mark-elliott.net

Alas, the end must come to all good things… I will begin a bit of a reflection upon the Future Melbourne project, framed as an investigation into the future of democracy, because, that’s what I believe it is.

One month later and today is the final day of public consultation for the Future Melbourne wiki. I applaud all who contributed - and note, I do consider simply browsing the site a form of contribution. In fact, it is often helpful to compare the wiki to a town hall meeting to get a better understanding of the forms of engagement that comprise the full spectrum of contribution.

For instance, those who actually turn up to a town hall meeting is a subset of everyone who had heard and possibly discussed the topic up for review. Then, those members of the attendees who ask a question are a yet another smaller subset. Similarly, those who browse the site are kind of like the group that turns up to the meeting, while the folks that take the time to register and edit the ones who ask questions.

Both sets are important and even necessary for each other’s existence. The dynamic where a majority of the input comes from a minority of the participants is referred to as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 Rule). I’ve found this rule to apply in almost every f-2-f social setting where the group is larger than those who can manage a single sustained conversation (usually about three people) and where all participants are engaging in a single endeavour.

While some people argue the Pareto Principle as failing of human activity (the majority is always represented by the minority), I don’t think this is the case. In my mind, this would be like arguing that since an engine always requires fuel, engines are a failure since they can never run without it. Engines are very useful to humanity, and while some fuels are better than others, there’s a lot of ways to engineer and engine (however you’ll never escape the need for some form of fuel).

So in collective activity, the fuel is the ‘masses’ who build ignite the sparks of the minority. The rising of such a minority may be due to the dynamics of collective psychology, or, perhaps those individuals would always participate without the support of the majority. Nevertheless, the two seem always to be tied and therefore it makes sense to see the two as interdependent.

UPDATE (thanks Dale ;-):
During the period of consultation between 17 May and 14 June we received approximately 9300 visits to the site from 6500 people. In total, these visitors viewed over 48000 pages on the site.

During this period, approximately 200 individual edits were made to both the plan and its discussion pages. These ranged from new ideas to extensive well-researched contributions on the future of our city. The contributions will now be reviewed by the Future Melbourne team to organise, refine and incorporate the range of ideas into the Future Melbourne plan in the best possible way.

With regard to the Pareto Principle, this means that of the total number of folks who engaged the site (6500), 3.1% made edts (200)…