In late 2007, I came up with the idea for eDemocracyCamp, a barcamp on e-democracy. One goal from the beginning was for it to be an open, participant-driven complement to the annual Politics Online Conference in Washington DC.
The first event took place on March 2, 2008 in Washington DC. About 70 or so people attended over the course of the day.
This year, we’re doing it again. Please join us for eDemocracyCamp2:
eDemocracyCamp is an unconference about e-democracy (using the internet to support democratic processes) with a particular focus on e-participation (using the internet to support public participation). The goal is to connect researchers, developers, practitioners, citizens and other enthusiasts for a day of intense collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Like last year, Intellitics will contribute $100 towards funding the event. Not a huge sum, but even at this level it only takes a couple dozen sponsors in order to be able to provide for 100 attendees (and quite comfortably so). Please sign up on the wiki or leave a comment if your organization can chip in.
I’m making an extra effort this year to ensure that the sessions will be recorded so as to allow non-attendees to get a piece of the action, too.
By the way, the first time we sponsored a barcamp was back in 2007 when we supported BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, CA. As you can probably tell by now, we’re big fans of the format. It’s a great way to connect with people who share your passion, bounce off ideas, get feedback, learn and teach — all for the cost of showing up and participating in the sessions.
The development and wide use of powerful new ICT applications are transforming the political landscape. These new tools allow citizens to access more information and interact, debate and participate in public life in way not seen before. They are beginning to give ordinary people a greater voice.
The European eParticipation Day will provide the opportunity for a high level debate on current state of play and future directions. It will address the political challenges and the solutions that ICT can provide. The US election campaigns and the forthcoming European elections will be among the discussion points. The use of ICT to help legislators and decision-makers in their work and in particular to better communicate with their constituency and understand their views will be discussed. The event will also look at the benefits of ICT for citizens by giving them more of a say in decision-making as well as how ICT is helping to reconnect Europeans, in particular young Europeans, with politics.
In parallel, there will be an exhibition of the eParticipation projects that have been funded under programmes run by DG Information Society and Media.
This event is being organised by the European Commission.
Location of the event: Charlemagne Building, 170 Rue de la Loi (Wetstraat), Brussels
Date of the event: 4 March 2009
Interpretation will be available in English, French and German
The agenda looks promising and it seems the event will be webcast, too.
A few days after the launch of the new WhiteHouse.gov website, President Obama issued a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which announced that the new administration
… is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
It also directs the yet-to-be-named Chief Technology Officer (emphasis mine):
… to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.
Here’s what the memorandum had to say about public participation:
Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.
Today, Washington DC-based Sunlight Foundation rolled out Our Open Government List (OOGL), a new microsite that allows the public to make suggestions as to what should be included in the Open Government Directive:
Shortly after President Obama’s inauguration, he issued a memo on transparency directing his top officials to develop plans for an Open Government Directive to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration. The Sunlight Foundation has created this page in order to add a public element to the crafting of this Open Government Directive that is itself transparent, participatory, and collaborative.
We encourage you to submit ideas for what the Directive should address, and to vote for your favorite submissions below.
While a lot of the discussions lately seem to focus solely on the aspects of transparency and open government data, I thought it was appropriate to point out that the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) has developed a list of seven Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation that could be tremendously helpful in guiding government efforts in this area:
Public participation is based on the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process.
Public participation includes the promise that the public’s contribution will influence the decision.
Public participation promotes sustainable decisions by recognizing and communicating the needs and interests of all participants, including decision makers.
Public participation seeks out and facilitates the involvement of those potentially affected by or interested in a decision.
Public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate.
Public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.
Public participation communicates to participants how their input affected the decision.
A common approach to trying to surface the most relevant, highest-quality or most agreed-upon items out of a large quantity of content is to allow participants to rate each other’s contributions and then expose the highest-rated items in a “most popular” list. Very often, a simple binary, up-or-down rating mechanism is used for this purpose.
The three input gathering tools used on Change.gov all offered such mechanisms:
Join the Discussion: Threaded comments + “Thumbs up, thumbs down” comment ratings (screenshot, I’m intentionally leaving out the reputation piece here, though that certainly serves as another filter)
Open for Questions: Posts only + “Good question? yes/no” post ratings (screenshot)
These rating mechanism look fairly straightforward, though from the way they are named it is not entirely obvious which evaluation criterion each one of them refers to:
“Thumbs up, thumbs down” might rate contributions based on relevance, quality or agreement
“Good question? yes/no” looks like it’s going after relevance or quality
“Vote up, vote down” seems to filter based on agreement (in the context of an idea contest, at least)
It may not always matter, but strictly speaking these three (relevance, quality, agreement) aren’t identical. There may well be occasions where it’s worth differentiating between the three or at least be more explicit as to which one is the intended criterion.
More interestingly, though, there’s room for other, less commonly used criteria as well. If we assume for a second that all input types are not created equal, then surely there may be more appropriate evaluation criteria that can be applied.
Below are a few examples of various input types as well as potential evaluation criteria that might serve well in an early, fairly general phase of an e-participation project:
Question: “I share this question (and would like it answered)”
Story: “I have had the same experience” or “I know someone who has had the same experience”
Resource: “This material was helpful”
Idea: “This idea should be investigated in more detail”
Note that negative ratings are being avoided here (it’s really more a flagging mechanism than an up-or-down vote).
More to think about:
Other combinations of input type and evaluation criterion are entirely possible, of course.
Other rating mechanisms (e.g. 5-star voting, 0-to-100-percent sliding scale etc.) may be more helpful.
And finally, negative feedback isn’t always a bad thing: it just depends on where in the process it’s applied, how well it’s introduced and supported (e.g. by community ground rules), how much group cohesion and trust there is among the participants etc.
Again, it may not always be necessary to go to this level of detail, but at the scale of participation we saw on Change.gov it might have provided another much-needed step towards transforming the amorphous mass of unstructured participant contributions into a more meaningful summary.
While I was assembling my off-the-cuff analysis of input types on Change.gov, I felt compelled to revisit two existing facilitation techniques that help guide participation by adding to the process the kind of structure that I believe could work very well for large-scale efforts.
Dynamic Facilitation is a natural way of facilitating that works well with people addressing difficult issues about which they care deeply. Rather than asking them to limit themselves — to hold back their emotions, to stay on the agenda, or to follow the process — the dynamic facilitator frames the conversation so that all comments are helpful and productive. He or she establishes a “zone” of thinking and talking known as “choice-creating,” where shifts, insights and breakthroughs are frequent. The process allows ordinary, untrained people to address difficult issues and reach consensus solutions that are better, faster and which have more support than traditional means of “consensus-building.”.
…
The dynamic facilitator starts by helping people determine an issue they really care about, whether it seems solvable or not. Then he or she helps them to say what is on their minds and hearts. To do this she uses four flip charts for creating lists of: Solutions, Problem-statements, Data, and Concerns. A fifth chart of Decisions is added as group conclusions emerge.
Here, the participants’ input is discovered, captured and structured using content categories or input types. And while Dynamic Facilitation is intended for small groups only and relies heavily on the facilitator role, I believe that in principle this could be applied to large-scale engagements as well.
The other process I wanted to reference here is plain old brainstorming (again, emphasis mine):
Brainstorming is a method for developing creative solutions to problems. It works by focusing on a problem, and then having participants come up with as many deliberately unusual solutions as possible and by pushing the ideas as far as possible.
During the brainstorming session there is no criticism of ideas – the idea is to open up as many possibilities as possible, and break down preconceptions about the limits of the problem. Once this has been done the results of the brainstorming session can be analysed and the best solutions can be explored either using further brainstorming or more conventional solutions.
The key here is to suspend judgment while the brainstorming process is still ongoing. If we were to view the various e-participation efforts on Change.gov as large brainstorms (which, in my view, is a fairly reasonable characterization), then clearly this principle of suspending judgment was not adhered to. Instead, participants were allowed and encouraged to rate each other’s contributions by way of simple up-or-down votes at the same time new contributions were still being added.
In their excellent book Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd edition, 2007), the authors Sam Kaner et. al. have this to say about “the cost of premature criticism” (p. 118):
Rough-draft thinking is just like rough-draft writing: it needs encouragement, not evaluation. Many people don’t understand this. If they notice a flaw in someone’s thinking, they point it out. They think they’ve been helpful. But rough-draft ideas need to be clarified, researched, and modified before being subjected to critical evaluation. The timing of critical evaluation can make the difference between the life and death of a new idea.
Premature criticism is often inaccurate. And stifling. When ideas are criticized before they are fully formed, many people feel discouraged and stop trying. Furthermore, they may become unwilling to volunteer their rough-draft thinking at future meetings. They anticipate objections and keep quiet unless they can invent a counterargument. Thus, people learn to practice self-censorship. A group is then deprived of access to its most valuable natural resource: the creative thinking of its members.
I’d argue that in the context of e-consultations like the ones seen on Change.gov, the same rule applies not only to ideas but to personal stories, concerns, questions etc. as well.
The key take-away here is that structure can be added to an input gathering process not only by categorizing participant contributions (brainstorming relies on additional processes for category creation and input sorting to handle this), but also by applying time-based activities or phases.
Following this approach, here’s what the process on Change.gov might have looked like at a very basic level:
Invite a lot of raw input (using e.g. forum-type discussions)
Organize and refine participant input (e.g. by way of categorizing along input types, by summarizing, rephrasing or merging content and by removing duplicates)
Evaluate and select (e.g. by way of ranking, prioritizing or voting at the summary level, not the raw input level)
Potentially, this could make for a much more efficient setup.
As I pointed out previously, some of the discussions we saw on Change.gov were all over the place even when they were supposed to focus on specific topic-related questions (e.g. “What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?”) or tasks (suggesting a question or an idea to the president-elect).
At the massive scale of participation we saw on Change.gov, this poses a considerable challenge: there simply ends up being way too much unstructured content for any single participant to digest or make sense of. Here’s what I wrote back in December with regard to the healthcare discussion, which was still ongoing at the time:
Lack of focus in the comments: Instead of simply answering the question (”What worries you…?”), many participants choose to share rich combinations of personal stories, experiences, concerns, assumptions, questions, ideas, solutions, values, priorities, resources, data etc. While this shows just how much energy the participants bring to the table, it also tends to leave the discussion somewhat directionless. There is no process in place to further organize this input, nor does the forum software support participants in being more disciplined or structured.
I wanted to take a closer look at this phenomenon as I have a hunch that understanding the underlying structures of large-group discussions like these may provide a good first step towards finding a better approach to dealing with large-scale online input gathering and the overwhelming amounts of content it can produce.
Looking at a sample of about 1,000 comments from Join the Discussion: Service (a little less than 25% out of the total 4,199), I tried to extract various common types of inputs the participants shared with each other (see screenshots):
Below is a list of 25 input types I was able to identify on a first pass, roughly sorted by frequency (with the more common types listed at the top):
Off-topic remarks
Expressions of approval or disapproval
Personal stories and anecdotes
Ideas
Arguments for or against other ideas
Resources (both online and offline)
Concerns
Questions
Frustrations or rants
Value statements
Hopes
Kudos
Data and statistics
Expressions of empathy, listening or appreciation
Moderator advice or guidance (community management)
Contact information
Quotes
Process feedback
Personal profile information (introductions)
Calls for help or support
Test posts
Personal attacks
People suggestions (expert referrals)
Definitions
Event notifications
Obviously, this isn’t a particularly complete or refined list by any means nor does it claim to be generally applicable. At the same time, however, it seems to include a good portion of input types we can typically expect to find in forum discussions of this sort.
A few additional observations:
I didn’t have time to produce exact numbers, but a large majority of comments fall into one or more of the top 5-10 categories, whereas much fewer comments fall into any of the bottom 15-20 categories.
As I noted in December, many comments do in fact combine various input types (e.g. a story and an idea, kudos and a supporting argument, an idea and a few resources and a question etc.)
While I haven’t done a detailed comparison, from what I remember it seems the same categorization can be applied to the entries and comment discussions in the Citizen’s Briefing Book and — to a lesser extent — to the questions submitted in Open for Questions.
The three input gathering tools used on Change.gov (IntenseDebate, Google Moderator, Salesforce Ideas) presented the participants’ contributions in the form of relatively flat lists (sortable mainly by recency and/or popularity).
What if there was a mechanism in place that allows for content to be processed by input type? What if the participants’ numerous contributions could be aggregated or even synthesized across input types? This might solve a number of problems:
Improve navigation across the entire discussion.
Greatly reduce the time necessary for participants to gain or maintain an overview of the entire discussion.
Lower the number of duplicate entries due to increased visibility into what has already been said by others.
Facilitate follow-up by highlighting any loose ends (e.g. questions awaiting an answer).
Improve the quality of input evaluation and ratings: Not only become up-or-down votes a lot more meaningful when they are applied to inputs of the same type, but a variety of evaluation criteria and rating mechanisms could be used for different input types depending on what’s most appropriate (e.g. a “thumbs down” may not be an appropriate rating option in the context of participants’ sharing of personal stories).
This kind of summary layer built on top of the input gathering effort or discussion could make large-scale input gathering more manageable and productive.
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