Giving citizens control over their own political parties is part of a broader cultural trend towards the co-creation of content, blurring the lines between professionals and amateurs, which is already evident in many areas.

This can be seen in the overlap between the reporting and commentary of 'amateur' blogs and professional media organisations, or the way in which millions of people not just consume video content but upload their own videos to sites such as YouTube.

In the media world, Arianna Huffington has outlined the changes as follows:

"[T]he contributions of citizen journalists, bloggers, and others who aren't paid to cover the news are constantly mocked and derided by the critics of new media who clearly don't understand that technology has enabled millions of consumers to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation – from couch potato to self-expression. Writing blogs, sending tweets, updating your Facebook page, editing photos, uploading videos, and making music are just a few of the active entertainment options now available. But when the data began to show a significant shift in consumer habits, traditional media responded by belittling web journalism.

"The same people who never question why consumers would sit on a couch and watch TV for 8 hours straight can't understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues – great and small – that interest them. For free. They don't understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who Twitter for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook page for free, who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities... for free." [i]

And to emphasise the point that this cultural change applies as much to areas of citizenship as to the media, Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, said at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference in November 2009, "we are no longer passive consumers of anything any longer, and this, of course, is only good for our democracies" [ii].

Speaking at the same event, Charles Leadbeater, a writer on creativity and innovation, noted that music firms may be struggling but "if you look at music as culture there is more music than ever" [iii].

This highlights the points made in this essay that engagement in the future will not take place within traditional structures.

Leadbeater predicted that there would be "deep trouble for traditional institutions, both public and private, who are ill-equipped for this new world".

He compared traditional established organisations to "big boulders", but now there are thousands of people "dropping pebbles on the beach". "This sea of pebbles is threatening to engulf the boulders," he suggested.

"The characteristic of a pebble is small internal mass to very large surface area, in ratio. The characteristic of a boulder is large internal mass to small surface area relatively, in proportion - they are much more internally focused."

In comments about the media industry, but which could be equally well applied to political parties, he predicted there would be no new 'boulders' but there would be new businesses which would help people create, share, find, sort and aggregate the 'pebbles'.

And he added that 'pebbles' "aggregated in a certain kind of way may indeed resemble boulders".  This tells us something about not just corporate structures but also about the likely party structures of the future.

And other factors such as their ability to innovate can help the pebbles.

"Almost all of the time, innovation comes from collaboration, because innovation comes from combining different ideas, assets, points of view, talents, tools, ways of interpreting the world and bringing them together," argued Leadbeater. "Innovation is invariably a process of creative combination and that invariably comes from conversation." The 'pebbles', with their proportionately larger surface areas, will have more points of contact across which such conversations can take place.

So in policy as in the media and other creative industries, new and better thinking about policy challenges may increasingly come from smaller parties rather than the 'hits' of the past.

Footnotes:

[i] Huffington, A. (2009), 'Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism'. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/journalism-2009-desperate_b_374642.html [December 23, 2009].

[ii] Miller, E. (2009), speaking at Personal Democracy Forum Europe 2009, MP3 audio file available at http://civicolive.com/pdfeu/files/2009/11/Ellen-Miller-Keynote.mp3 [December 23, 2009].

[iii] Leadbeater, C. (2009), speaking at Personal Democracy Forum Europe 2009, MP3 audio file available at http://civicolive.com/pdfeu/files/2009/11/Charles-Leadbeater.mp3 [December 23, 2009].