Digital Democracy: Outreach Versus Mechanism for Change

Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President Joan Dempsey moderated a panel titled “Digital Democracy: Transparent Governance or Tyranny of the Majority?” on July 4, 2009, at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival. Dempsey, who is a special advisor to the U.S. Strategic Command on intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, and information operations, appeared alongside Lawrence Lessig, newly named a professor of law at Harvard Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society; John Palfrey, the Henry N. Ess Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and Beth Simone Noveck, U.S. deputy chief technology officer for open government. Dempsey provided these additional insights following the panel.

How much of digital democracy is real and how much of this is feel good, what you might call “wiki-washing?”

It’s one thing to improve public outreach, and I think all the initiatives the Obama administration is beginning are good ways to do that. They are good ways to inform decision-makers about what the general pubic thinks about issues. But you want an informed public playing into these processes. How do you bring along the federal bureaucracy, which is central to affecting change inside the government? It’s not enough to have good communications with the public if you don’t also bring along the departments and agencies.

That’s something the administration needs to take on. If all you do is improve the outreach, you haven’t succeeded in really changing anything. Then you’ve also created an expectation of change and you can’t deliver. That might be worse.

Don’t you also create an easier forum for uninformed opinion?

Right. If you replace wealth-fueled special interests with something else, how do you know if that something else is going to be any better? How do you know that you get informed policy debate, and how do you know that you’re not just creating a new form of special interests based on a digitally-savvy group?

Ms. Noveck referred to venture capitalists affected by public policy. And the Obama administration is reviewing its process for declassifying documents. Is digital democracy a way to reach out to a specific, informed community as a way to work through these issues?

I find it fascinating that the administration has taken on one of the most difficult issues it could have imagined taking on: how government information gets declassified and put out for public consumption. I spent 25 years in the government. A fair amount of that time, I was enmeshed in the internal debate over declassification. There are very few topics that are more emotional and in which the bureaucracies are more entrenched.

You asked the panelists, what does digital democracy look like. After listening to them, what do you think?

Anytime you can more actively engage the public in what government is doing, that is success. The real issue becomes, do you get enough benefit to warrant investment, and can you sustain it over time? Does it extend beyond the first or second term of the Obama administration and become part of the way the populace interfaces with the government? To me, that’s going to be a tremendous measure of whether this is just capitalizing on interesting social media or whether it will have staying power.

The question came up about social networking tools in the uprising in Iran. How are these media different under repressive regimes than in open democracies?

You can’t apply the same measures in a democratic government than in a repressive regime. The question I worry about is, what’s the backlash from using Twitter during the Iranian elections? Certainly we saw the Chinese after Tiananmen Square take a very hard-line approach because they knew the students were using the Internet to organize themselves. It will be interesting to watch to see what the longer-term Iranian response is.

Watch a Clip from the Panel Discussion

Watch a clip from the “Digital Democracy: Transparent Governance or Tyranny of the Majority?” panel.

Learn more about Booz Allen's participation in the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival.

story posted July 6, 2009