Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Op-Ed Piece in Federal Computer Week

Published by Tim on January 25, 2010 in Crowdsourcing and Press. 5 Comments Tags: .

Last week, Federal Computer Week published an op-ed they had invited me to write on the issue of crowdsourcing, public participation and how the former might be applied in the context of the latter: The outer limits to the crowd’s wisdom

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that this is something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around over the past few months, especially since the conversation on the web continues to be characterized by confusion about concepts and terminology. The article is a good interim summary of my efforts, and more aspects remain to be explored.

I would like to thank the many who have contributed to this discussion in the comments, via the NCDD mailing list, on GovLoop and elsewhere on the web. Sharing your thoughts so generously has certainly helped me clarify mine. Please keep it up!

Open Government Needs Public Participation Calendars

Published by Tim on January 21, 2010 in Public Participation. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Over at Sunlight Labs, they have some design suggestions today around how federal agencies should approach their new /open website sections with regard to data.

Here’s the comment I just left (pretty much the same point I made on the OSTP blog a few weeks ago when they were seeking input on an Open Government Dashboard):

In addition to exposing the list of available data sets, agencies should publish — at the very minimum — a calendar of ongoing as well as upcoming consultations or any other participation initiatives they offer.

This would be a first step towards tracking the scope and quality of agencies’ public participation efforts.

Obviously, it would also make it easier for citizens to find the participation opportunities they are most interested in.

A lot of thought leaders in the area of public participation have freely and generously shared their advice over the past year, and agencies should draw on this knowledge as they continue to become more participatory.  The key success factors to meaningful, effective participation aren’t a secret, and over time I’m sure we’ll see smart solutions for consistently tracking, measuring and evaluating public participation efforts at all levels of government.

However, the very first step towards this goal is to simply give people (citizens, researchers and other participation evangelists) an easy way to find out about upcoming participation opportunities.

And who knows, making this information available may pave the way for other, more fancy ideas in this area.

Results From 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey

Published by Tim on January 20, 2010 in Research. 0 Comments Tags: .

Caroline Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and Francesca Polletta, Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at UC, Irvine, have just released the results of a survey they did in September/October 2009 and which garnered responses from more than 400 practitioners: The 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey: What is the State of the Field?

From the about page:

We conducted the survey as part of two separate research agendas, both of which focus on multi-method analysis of issues in the dialogue and deliberation field. Caroline Lee has completed four years of fieldwork at dialogue and deliberation conferences, trainings, and courses– and is interested in testing the extent to which the perspectives and themes she is surfacing inductively are shared across a broad group of practitioners. Francesca Polletta is interested in building on earlier findings on gender in a study of online deliberation. We plan on comparing our survey results to the insights emerging from other qualitative and quantitative methods. This triangulation of methodological strategies seeks to strengthen the validity of research findings by accounting for the limitations inherent in every research method.

A few tidbits I found interesting:

  • According to “Q21: Methods Used Most Often in Current Practice”, 25% or respondents are reporting frequent use of “onine/digital media”. That’s pretty cool!
  • According to “Q23: Term that best describes the people and organizations currently leading D&D efforts”, 57% of respondents prefer “Community of Practice”
  • According to “Q23: Most important challenge facing the D&D community, based on challenges defined by NCDD conference attendees”, 20% of respondents mention “Demonstrating to powerholders that D&D works”

The full results are available on the website and are available for download (PDF).

How Quora Does Opt-In Anonymity

Published by Tim on January 20, 2010 in Research. 1 Comment

As I suggested a few weeks ago, there might be a lot to gain if e-participation systems offered “more flexible ways of dealing with identity” than the one-size-fits-all approach that’s currently predominant:

  • By giving participants better overall control of how much information they want to reveal about themselves (vis-a-vis the application as well as other participants)
  • By offering more fine-grained identity and anonymity options at the activity or process level (not just the project level)
For example, a group brainstorming exercise could rely on the following three parameters:
  • Default identity setting: This would be defined by the convener/facilitator, a user’s identity is either shown or not shown along with the idea they submit (anonymous idea)
  • Default override option: Here, the user either has the option to change whatever the default setting is (i.e. reveal her identity when the default is set to anonymous and vice versa), or the user doesn’t have that option
  • Identity revelation: For anonymous contributions, this setting defines if the identity will be revealed during or at the end of the process: always (all anonymous ideas will be revealed at the end), never (all anonymous ideas stay anonymous and can’t be revealed), or optional (the user decides if and when to reveal their identity)
This would allow for scenarios that are completely public, completely anonymous as well as those that give more flexible control to participants.
Last week, I came across a nice example of what this process might look like. Quora is a newly launched social web application that aims to build “a continually improving collection of questions.” Their identity parameters for the process of submitting new questions are currently set as follows:
  • Default: user identity is shown
  • Override: yes, user can choose to post questions anonymously
  • Revelation: no (the identity of the post remains hidden and can’t be revealed; however, the user can choose to post publicly in the comments)
The following screenshots illustrate the process of first posting a contribution anonymously and then revealing one’s identity in the comments later:
1. User prepares a new question

Quora - Home

2. User checks option “add question anonymously”

Quora - Home-2

3. Anonymous question appears (user identity not shown)

Quora - What are the three biggest items in California's state budget?

4. User chooses to reveal identity

Technically, this applies to the comment section, not the original question. But you can see how the same would apply if the user were to reveal the authorship of her original question.

Quora - What are the three biggest items in California's state budget?

5. Posting appears with user identified

Again, in the case of Quora this applies to the comment section, not the original question.

Quora - What are the three biggest items in California's state budget?

It’s obvious how this could be useful. In brainstorming, it is crucial to suspend judgment during the ideation process. Allowing participants to post anonymously would invite participation from those who are otherwise too afraid to post half-baked ideas. Requiring all participants to post anonymously might serve as a nice equalizer in cases where a lot of strong voices are dominating the discussions.

GSA to Offer IdeaScale to Federal Agencies

Published by Tim on January 20, 2010 in E-participation and Radar. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

As was already mentioned at last week’s Open Government Directive Workshop event in DC (see video, starts at around 1:14:20), the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced it will offer IdeaScale to federal agencies free of charge in order to help them comply with the tight deadlines presented in the Open Government Directive. From the press release: Further Opens Government, Launches Online Public Dialog Tool for Agencies

WASHINGTON – To help federal agencies fulfill President Obama’s Open Government Directive, the U.S. General Services Administration has introduced a public dialog tool to federal agencies at no cost. GSA hosted more than 70 government officials last week from more than 20 agencies to introduce the tool, answer questions, and gather feedback.
“To help agencies answer President Obama’s call for a more citizen-centered, open government, GSA is making sure those agencies have the necessary tools to meaningfully engage the public,” said David McClure, Associate Administrator for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications. “By leveraging a single solution governmentwide, GSA can simplify the public engagement process for both agencies and the citizen, helping to build and offer uniformity and consistency in how the public engages with their government and move toward making the process as efficient as possible.”
On Dec. 8, 2009, President Obama issued the Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to launch an open government Web page that incorporates a public feedback mechanism by Feb. 6, 2010. To help agencies meet this benchmark, GSA is providing this tool at no cost to agencies, along with technical, management, and policy support. Agency officials will be able to devote their attention to running, moderating, and analyzing public input.
GSA’s public dialog tool will allow agencies to provide citizens a forum to share ideas, give feedback, and engage in Web-based discussions with their government.
GSA’s Office of Citizen Services, which fosters public engagement by using innovative technologies to connect citizens to their government, will continue to develop additional tools and practices to help agencies provide more opportunities for the public to engage with their government.

CNET News has more details: Feds get new tool for online public feedback

The new tool, which was built by a company called Ideascale, is very cheap to work with and implement, said Bev Godwin, the GSA’s director of new media and citizen engagement. All told, she added, it is expected to cost the GSA just $3,000 and will be free to each agency that wishes to use it.

[...]

Although the tool will display real-time results of the most popular publicly-submitted ideas on each agency’s Web site, there are no guarantees that those ideas will ultimately be implemented. But the point, said Dave McClure, who heads up the GSA’s Office of Citizen Services, is that the tool empowers the spirit of the Open Government Directive, by giving the public an easy way to submit ideas and become involved in the decision-making process.

[...]

All told, McClure said, 21 out of 24 “major” federal departments have signed on to use the tool, which is not mandatory under the Open Government Directive’s guidelines.

As you may remember, IdeaScale was used during phase 1 of the Open Government Dialogue back in May of last year. Three issues were widely noted then:

  • Little participation by the convener/host
  • Lack of moderation
  • Information cascades/herding: like most other tools in this space that allow idea generation and up-or-down voting to happen in parallel (while also exposing the leader board, often as the default view), IdeaScale tends to favor those ideas that gain an early advantage (see my detailed tracking notes on Flickr)

It will be very interesting to see if and how these issues will be addressed during upcoming projects.

To see how IdeaScale has already been used in practice, check out the IdeaScale entry on ParticipateDB. A handful of e-participation projects using this tool have already been captured. Looks like quite a few more will have to be added shortly.

Connect the Dots National Student Conference: March 3-6, 2010 in Point Clear, AL

Published by Tim on January 19, 2010 in Events. 0 Comments Tags: .

This just in via the The Democracy Imperative newsletter:

We’re happy to start the New Year with this announcement: the students who attended the No Better Time conference last July were inspired to take the initiative and host their own event, Connect the Dots: Public Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community Problem Solving & Action. If you missed NBT, you might want to attend this conference.  And please send this out to students you think would be interested.
The conference, which is being hosted by the David Mathews Center for Civic Life, will be March 3-6, 2010 in Clear Point, Alabama. If you check the conference web site, you will find links to the conference schedule, proposed workshops, and registration information.  There will be workshops in models and methods of public dialogue and deliberation, facilitation, intergroup dialogue, leadership, social and political equity, Sustained Dialogue, National Issue Forums, organizing community-wide dialogue-to-change initiatives, issue framing, and more.
The call for proposals deadline is February 1.
We hope that campuses will send teams – and we’ll see you there
The conference goal is “to provide a forum for students learning about how to embed democratic practices in their everyday work and lives. These practices include public dialogue, deliberation, problem solving and action.”
The call for proposals lists the following areas of interest:
  • Public Policy Making
  • Community Building
  • Community Organizing
  • Community Values
  • Intercultural Engagement\Relations
  • Models & Approaches to Deliberative Democracy
  • Peace & Conflict Studies
  • Justice, Equity & Freedom
  • Leadership
  • E-democracy
  • Strong Communities
  • Civic Engagement

No Better Time was a great conference, and this “national student conference on public dialogue, deliberation, community problem solving and action” sure looks like an interesting follow-up.

Please leave a comment if you plan on going. Definitely leave a comment if you plan on doing something in the area of e-democracy.