Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Participatory Government in the US: Next Milestones

Published by Tim on September 29, 2009 in Events and Public Participation. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Earlier today, the FASTForward Blog hosted a webinar discussion with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, titled: Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government

A recording of the webinar is available on the FASTForward Blog. I was lucky enough to get one question in (starts at around 45:50):

star45:50
Question:
With regard to public participation, what are the next milestones for the Open Government Initiative as we’re going into 2010?
Here’s what Beth Noveck had to answer:
Number one, the creation of an Open Government Directive that will ask every government agency to develop its own Open Government plan, a plan that will ask agencies to develop strategic priorities around the release of data, the development of citizen engagement pilots and projects and the greater use of collaboration and the kind of collaborative problem solving and really the use of innovative policy approaches that we mentioned a bit of on the phone.
So I think that that’s very important and everything that will follow from that in terms of the institutionalization, organization  and best practice sharing, and idea exchange.
I think the second big milestone will be the move towards development of new platforms, in other words, making technologies more widely available across government as we learn what works and what doesn’t work so that people can take advantage of the new tools to do these things. So for example, there already is — completely ad hoc — a group who are sharing best practices and tools around employee brainstorming and innovation. So one agency was already doing it, asking employees for ideas and advice, several other agencies said “We’d like to do the same thing” and they spontaneously essentially come together to share code, to share ideas about how to do that. So institutionalizing those practices and platforms around a range of more open projects.
The last thing is really trying also to link up more effectively major presidential priority areas around specific open government projects. In other words, you’ve seen something like the VA’s project to reduce the backlog of veteran benefits applications. Similarly, other kinds of priority areas like that where there is really an imperative to get something done, whether it’s around stem education, science and technology, engineering and math, or entrepreneurship, or climate change, in which I think the application of these principles of transparency, participation and collaboration and the tools that enable them can be brought to bear to enable us to address these problems more effectively and in new ways.I was lucky to get one question in (starts 45:50 of th

With regard to public participation, what are the next milestones for the Open Government Initiative as we’re going into 2010?

Here’s what Beth Noveck had to answer (transcript mine):

Number one, the creation of an Open Government Directive that will ask every government agency to develop its own Open Government plan, a plan that will ask agencies to develop strategic priorities around the release of data, the development of citizen engagement pilots and projects and the greater use of collaboration and the kind of collaborative problem solving and really the use of innovative policy approaches that we mentioned a bit of on the phone.

So I think that that’s very important and everything that will follow from that in terms of the institutionalization, organization  and best practice sharing, and idea exchange.

I think the second big milestone will be the move towards development of new platforms, in other words, making technologies more widely available across government as we learn what works and what doesn’t work so that people can take advantage of the new tools to do these things. So for example, there already is — completely ad hoc — a group who are sharing best practices and tools around employee brainstorming and innovation. So one agency was already doing it, asking employees for ideas and advice, several other agencies said “We’d like to do the same thing” and they spontaneously essentially come together to share code, to share ideas about how to do that. So institutionalizing those practices and platforms around a range of more open projects.

The last thing is really trying also to link up more effectively major presidential priority areas around specific open government projects. In other words, you’ve seen something like the VA’s project to reduce the backlog of veteran benefits applications. Similarly, other kinds of priority areas like that where there is really an imperative to get something done, whether it’s around STEM education (science and technology, engineering and math), or entrepreneurship, or climate change, in which I think the application of these principles of transparency, participation and collaboration and the tools that enable them can be brought to bear to enable us to address these problems more effectively and in new ways.

So I guess that means we can expect to see more e-participation pilots at various levels of government. Very exciting times indeed!

What Is Community?

Published by Tim on September 17, 2009 in Dictionary. 0 Comments Tags: , .

If there was an award for most-overused term, I’m sure community would be a contender.

For future reference, here is one of the best definitions I’ve come across so far. It’s somewhat hidden in a blog post by Canada-based Myriam Laberge from a while back: Collaboration As A Living Emergent Co-Creative Process

A ‘community’ is created over time around shared purpose, language and meaning, and the development of shared values, reciprocity and mutual trust in the longer term from being and doing together.

Community doesn’t happen overnight. And it certainly doesn’t come out of the box with any online tool you might install.

An interesting relationship to point out is the one between community and participation. In my view:

  • Participation often happens within or across existing communities
  • Participation done right can have strong community-building effects
  • Participation without the slightests levels of (a pre-existing) community fabric is difficult to imagine
  • Especially for online participation, a lot of moderation and facilitation activities are often required that are commonly referred to as community management

Myriam will be in San Diego for the 2009 IAP2 annual conference next week, and I hope to get a chance to talk to her in more detail about this important interrelation.

Crowdsourcing and Public Participation

Published by Tim on September 15, 2009 in Crowdsourcing, Public Participation and Research. 9 Comments Tags: .

As I noted last week, I see widespread confusion around some of the key terms in the conversation about government 2.0 in general and participation in particular: public participation, crowdsourcing and “the wisdom of the crowds” — unless I am terribly mistaken, the three don’t mean the same thing and hence should not be used interchangeably.

Over on Andrea DiMaio’s blog, I just left a comment that takes a first stab at trying to clear up the confusion:

It seems to me there is quite a bit of confusion in terms of some of the terminologies that are being thrown around. In my view, crowdsourcing and public participation are not the same. In fact, there may be less overlap between the two than some people think.

Here’s where I see the main differences:

For example, crowdsourcing usually involves clearly defined goals and measurable outcomes (e.g. improving an algorithm, doing pharmaceutical research, vetting satellite imagery etc.). In cases where there aren’t any objective success criteria (e.g. some design contests), at least there is a committee that has full authority to rate and rank contributions and pick a winner. It is irrelevant who participates in a crowdsourcing initiative, and there is no concept of participants having to buy into or agree with the outcome or winning proposal.

Public participation, on the other hand, is about engaging citizens in decision making that often involves making difficult trade-offs based on conflicting values systems (very subjective). It is extremely important that all stakeholders have a seat at the table and feel they have ownership of the process. Most of the time the process will be guided by consensus seeking of some kind and achieving a certain level of agreement across all participants is required in the end in order for things to be able to move forward politically.

Can and should crowdsourcing as we know it be applied to help with certain pieces of policy making? Absolutely. But will it be sufficient to qualify as and achieve the goals of public participation? Most certainly not.

I think this is an important piece of the discussion. Let me know in the comments how you make sense of the two concepts, how the differ or complement each other. Thanks!

ParticipateDB

Published by Tim on September 15, 2009 in About, E-participation, ParticipateDB and Research. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Probably the most memorable presentation at the 2007 Community Next conference in Stanford was “The Patent-Pending skinnyCorp Method for Creating Online Awesomeness and Other Cool Stuff” by Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of skinnyCorp, makers of Threadless and other entertaining projects large and small.

As Kalmikoff pointed out in one of the stories they shared (starts at around 4:50 into the video):

As things happen, the line you’re gonna hear at skinnyCorp a lot if you stop by is: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if…?”

My key take-away back then: watch out for that phrase, it might lead to fun projects! Plus, looking at the world with a wouldn’t-it-be-awesome-if mindset seems like a sure-fire way to delight your community (and your customers).

Well, the phrase has come up a lot over the past twelve months. At the conferences and events that I had a chance to attend (and even at some of the ones I followed remotely), the conversations often seemed to circle back to one recurring theme:

  • Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a site that lists all the online tools for public participation and civic engagement that are out there?
  • Wouldn’t it be great if we had a comprehensive guide to all the commercial and open source products that support online dialogues and e-consultations?
  • Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could keep track of recently launched projects in this area and even compare them side by side?

Yes, yes, and yes.

We’ve been monitoring this space internally for quite some time now, occasionally sharing our findings. Yet while we’ve managed to build a decent list for our own use, it is by no means complete. And with so many new initiatives and interesting projects popping up left and right almost every week, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up.

To solve this problem, and since nobody else appeared to be going for it, we thought it might be a good idea to build a small app that lets anyone collect and share their favorite tools for participation. We call it:

ParticipateDB

A directory of online tools for participation that anyone can edit.

The site is live but is not fully functional yet. Over the next few weeks, we plan to seed it with some of our own data, add some basic site functionalities and then hope to open up to the public later this Fall.

Please contact us or leave a comment if you have feedback. You can follow ParticipateDB on Identi.ca or Twitter, and we will let you know when things are happening.

In the spirit of International Day of Democracy, which is today, we hope ParticipateDB will make the world of online participation a little more awesome.

In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly decided to observe September 15th as the International Day of Democracy and invited all member states and organizations to commemorate the day in an appropriate manner that contributes to raising public awareness.[1]The preamble of the resolution affirmed that:“ while democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy and that democracy does not belong to any country or region…democracy is a universal value based on the freely-expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems, and their full participation in all aspects of life.
In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly decided to observe September 15th as the International Day of Democracy and invited all member states and organizations to commemorate the day in an appropriate manner that contributes to raising public awareness.
The preamble of the resolution affirmed that:
while democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy and that democracy does not belong to any country or region…
democracy is a universal value based on the freely-expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems, and their full participation in all aspects of life.

14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work: “Keep Folks in the Loop!”

Published by Tim on September 7, 2009 in E-participation. 2 Comments Tags: .

In preparation for our potential panel at SXSW 2010 and in an effort to give people a better understanding what our topic is all about, I’m putting together a mini series of posts around some of the recommendations we plan to share. This post is the second part of this series and addresses the importance of keeping participants informed as an e-participation initiative progresses.

One of the challenges we’ve seen with many of the recent e-participation initiatives at the national level is the fact that they tend to produce more raw content in a short period of time than any single participant would ever be able to digest. From what we’ve observed, this problem starts to occur at fairly small group sizes of several hundred participants and up, and the sheer volume of the participants’ collective input can quickly become overwhelming (for details, see here, here and here).

At the same time, it is safe to assume the following (we don’t have hard data to back this up, but reading through the discussions of any of the above projects provided plenty of anecdotal evidence):

  • Overall, the average participant will have a fairly limited amount of time to spend (participation is not their full-time job, far from it)
  • She may only check for updates occasionally (not, say, several times a day)
  • She prefers to “get in and get out” to make her contributions (not hang out and linger for hours on end)

The resulting lack of overview — knowing where things stand and how the project is progressing — can cause unnecessary friction, for example:

  • Less grasp of the overall discussions or any other ongoing activities and the content they produce, which may impact the quality of a participant’s contributions
  • Not knowing something is already being discussed elsewhere leads to repetition
  • Not being aware of the sections or threads that are most relevant to a participant personally may mean missed opportunities to make valuable contributions
  • No “contextual” navigation (knowing what is being discussed where, but also which sections or threads matter and why) may mean too much time spent on random browsing and search rather than meaningful contributions
  • All of the above can frustrate participants, and participation may be perceived as a waste of time

Keeping participants in the know about the bigger picture, on the other hand, can make participation a lot more convenient and fruitful and hence marks an important opportunity for the convener to create a better overall participation experience.

Some of the ways the convener might decide to address this challenge:

  • Provide short summaries on a regular basis (e.g. daily, depending on volume, in text, audio or video format)
  • Provide alerts for certain interesting developments (e.g. sudden sharp spikes in volume, highly active threads etc.)
  • Allow participants to subscribe to these digests and alerts via their preferred channels (e.g. via email, via RSS from an accompanying blog or wiki, or via satellite sites on other social networks)
  • Highlight the most valuable participant contributions (incl. convener responses, explain why)
  • For additional perspective, encourage participant to create their own digests and reference them generously

From a technology standpoint, these recommendations should be easy to implement on the web today. Many web-based tools for participation already support some aspects of participant information services. A wide array of supporting tools (many free and open source) is available to fill any gaps.

“No Better Time” Session Notes Now Available

Published by Tim on September 6, 2009 in Deliberation, Events and Research. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Session notes and related resources from the “No Better Time” conference at the University of New Hampshire back in July are now available for download on their resources page.

Measuring and metrics was a hot topic that was discussed at the following learning exchanges:

  • Embedding Deliberative Practices in Local Democracy (session notes, PDF):
    This would need some further digging into, but lots of interesting tidbits and potential starting points for assessing impact and ROI, various ways to measure “embeddedness” over time etc.
  • Making the Case for this Work: Improving the Way We Collect, Report, and Explain Outcomes (session notes, PDF):
    The goals of this session were “to a) Identify where the field/participants are with regard to evaluation; b) Identify where the field/participants want to be with regard to evaluation; and c) Identify strategies to get the field/participants to that place (how are going to get there?)”
  • New Frontiers for Assessment and Measurement
    No session notes available, but check out “Impacts and Outcomes of Participatory Processes in Brazil and Canada” (download, PDF)
  • Renewing the Research Agenda (session notes, PDF)
    Only a brief outline here (“Assessment was the main theme. One view was that questions about what works, under what conditions, and why can be broken down into researchable parts and studied (quantitatively or qualitatively), with the gold standard being a randomized experiment.”), would be nice if someone could add some detail.
  • The “Downside” of Deliberative Democracy (session notes, PDF)
    Very little detail, except “doing ‘diagnostics’ and ‘assessment’ before planning a deliberative project” was discussed, apparently.

Please leave a comment if you have additional notes or comments you can share. Thanks!