Vanessa Herringshaw at Making All Voices Count: ” …I’ve been reading over the incredibly rich and practically-orientated research and practice papers already on the Making All Voices Count website, and some of those coming out soon. There’s a huge amount of useful and challenging learning, and I’ll be putting out a couple of papers summarising some important threads later this year.
But as different civic tech and accountability actors prepare to come together in Brighton for Making All Voices Count’s final learning event later this week, I’m going to focus here on three things that really stood out and would benefit from the kind of ‘group grappling’ that such a gathering can best support. And I aim to be provocative!
- Improving state responsiveness to citizens is a complex business – even more than we realised – and a lot more complex than most interventions are designed to address. If we don’t address this complexity, our interventions won’t work. And that risks making things worse, not better.
- It’s clear we need to make more of a shift from narrow, ‘tactical’ approaches to more complex, systems-based ‘strategic’ approaches. Thinking is developing on how to do this in theory. But it’s not clear that our current institutional approaches will support, or even allow, a major shift in practice.
- So when we each look at our individual roles and those of our organisations, are we part of the solution, or part of the problem?
Let’s look at each of these in turn….(More)”