People-Powered Policy
Image credit: John Jennings (Unsplash)
Today, on Bastille Day 2020, President Emmanuel Macron announced the results of a major new project: to listen, learn and gather actionable policy solutions generated by nearly 200,000 French citizens.
Bold leaders listen
What to do as we enter a post-COVID world? Every government on Earth is grappling with this wicked problem and now urgently seeking solutions. Macron is one of the rare leaders who knows how to listen - not just to experts, but to citizens.
We achieve this through best-in-breed machine-learning technology: the Assembl platform, which has been developed by our partners Bluenove with whom we at Liminal share a common goal: to harness the power of collective intelligence.
France has seen its fair share of political discontent in recent years. Assembl was used previously on the 2019 ‘Grand National Debate’ triggered in part by the Gilets Jaunes movement. Macron’s team once again picked Assembl to aggregate and analyze a vast new dataset generated from digital and physical citizen consultations on COVID-19.
Liberate Open Data
Fast-forward to today. During the COVID-19 crisis, more than a dozen large-scale citizen consultations were conducted in order to imagine "the world after coronavirus" This data-gathering exercise was led by independent players in the French civic tech ecosystem: all data was anonymised, and made open.
The crisis naturally sparked significant engagement. Nearly 200,000 citizens participated, 100,000 ideas and 1.7m votes were cast on solutions arising from these debates.
But how to make sense of it all?
The task was to aggregate and analyse the data, and draw representative summaries in a very short timescale. An unprecedented experiment in collective intelligence was now under way.
Software is strategy
A key part of our understanding of collective intelligence is that people close to problems are the best ones to provide solutions.
This network-centric idea is no mere utopian vision. Now formalised in the idea that leadership starts at the bottom it has become a central doctrine of modern military planning. Who better to ask for solutions than those in the front-ranks, in the line of fire?
Accordingly, citizens should not be second-guessed, guided or steered into answers. The Assembl technology embodies this philosophy, by allowing input from people speaking freely instead of merely voting on an existing idea, or filling in a structured survey.
While the technical challenge is far harder, the reward is much richer, a more fruitful set of solutions than could otherwise be gathered. In this case, eight major themes were uncovered: a hundred challenges for government were extracted, and over six hundred proposed solutions were found.
What this shows is clear: if you ask people about their problems, they bring solutions too. Whether in business, or society at large, all you need to do is have the courage to listen.
Start making sense
If you would like to know more about our work in collective intelligence, and how you can gain advantage from using Assembl, please get in touch now.
