I am sorry that I have just seen this a year or so after it was originally posted. I have been working on voluntary standards for a long time – as Maya knows – and have come up against most of the constraints typical of this world. Most recenlty, with an organisation called AccountAbility, we revised the voluntary standard used to provide assurance (published late 2008) for the sustianbility reports you refer to in your original post. To try to breakout of the ISO/ UN Security Council mode of working, we used a wiki platform for the collaborative drafting of the revised standard (the first time such a process had been used for this I believe). We found that this was very useful for developing a community of interest and providing access to a process that typically has more barriers to acces than Westminster. However, only about 7% of people who joined the community actually contributed. I understand this is fairly typical. Also, more people tried to go thru the back door than the front door. They wanted anonymity. So they sent us comments offline. We tried to lead them back to the front door – but, especially for those working for large companies and notably the big four, this was not always successful. So irronically a method chosen to enable greater transparency and more equitable engagement – and to develop a product that was all about transparency – struggled to convince key players to play transparently. This was not unexpected, but it was dissapointing.

I am currently involved in a much larger initiative that is being convened partially by the Prince of Wales Accounting for Sustainability group. It is looking at how to develop a more holistic approach to reporting – an approach that integrates financial and non-financial reporting. One of the issues that we now face is the realisation that the old isntitutions are not up to it and that to develop something that really adds value will require a radical rethink of the development process. At the same time the old institutions are all over it.

It would interesting to get your thoughts on how to explode these entrenched and sclerotic structures and enter the co-creative space with this initiative. The stakes are not insignificant.

Alan

Participatory collaborations between citizen’s groups, business and governments have emerged to overcome all sorts of market and government failures, in areas ranging from opening up global markets to the ‘next 4 billion’ to securing basic human rights at work to the development of new rights and markets for ecosystem services.

But this first wave of d.i.y. regulation is now coming up against problems – fatigue and overstretch amongst the civil society organisations that often stand in and are gatekeepers for real citizen involvement, proliferation, confusion and competition between different initiatives and the issues they address (There are, for example, at 17 civil regulation standards on forestry alone, while other participatory regulation initiatives address climate, food, energy, global trade as if these were all independent issues). Perhaps most importantly these initiatives are coming up against problems of ensuring their own accountability, transparency and responsiveness as they try to go to scale (see http://tinyurl.com/bgnzow) .

Apart from a few notable exceptions I don’t think many participatory regulation initiatives have grasped the opportunities that many-to-many connectivity offers for governing collaboration in new ways. Too many are setting up structures that look more like the UN Security Council than wikipedia.
I think it is definitely time for participatory regulation, and I think there is a huge opportunity to accelerate progress by bringing the kinds of organizational innovations used by Linux community, twitter and wikipedia into collaborative partnerships.