Jon notes above, communicating about something forces you to frame and focus on the topic in a focused way that can help you make, or reinforce, a decision. Communicating is vital.

Frankly, it tells me something about Jon that he's willing to take time to write, and fact check and self-edit, a post about elevator inspection fees. It tells me something good about him. When I look at my own workload, I find it pretty intimidating to write up topics in Lakewood to that level of detail. His desire to be definitive is impressive. I don't think all of us choose to be that definitive because of other demands on our time, but it's impressive to see in action.

How do other elected officials find time to communicate when there are so many other demands on their time?

A Change In Approach

It hit me with a dull thud, strolling from an air-conditioned conference center in Vancouver to a hot downtown street, that I've been going about this all wrong. Well, somewhat wrong.

By presenting twice now to my fellow city council members at the Association of Washington Cities .... by being in a "how to" webinar last January ... by helping in my own modest way with OpenGovWest ... I thought we'd help current elected representatives find new ways of using social media and other aspects of the so-called "Gov2.0" movement.

The brutal truth the other day in Vancouver at the 2010 Association of Washington Cities meeting was that co-presenter Everett Asst. City Attorney Ramsey Ramerman and I had probably a fourth of the people we had at the 2009 meeting of the Association of Washington Cities. Honestly, I'm not surprised. If you talk to a lot of city council members, they don't get it. They were elected without social media. They were elected without Gov. 2.0 Why bother? People are clamoring for more services and lower taxes. Isn't that enough of a challenge?

There are a few exceptions - the moderator of our panel, for example, City Councilwoman Jennifer Gregerson of Mukilteo. But in general, the currently elected folks are pretty ambivalent about diving into these waters. After the workshop, I spoke with two city council members thinking of blogging. Both are motivated by a lack of competent news coverage. So there's interest but ...

What I'm left to wonder is whether it's better to focus on the people who got elected last year who practice new forms of communication, and those of us few 'old fogeys' taking a swing at a better world of communication and democracy. Maybe we can share examples of how this stuff helps. So I'm going to take more of a focus on sharing best practices than trying to convert anyone. Maybe if those of us using the tools use them better, and share how that strengthens democracy, it will matter.

I sort of went down this path with the collection of city council bloggers I began on Friendfeed. But we need to share more aggressively. And of course there's a lot lot lot more to digital democracy than blogging, which is really a communication vehicle of last result for more politicians.

Still, blogging is what I know best. As part of prepping for the AWC meeting, I got a great note from Spokane Councilman Jon Snyder that explains why he blogs. I'll post that next week after the holiday, and try to do a better job of highlighting how a new generation - regardless of their chronological age - is using digital tech to strengthen public policy and democracy.

Neither Fish nor Fowl: Better Gov 2.0

As a city councilman, I found myself reflexively nodding my head up in down in agreement while reading the entire post. Citizens will often suggest solutions as well as concerns. But the ideas often end up floating in a big soup of words. When social media can make organizing possible, it's a win for the community. Just off the top of my head, I can think of one neighborhood situation described on my blog in which some great people found each other but it was very unstructured - just chatting on a blog. The tools described in this post are intriguing, and any elected official should want to know more.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Open Government West

Open Government West is just revving up on this second day. People from several states and British Columbia are gathered around, looking at the various proposals for presentations here in Seattle City Hall. We're all voting about what talks people would like to see and hear.

The picture from right is from yesterday, at a panel I helped moderate about social media policy and government. People were voting there too, this time on recommendations for how to best implement social media policy and government.

It's only normal to look at what's happening now in the light of what happened to you in the past. As I look back over my career, the most workshops I went to were staged by or for benefit of journalists, such as the National Writers Workshops. Journalists would gather for a couple of days and talk about reporting and writing. These sessions were always valuable for the people you met and for what you learned. The other day, at the first gathering of Social Media Club Tacoma, one of my former writers floored me by saying she remembered a writing technique I had taught her. I had picked up the technique at one of those national writers workshops.

There's clearly a need for something similar in the Open Government community. As I look around the room and pick out people I know, I see citizen activists, community organizers, a slew of Information Technology workers, Web techies, PR people, software developers, small business entrepreneurs, grad students from the Evans School at UW and officials who work in a variety of jobs and a variety of levels at a variety of government levels.

The challenge, of course, is that this is not a unified group of people who are used to meeting with each other. So it's an open question whether events like this will continue to take place. I hope they do. The group of us do not constitute a profession that naturally gathers. But we constitute a movement that believes passionately in the importance of communication and the dialogue of government. There are tools to be learned, challenges to overcome, opportunities to be recognized and articulated.

What makes me smile as I type is the biggest difference. Journalists were a profession that organized workshops. Open government believers are here a conference organizing a sort of profession. Five years from now, our vocabulary and tools about open government will be much broader than any of us can imagine. So will a new 'profession' - the profession of linking communication, data and democracy for better public policy and a better world.

The Webinar about Social Media, Cities and the Law in Washington State

The recording of a pretty detailed webinar about social media, digital communication, governments in Washington state, the law and cheese is up! It's available for your viewing pleasure. I tell people in all candor that it's about 75 minutes, so have coffee nearby. I'm very grateful to attorney Ramsey Ramerman for his lead role in, really, the state of Washington, in making important information known to local governments.

Here's the slideshow. We debated whether to post it separate from the webinar. We already got some feedback, well said, that we left something out. We really should have counseled elected officials and others to meet not only with attorneys but also their IT department. The computer people play a huge role in this, as we discuss in the webinar, and Ramsey and I agree we could have called that out better in the slides.

Friends, Faux Pas, Tweets and Traps: How Elected Officials Can Use Social Media and Comply with the Law

View more documents from Walter Neary.

Something that's a bit frustrating is that we don't really have an online forum anywhere to have an 'afterparty' to discuss what came up during the webinar. So the webinar happened, there was a good discussion, and then everyone dispersed. But someone familiar with the webinar's contents will probably enjoy the question and answer document which we worked on after the webinar was concluded.