Did the UK Spending Challenge Fall Victim to SCID?

I had heard of the DAD acronym before (decide, announce, defend) but was unaware of SCID until it came up during training last week. Here’s what SCID stands for:

• Solicit (ask stakeholders for input)
• Consider
• Ignore
• Decide

Obviously, this is not good practice as it violates a number of public participation principles (mainly, you don’t ask for input if the decision has already been made or if there is no genuine interest in having that input inform the decision to some extent).

Between the two, SCID is worse than DAD in that it first sets expectations regarding the level of impact participants will have only to then disappoint these expectations.

Even if the participation project is well-intentioned, the perception of SCID can set in easily and quickly. Take, for example, this recent announcement from the Spending Challenge blog:

Thank you for the ideas so far…

As you may have noticed, the site has been the subject to a small number of malicious attacks so we have unfortunately had to pause on the interactive features for now, but we’re still keen to hear any further ideas you have, which we may publish at a later date.

We are really grateful to have already received thousands of good ideas and we’re committed to giving as many of you as possible the chance to get involved and feed into the tough decisions that must be made in the Spending Review.

Without going into a lot of detail, the Spending Challenge consultation launched on June 24, at first for UK public sector workers only. Once it opened up to the general public on July 9, the site was soon overrun by objectionable content. The rich idea generation and commenting features including all content were eventually taken down on July 16 and replaced by a standard one-way feedback form.

For anyone who doesn’t have a lot of trust in the process, a statement like this may well seem like a cop out and prove that the public’s input never really mattered much in the first place (see the tweet shown above).

Better communication might alleviate some of these concerns, but in the end only actions that are in line with what was promised will build the necessary trust with the public. And trust and credibility — and obvious as this may seem, this was one of the key take-aways from last week’s IAP2 certification training — are what makes or breaks any public participation effort.

The good news here is that the D in SCID (the decide) hasn’t actually happened yet. It’s still entirely possible that a lot of the input that’s being gathered will have an impact and that this consultation will have been a meaningful exercise after all.

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Tagged as: scid, spendingchallenge, uk