Last month saw a nice spike in traffic from people interested in public participation. Welcome!
Here are the three most popular posts from recent months (from the three-month period December 2013 through February 2014):
And our most popular legacy posts:
Thanks for reading!
Interesting research project out of the University of Bonn, Germany: Political Deliberation on the Internet: Forms and Functions of Digital Discourse Based on the Microblogging System Twitter
From the project outline:
Partly driven by social media applications such as the microblogging platform Twitter, the far reaching process of mediatisation of society has ushered in new forms of political participation in the public sphere. The evaluation of this development, however, is ambivalent: New media apologetics on the one hand postulate new modes of political participation put forward by ‘heterarchical’ digital media. A more critical perspective on the other hand doubts that the internet and social media are able to integrate and mobilize a wider circle of citizens. Instead, fragmentation is strengthened and deliberative democracy is still a theoretical ideal. More recent approaches are more diversified and focus on the contextual conditions and relations on a social, technical and political level. This research project aims at examining digital forms of participation and political involvement by proposing a model of how the ongoing mediatisation of politics might indeed lead to digital deliberation.
The material basis consists of the communicative actions performed on Twitter (tweets) by politicians (electoral candidates), citizens and media accounts during German state elections. With the help of a tweet analysis (content analysis, speech act analysis and argumentation analysis) it will be examined how political issues are discussed and argumented for in this digital environment. First results show that it is mostly the topics carrying potential for conflict that lead to users’ deliberation and argumentative participation on Twitter.
The project’s first research period (2010-2012) produced a model that “systematises the structural specifics and functionalities of Twitter communication”. During the second phase (2012-2014), the goal is to feed the model with more data and produce a “comparison between the national and the state level [that] will offer insights into the different ways of digital political participation, interaction, and tweeting styles.”
The project is part of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Priority Programme 1505 „Mediatized Worlds“, which is “funded by the DFG and combines different research projects through a global concept.”
Follow @NetDiscourse on Twitter.
A bit late, but here they are, our most popular posts in January.
Most popular recent posts (from the three-month period November 2013 through January 2014):
Most popular legacy posts:
As always, thank you for your continued attention.
Over on the NCDD blog, Roshan Bliss last week asked whether online comment sections can be “dialogue spaces” (a re-post of a Journalism That Matters post from December of last year: Moderation matters for online commenting).
It’s a good overview of some of the (perceived, at least) challenges with online comment sections and how some media outlets are responding.
The post sparked a brief conversation on the NCDD discussion list. Here’s the comment I left on Wednesday:
As long as “civil discourse” isn’t part of a newspaper’s business model, there’s little likelihood they’ll make the necessary changes or investments (technology, staff time etc.).
Once the comment section becomes part of the value chain (e.g. when a journalist uses reader input to help her do a better job, or when a media outlet realizes quality discussion gives them a competitive advantage), then there are many options available to create better (more productive, civil etc.) environments.
I believe the same applies to digital engagement in general. Develop a clear value proposition, or else it won’t happen.
As far as online comment sections are concerned, while there may have been incremental improvements here and there over the past few years, they are still stuck in some kind of discussion forum paradigm. Most online comment sections are pretty good at creating walls of text: huge amounts of largely unstructured content that is expensive to moderate, difficult to consume, and easily forgotten. They could be so much more, of course, but apparently not too many people on the business side care enough to explore what’s possible. Yet.
Thoughts? The conversation continues on the NCDD blog, in the comment section.
Interesting event at UC Berkeley This Wednesday: Tanja Aitamuro, Research Exchange: Crowdsourcing in Policy-Making: The Impact of Blended Expertise on Law-Making Process
This talk reports on a study about the impact of crowdsourcing on a law-making process in Finland. In the studied process, the off-road traffic law reform was opened for public participation in Finland by the Ministry of the Environment. The citizens were first asked to share their experiences and problems with off-road traffic and the regulating law on an online platform.
Then the participants were asked to share solutions for those problems. Crowdsourcing resulted into 500 ideas, over 4,000 comments and 24,000 votes, which were analyzed and evaluated both by the crowd by using a new tool called CrowdConsensus and by a globally distributed expert panel. The talk discusses deliberative aspects in crowdsourcing and the usefulness of blended expertise, i.e. the mixture of the crowd’s and experts’ knowledge, in law-making. Furthermore, the talk discusses the concepts of representation and legitimacy in a crowdsourced policy-making process.
The Finnish experiment is one of the first empirical studies about crowdsourcing in legislative processes. Such democratic innovations hold the potential to improve citizen empowerment and participation in the age of democratic recession and deteriorating political institutions. More about the Finnish experiment here: http://thegovlab.org/seven-lessons-from-the-crowdsourced-law-reform-in-finland/
From the CITRIS mission statement:
The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) creates information technology solutions for many of our most pressing social, environmental, and health care problems.
CITRIS was created to “shorten the pipeline” between world-class laboratory research and the creation of start-ups, larger companies, and whole industries. CITRIS facilitates partnerships and collaborations among more than 300 faculty members and thousands of students from numerous departments at four University of California campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz) with industrial researchers from over 60 corporations. Together, the groups are thinking about information technology in ways it’s never been thought of before.
CITRIS works to find solutions to many of the concerns that face all of us today, from monitoring the environment and finding viable, sustainable energy alternatives to simplifying health care delivery and developing secure systems for electronic medical records and remote diagnosis, all of which will ultimately boost economic productivity. CITRIS represents a bold and exciting vision that leverages one of the top university systems in the world with highly successful corporate partners and government resources.
Head here to sign up.
The event will be live broadcast. The hashtag is #CITRISRE. Or view that talk later on YouTube.
The GobLab team (for more about GovLab, see our earlier post today) is currently working with the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation to assist them in developing “recommendations for ICANN on how the organization can evolve the ways it engages with global stakeholders in coordinating the Internet’s unique identifier space.”
From the project website:
About the Project
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has managed the system of Internet domains for a decade and a half. Yet as the Internet continues to rapidly evolve and the volume and diversity of stakeholders connecting to the Internet grows, ICANN has recognized it must rethink how it operates as a platform for global collaborative decisionmaking – especially in light of new and increasingly sophisticated communications technologies. The GovLab is working with the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation (MSI Panel), chaired by The GovLab director and co-founder Professor Beth Simone Noveck, to research and design technology-enabled experiments to help ICANN engage broader communities and bring their expertise and input into ICANN’s policy development processes.
Specifically, the Panel has been tasked by Fadi Chehadé, President and CEO of ICANN to:
- Propose new models for international engagement, consensus-driven policymaking and institutional structures to support such enhanced functions; and
- Design processes, tools and platforms that enable the global ICANN community to engage in these new forms of participatory decision-making
Tasty! The project is currently in the second stage of a three-stage brainstorm:
Image source: http://thegovlab.ideascale.com
They have already released a master blueprint (The Quest for a 21st Century ICANN, PDF) and are currently in the process of developing “16 concrete experiment proposals that ICANN could implement and test toward the end of becoming a more effective, legitimate and evolving institution”. These proposals cover a broad range of topics, many of which should be familiar to readers of this blog:
The second proposal was released last week: Proposal 2 for ICANN: Get Broad-Based Input by Crowdsourcing Each Stage of Decisionmaking
From the post:
From Principle to Practice
The legitimacy of a 21st century global institution operating in the public interest depends on whether those affected by the decisions the institution makes are included in the decisionmaking process. Especially in the case of the Internet and of ICANN, to be legitimate, anyone must have easy and equitable access to help shape the policies and standards of the Internet that ICANN helps facilitate.
Using a variety of web, SMS-based and in-person participation tools, ICANN should test a wide array of alternative mechanisms for getting broad-based input in identifying and framing issues, drafting solutions, gathering relevant information to translate solutions into implementable policies, as well as commenting after the fact and participating in oversight and assessment. ICANN should use some of these tools in conducting its Public Forum at ICANN meetings, in which people can “make comments and ask questions on the main topics at each meeting directly to the Board and in front of the rest of the community.”
The post brings up a number of interesting questions regarding the relationship between public participation, stakeholder engagement and crowdsourcing. Here’s the comment I left (you should read the full post first):
Nice conversation starter!
A couple of comments:
Crowdsourcing and stakeholder engagement are two fundamentally different things. As you rightly point out, crowdsourcing relies on an “undefined (and usually large) network of people”. In stakeholder engagement, on the other hand, very specific groups or individuals need to be involved. Which one is it? If the idea is to do both in parallel or in some other complementary fashion, I suggest to outline in more detail what that would entail.
Secondly, when it comes to public participation (involving the public in decisions that affect them), it is absolutely critical to know upfront how any of the input generated in the process will impact the decision at hand. In your example, the decision at hand is to define an agenda, presumably. The suggested approach is to support the “up-front issue framing” process by crowdsourcing the identification and ranking of issues. Would it matter who participates in this process and whether certain stakeholders are represented? How binding would the results be? Would the decision making body commit to implement what the crowd decides or merely take their input into consideration?
Jillian Raines, the post’s author, has already replied in the comments. Definitely an interesting and very timely conversation which I hope will continue and deepen as their project continues.
What is your take on the relationship between the various concepts? How do they contradict, how can they complement each other?
The GovLab is the “governance lab” at New York University (NYU). Founded and directed by Beth Simone Noveck, it aims to “improve people’s lives by changing how we govern” and “seeking new ways to solve public problems using advances in technology and science”.
From their about page:
Innovations in technology and science are empowering individuals to engage with one another – and with traditional institutions of governance – to tackle problems more collaboratively, and drive progress more rapidly than ever before. Through collection, computation and visualization of large-scale data sets, we can make better informed decisions. We can use new methods for generating ideas from more people in response to wicked challenges. New insights from social and behavioral research are teaching us how to use tools like prizes, games, challenges and “nudges” to create incentives for engagement. We are developing social machines – collaboration platforms – for organizing work at a distance so we can solve problems more democratically.
[...]
GovLab operates as a network of networks. Housed at New York University and funded by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the GovLab encompasses two major initiatives: GovLab Research and GovLab Academy.
Among many other interesting projects, GovLab runs Living Labs, which aims to “combine solving real world problems with rigorous research”. From the site:
Our Hypothesis
We believe that when institutions open themselves to diverse participation and collaborative problem solving, those institutions are more effective and the decisions they make are more legitimate.
How We Work
The Living Labs convene leaders of institutions and communities who want to implement more open and collaborative decision-making, and bring them together with researchers who want to study those projects and their real-world impact. We work with an international network of advisors to design our projects and develop experiments for evaluating them. We always work with at least two institutional partners to ensure that results inform a more general blueprint for opening government.
We briefly covered their GovLab Experiment event last Spring on “Making Engagement Work”.
The GovLab blog has quickly become a high-volume (and high-quality) source of open government and government innovation news.
Follow @thegovlab on Twitter.
Bonn, Germany-based development agency Engagement Global and its subsidiary Service Agency Communities in One World recently released an updated version of their “Participatory Budgeting Worldwide” study, originally published in 2010: Dialog Global Number 25: Participatory Budgeting Worldwide – Updated Version (PDF)
About Engagement Global (quoted from Service Agency flyer):
Since 1 January 2012, Engagement Global has been Germany’s one-stop-shop for engagement for development, both Germany-wide and internationally.
Engagement Global provides information on current projects and initiatives in Germany and worldwide. It advises individuals and groups on development measures, an supports these financially. It provides demand-driven training, brings people and institutions together, and supports civic and municipal engagement, as well as private organisations.
Under “Box 1: The growing centrality of ICT” (page 10), the study outlines how digital engagement has been applied across the entire PB lifecycle:
Although participatory budgeting has existed since the early 1990s, the use of technological tools was long limited to informational and communicational support (Allegretti, 2012b). The first real experiments in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) played a large role within PB were only in the first decade of the 2000s. Unsurprisingly, Brazil was the first country in which ICTs were used to innovate participatory budgets and make them more attractive and cost-efficient. Today, one can point out seven different main uses of the digital technologies in PBs worldwide:
These seven are listed as follows:
The e-participatory budget of Belo Horizonte, Brazil is mentioned as “[o]ne of the most interesting e-participation experiments” (page 38):
[...] With 2.3 million inhabitants, this city is the sixth largest in the country and an important political center. Its PB is one of the oldest in Brazil: it began in 1993 and its methodology has been innovative. Notably, it has included an autonomous housing PB designed to deal with this important issue. It is based on a two-year cycle, a feature that has inspired other experiments in Brazil, and emphases popular control over the real execution of the public works chosen. In 2006, a digital PB was added as a third pillar, repeated in 2008 and 2010. The digital PB has three goals: to modernize PB through the use of ICTs; to increase citizen involvement in the process; and to include big investments, concerning the whole city, in the PB process. In fact, most Brazilian PBs face a double problem: participation remains relatively limited (1 to 3 percent of people living in cities, somewhat higher in smaller towns) and the biggest investments tend to remain outside their reach. The idea is to organize an online vote open to all residents older than 16 in order to prioritize some investments that require more than the amounts available at the district level.
Citizens have to access the e-voting platform through the city’s official website, which provides information on the various public works. For covering the risks linked to digital divide, a bus equipped with computers was organized and moved around the city, targeting poor areas. Decisions are made by majority, with no preference given to socially dis- advantaged areas. In 2006, R$ 25 million (around US$ 14 million) were made available to the digital PB. The amount was increased to 50 million (US$ 28 million) in 2008, so that one public work (a beltway around a very important square) could be selected.
The methodology was somewhat different in 2006, when voters could cast 9 votes, one per district, and 2008, when voters had only one choice and it was also possible to vote by phone. A total of 173,000 persons voted in 2006 (nearly 10 percent of the Belo Horizonte electorate), and 124,000 in 2008 – compared with 38,000, 34,000 and 44,000 voters for the district PB in 2005/2006, 2007/2008 and 2009/2010. The increase in participation with online voting was clearly a success in the first edition, but later on was affected by the lack of control over double voting and voting-by-phone, which obliged the municipality to introduce a series of strict rules that ended up discouraging many participants in the last edition of e-PB in 2011. Over time, the deliberative dimension has been virtually lost and the digital participatory budget today looks more like a refe- rendum “lite” or a “strategic choice” than a “traditional” PB. This peculiar structure has made the Belo Horizonte digital PB an internationally recognized good practice and has inspired many other cases, albeit adapted to different contexts (Peixoto, 2008).
In its review of global initiatives, the study included consultative processes, including some focused on cost reduction efforts.
Hat tip to Giovanni Allegretti via Facebook.
The International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (IOPD) is an organization based in Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain). From their about page:
The International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (IOPD) is a space open to all cities in the world and all associations, organizations and research centers interested in learning about, exchanging impressions and applying experiences of participatory democracy on a local scale with the aim of deepening the roots of democracy in municipal government.
The network was created in 2001 within the framework of the European Commission’s URB-AL programme for decentralized cooperation. It was officially constituted in November 2001 during the 1st Annual Conference of the IOPD in Barcelona, where its internal operating regulations were approved. Since 2006 the IOPD has coordinated with United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), at present the IOPD is contributing to provide local government’s innovative knowledge in the specific area of citizens’ participation.
In November 2011 the IOPD decided to recover and place emphasis on its original goal of becoming a space for the production of knowledge and the exchange of useful experiences for the towns and cities that make up the network. Therefore the OIDP assumed the challenge of serving as a reflection in matters of participatory democracy at a worldwide level, in order to innovate and to recommend specific policies to public administrations, preferably local, throughout the world and to make the exchange of experiences its main working base.
For the past seven years, IOPD has been hosting a Distinction for Best Practices in Citizens’ Participation, an annual award “meant to recognize those innovative experiences and ideas coordinated by local governments in the field of participative democracy that can to be replicated elsewhere.” Applications for their 2014 award will be accepted from February 3rd through March 7th.
Their list 2013 project entries can be found here: VII Distinction for Best Practices in Citizens’ Participation (PDF)
The 16 projects from Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Palestine, Afghanistan and Argentina cover a range of participatory processes, including strategic planning, citizen consultations and participatory budgeting.
It’s a bit shocking that I only found out about this program yesterday, thanks to a mention on Twitter. It’s a great glimpse at the work that’s happening in non-English speaking countries around the world, and I look forward to more interesting projects they will discover this year.
Participation Now is a resource for “exploring development and innovation in public participation initiatives” hosted by The Open University.
From the launch announcement last year:
Participation Now is a new project that aims to support the ongoing development and innovation of participatory public engagement initiatives.
At a time when many established public organisations and forums are in crisis and many familiar forms of public belonging are being questioned, the number of problems we collectively face appears to be increasing.
Partly in response to this situation, we are seeing a growth in the number and variety of participatory public engagement initiatives that attempt to address such problems.
We need a way to support active debate about the possibilities and difficulties of these initiatives and an infrastructure that can support ongoing innovation in this area. This is what is driving the development of Participation Now.
Late last week, the project shared a comprehensive update on their progress: Participation Now: Patterns, possibilities, politics
Having just passed the 100-entry milestone, the directory already allows for some interesting slicing and dicing of the data, e.g. by issue (what), convener (who), method or channel (how) and scale (at what geographic level).
The project applies the terms “public participation” and “public engagement” broadly, similar to what we would call civic engagement (for our preferred definition of public participation as related strictly to the process of involving the public in decision making, see here and here).
That said, there is plenty to discover. From the post:
The second theme we see emerging is ‘self-organisation’. A spectrum of ways in which participation is cast as a medium for voluntary public action is readily discernible. At one end of this spectrum we have started to place initiatives that offer to rationalise public engagement and make the participatory self-organisation of publics more efficient. At the other end we are placing initiatives that seem to be more focused on enriching processes of engagement and participation. We’ve noticed that the former are often cast as ‘toolkits’, technological ‘platforms’, or ‘methods’ that offer to support various kinds of ‘deliberation’, ‘consensus-building’ or ‘decision making’ (e.g. Puzzled by Policy, Planning for Real). The latter, by contrast, emphasise the importance of making the experience of engagement and participation a more intensely affective, relational, imaginative or creative one.
These initiatives can work through genres that involve the body, sound or moving images and sometimes also make use of relational media such as festivals (100 in 1 day), bar-based informal discussions (Drinking Liberally), café-style conversations (World Café) or participatory art installations (These Associations). In these ways such initiatives seem to be offering people possibilities for forms of creative and imaginative self-organisation, as well as processes that may potentially affect forms of public change beyond the bounds of these events.
A few more details regarding project background and funding is shared towards the end of the post:
The Participation Now project emerges out of a number of years of research, at The Open University’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), concerned with investigating changing configurations of ‘the public’. Participation Now was first developed in prototype form as The Experimental Democracy Console in 2010, but has since been significantly developed under the auspices the Open University funded Creating Publics project; an initial version of Participation Now went online in Spring 2013 and is now being developed in collaboration with OpenLearn. Work on Participation Now is also supported with funding from the RCUK-funded Open University Public Engagement with Research Catalyst project.
Follow @NowParticipate or see the post for a list of additional options to get involved with the project.
Head to the site to browse the data.
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