As part of our TICTeC work bringing together civic tech practitioners, we are running a community of practice for Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations (“PMOs”).
The other week we ran a session looking at “Subnational PMOs”, and this blog post is to work through what I’ve learned from the speakers, why that was a bad name for the session, and how it’s shaping my thinking on our future UK and international work.
Finding projects I want to learn from
As the name suggests, a Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation is a civil society/non governmental organisation that observes and monitors what happens in a Parliament. It’s a term that’s used internationally to help draw together and network organisations doing this work in different places.
My key interest here is that we run TheyWorkForYou, seen internationally as one of the first civic tech enabled PMOs (and it’s a delight to see new projects like Thailand’s Parliament Watch continue to cite us as an inspiration).
The trouble I’m having is in jumping between international work (where we say ‘PMO’ a lot), and long term planning for our UK services —where I see some of the key democratic problems/opportunity areas as further away from Parliament, but still something that logically fits within TheyWorkForYou.
I’ve got two “problems” here.
In the UK, I’m trying to think about what our approach should be to new levels of devolution in the UK. For international readers, the UK is an unusually centralised state, with a few layers of weak local government and a semi-federal arrangement in some areas of the country, but not others. In recent years, there has been more devolution to the larger cities and elected mayors. But this is a structure that doesn’t fit well within the framework of TheyWorkForYou, and needs new approaches.
Internationally, I’m trying to understand how we can add value in joining up organisations that wouldn’t otherwise know about each other. Joining up PMOs isn’t a new idea, and we don’t want to duplicate work with other regional networks. So part of looking subnationally is trying to learn more about organisations that may or may not consider themselves to be PMOs, and may be less discoverable (to us and each other) through the channels that already exist.
Ideally these two problems have some overlap in the solution. But the first step was to find some organisations doing what can badly be described as “subnational PMO” work. Fortunately, we found two (more detail below)! And this has helped me refine our thinking about what we’re actually trying to do here, and how we might better discover these groups in future.
Moving beyond Parliaments
I think the first thing we need to do is generalise PMOs: the term I’m thinking about is ‘Democratic Transparency Organisations (DTOs)’. Here’s a working definition:
Democratic Transparency Organisations are projects that [rework / create] public information about [democratic institutions / politicians] to improve [transparency / accountability / standards / efficiency].
The important bits of this definition for me are:
- DTOs will generally build on existing data from one or many institutions, but can also create new analysis or data.
- Their focus is democratic institutions – generally elected representatives, but could include scrutiny/transparency of citizens assemblies.
- Their role isn’t passive —it is to change the democratic system they are a part of. While the theory of change may differ, the goal isn’t to just record, but make things different.
This captures what I generally consider to be a PMO, but is also language that captures projects that share the same spirit. The tools of PMOs are a strategy that DTOs adopt when faced with democratic institutions that look like parliaments. But lots of democratic institutions do *not* look like parliaments —and these need a different approach.
Subnational DTOs
When we talk about subnational DTOs, there’s a lot of things that can be covered with the language of PMOs. Many state/devolved legislatures fit perfectly into the general model of elected representatives who are in parties and have debates, votes, etc.
But there’s a transition to entirely different forms of democratic institutions that the PMO model works less well for. The forms of democratic institutions become more varied, and the number of institutions to deal with increases.
DTOs aimed at the sub-national/municipality level have a different set of problems and these are in some respects harder problems. If your goal is to explain subnational democracy in a country, you have massively increased the scope of the work. This now involves thousands of politicians rather than hundreds, and hundreds/thousands of institutions rather than one or two.
This means a huge amount more foundational work and that changes the kind of project that’s viable. As such, even when PMO tools might be appropriate, the scale of the work makes them more inaccessible than other approaches.
Benefits of local DTOs
The scope of decisions made below the national level means improving the flow of data and understanding can have a substantial impact on public policy and the lives of citizens. Often the policy changes that have the biggest impacts on people’s day-to-day lives are made at the local level. Huge amounts of decisions and adaptation in climate especially involve local action.
The theory of change of local DTOs is the same as national ones: improving democracy through usage by citizens, civil society and official institutions.
- Citizens: Creates better feedback loops between citizens and representatives — better principal-agent alignment.
- Civil Society: Gives new tools to infomediaries (journalists, academic, CSOs) to understand, share information, and take action.
- Institutional: Creates internal efficiencies for the representative organisation(s) by making their own information more accessible/inspire improvements.
For each of these, national PMOs can hit a sweet spot of effort/cost to impact. But for each of these paths, different approaches may be more cost effective at the local level.
Going wide – Querido Diário
Querido Diário is a project that aims to bring together and make searchable the government gazettes for every city in Brazil (of which there are over 5,000). The goal is to create a national level database of decisions made in every municipality.
This evolved out of Open Knowledge Brazil (OKB)’s national level projects looking at public spending data. There often isn’t great data at the national/federal level, but this gets worse the more local you go. However, if information is technically available but horribly fragmented, this is something that civic tech can try and address from the outside. As there isn’t an API of government decisions available, OKB are building it themselves.
When you’re trying to build a project covering hundreds or thousands of different institutions, you have to do more work further down the value chain just bringing the data together before you can analyse it. For instance, in the UK, we’ve ended up being the holders of the best list of local authorities, because we needed that to power our climate analysis. The uses of that base layer are a bit abstract,- but it is the foundation that is required for highly impactful services.
In the case of Querido Diario, Diários do Clima builds on top of this base layer to create a service specifically looking at new environmental and climate regulations in all municipalities covered. Having this information in one place makes cross-city comparisons of climate action possible. As well as making gazettes easier to search for local journalists or civil society, this dataset enables subject areas journalists and researchers to do new cross cutting analysis.
Lowering the cost of accessing all local information helps people and organisations with subject matter expertise do work that would otherwise be unviable or incomplete. The scope of Querido Diario shows the challenges of scale when going wide —but also the big rewards of joining up the data.
Going deep – Datos que hacen Ciudad
An alternative to covering lots of municipalities is to build a service catering to one.
Datos que hacen Ciudad’s goal is to create better information about Santiago de Cali, a city in Colombia. The project includes familiar PMO approaches of displaying information about representatives, but is also consciously aimed towards getting better information to those representatives. The theory of change here is “If we give our leaders more information, it will lead to better decisions.” Through councillors sharing information on their areas of focus/problem areas, Datos que hacen Ciudad can both provide that information to citizens, and shape the information to be sourced and created.
One of the complexities of local governance is that they are best understood as a patchwork of different institutions. This project makes that complexity an advantage —it’s a partnership of different local institutions, pulling on resources and knowledge from different places, with a key anchoring in the university.
This feedback loop between decision makers and different groups helps create highly localised information. Data collection and analysis catering to the exact needs of decision makers can be more sensitive to local patterns than generalised national data.
The different approaches use expertise and technical knowledge in different ways, and can work constructively together:making the data of different cities more accessible helps local analysis pull on other polices and data better.
What can we learn from this?
A key takeaway, in terms of finding other organisations to connect and learn from, is that we should be looking for examples based around cities and municipalities (rather than language around ‘subnational PMOs’). This isn’t always what we’re trying to apply it to,- but they’ll be more discoverable and the approaches might be more generalisable.
In terms of work in the UK, ‘deep’ vs ‘wide’ represent different approaches. Our natural inclination at mySociety is to do ‘wide’ projects and be a foundational service. But funding wise, it’s difficult to score well in competitive bids with this approach (we’ll keep making the case, but it’s a recurring obstacle).
For new levels of devolution, it’s not just a transparency problem but a place-making problem, which requires tailoring approaches to different areas. Doing a better job in current and future devolution means more partnerships with local institutions that can shape the work towards what is most useful. Alongside that, less abstract work with a clear place based approach might be an easier sell.
In new mySociety projects, we tend to work with partners to pull in greater expertise and have a bigger impact. In our core democracy work, we’re getting back towards partnering with volunteers. We’ve thought about being accessible to students in our crowdsourcing approach (and have a few in our current cohort)– but this could go further: for instance, a more direct partnership with a London or Manchester-based university would be good for anchoring how we treat covering the respective mayors.
In general the future of TheyWorkForYou’s devolution approach may need an element of partnership with existing organisations, or incubating new groups. Going local means scaling up — and we need to find sustainable ways of doing that.
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Image: Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash.
