This year for starters I attended Katy Rubin’s Legislative theatre: Joyful and Participatory Policy Change

In a fun and high energy introduction to the method we acted out a real scenario of students feeling disempowered by a mock election. Then we iterated and acted out other possible outcomes, testing them and giving feedback on what might or might not make more empowering ways for the students to have an experience of democracy.

That was a little taste of this award winning democratic process that enables those most affected by an issue to devise policy together in real time, in the same room with policymakers, agencies and stakeholders. It’s a method that is practical, direct and equitable. 

My takeaway from this workshop was how this embodied prototyping of ideas could be a great way of testing recommendations produced in deliberative forums like citizens assemblies and juries and making them more robust and likely to be adopted. More about Katy’s work here.

My second course from the menu was Jon Alexander’s Rituals and Totems which looked at the dominant moral stories through which society has transitioned. Jon’s recent book Citizens details how the narrative has shifted historically from individuals being dependent subjects to passive consumers and that currently a new citizen shift is taking place where people find meaning through felt agency and active creation

Using this lens our workshop activity was to explore the ways in which local councils are currently stuck in the ‘service provider’ role to residents, seen as consumers. We identified rituals (day-to-day working practices that embed the story of what an organization is) that belong to this transactional consumer story, e.g “Democratic Services Officers”, consultation feedback such as “You said, We did”, councils engaging in commercial activity such as selling recycling bins, etc.

We ended by looking at culture hacks that might help local authorities shift from a service provider mindset to a community power mindset. Ideas from my small group included increasing community budgets and removing the word ‘service’ from job titles.

And last but not least, for dessert, I participated in Phoebe Tickell’s - How to be an imagination activist workshop which shared her experiences of bringing imagination to the London Borough of Camden Council. In a time when both locally and globally we’re facing huge challenges, crises and uncertainties, our linear, reactive thinking, processes and structures are clearly not working. From this perspective how can we afford not to think differently and engage our imagination and creativity?

This logic underpins the ‘Camden Imagines’ work that is training 30 officers to unleash their latent imagination and creativity and expand this outwards to the whole council and the 300,000 people of the borough. It was fascinating to learn of a council bold enough to move beyond linear thinking and willing to explore a creative paradigm shift in making positive local change.

In groups of four, our participatory activity in this workshop was for a project holder to think of a personal project, ask themselves “What would you do if you had the fearless confidence you would succeed?” and then speak from that point of view. The other 3 participants responded to the project holder’s ideas from the specific perspectives of doubt, future generations and past ancestors. Each of these multi perspectival conversations gave new insights for the project holder and participants alike.

#NotWestminster came to a close with everyone making a pledge on a postcard.

This year mine was the following:

The organization referred to is the Co-Intelligence Institute. My invitation to anyone who attended  #NotWestminster reading this is to check out our new website and the associated Wise Democracy Pattern Language.

An American friend’s perspectives on #NotWestminster

A few weeks before this event a good US based friend of the Co-Intelligence institute Laura Rigell, a Convening Organizer for an American foundation, had written to colleagues in Europe asking us what noteworthy happenings would be worth checking out.

I told her: come to NotWestminster!

So to end this article she has kindly shared some of her thoughts on the event.
Here are her notes

• Hearing about The Democracy Network reminded me of efforts to knit together the democracy-related field in the US, being undertaken by More Perfect and more informally by the Critical Connections Forum. I was impressed by how well-funded and organized they are as well as by their intentions to run collective campaigns and encourage groups to have a community-mindset in terms of how they pursue and talk about their work and that of others. 
  Seemed to be a bit different than the conversation in the US, which does include some thinking about each approach having an important role to play, but still seems pretty bogged down in critique of each other's work.

• The UK is far ahead of the US in terms of a rapidly expanding demand for citizen assemblies by local councils. Reflecting on Kelly McBride’s session Trusting the people: easier said than done I wonder how the US could learn from the experience here, to jump ahead and arrive more quickly at a transformative process?

  Such as:

• Intentionally incorporating a plan for accountability and implementation from the start of the process, including planned out avenues for the government representatives to act upon the recommendations. This could also include an ongoing organizing project to advocate for and hold the government to account to implement the assembly’s recommendations.

• Expanding the metrics of success for assemblies beyond their "deliberative quality" to include wisdom generation.

• Approaches that invite the whole human in 

• Not treating the community as something separate/removed from the Council but rather viewing the Council as part of the community. The idea of a Council asking themselves whether an action is relational or transactional, as a filter for what they're doing. That the borough of Camden has "relational" as one of their core focuses. These all seem pretty far out ahead of the US.

• The idea that consultation is the lowest level of participation and insufficiently robust if you want to build buy-in and wisdom via participation

• The deep awareness of local councils having insufficient resources and assumption of this continuing felt unique to the UK. I felt somewhat saddened hearing Kelly say that you must involve partners to help with implementation because the Council has such limited resources. 

• Being hard to ignore: It seemed that the youth present were calling upon activist traditions, naming that the Council has the power and that they needed to be hard to ignore to get what they wanted from the Council. 

• Scrutiny: Kelly shared about a citizen panel in the London Borough of Camden that is providing scrutiny of action on the results of their climate assembly. This seems like a step in the direction of ongoing citizen engagement in enacting and holding accountable the government around the recommendations, but seems to me (from my organizing background) to fall short of what would be needed. 

• The focus on local democracy seemed to be unique, in a way. I know there are a lot of groups working to support local electeds in the US enact progressive policies, and get more new progressives into office. But there is not a space that is focused on supporting them to enact participatory democracy, that I know of.