Shortly after the newly-elected coalition government in the UK took office this past May, they launched a website that invited the public to comment on their Programme for Government (their policy agenda for the next few years). The site went live on May 20, 2010 and stayed open for feedback for about three weeks, during which time they received close to 10,000 comments.
They just published their responses, and The Guardian on Monday pointed out a few issues with this project: Coalition’s first crowdsourcing attempt fails to alter Whitehall line
9,500 responded online to request for suggestions but no departments willing to amend any of their policies
The government’s first attempt at crowdsourcing its coalition programme has ended without a single government department expressing a willingness to alter any policy.
Crowdsourcing involves soliciting knowledge and expertise from the public to help find solutions to problems. The coalition asked the public to respond to its programme on government websites. It received 9,500 replies online.
However, its formal responses, published on each website, shows Whitehall regarded the process largely as an endorsement of what it was already doing.
In cases where most of the submissions conflicted with existing policy, the department simply restated the policy. The departmental responses were published last Friday without publicity.
Leaving aside for a second the use of the term crowdsourcing in this context (see here, here), here’s the comment I left over on the Democracies Online Exchange:
This looks like your typical bad attempt at public participation, a prime example how *not* to do it.
Things that may have possibly gone wrong:
Maybe the final decision on what the “programme for government” should look like had already been made, in which case there was no reason whatsoever to consult the public in the first place.
Or maybe all the new leadership was interested in was to inform the public (and maybe acknowledge their concerns) with little or no commitment for this input to be incorporated in any way. In this case, it appears the public’s expectations were managed rather poorly.
Or maybe they *were* in fact open to incorporating public feedback in some areas and to some degree but the input they received was irrelevant, lacked in quality or otherwise was not helpful to them. In which case, maybe they should have facilitated the process better.
Or better yet, maybe the *leadership* was genuinely interested in collaborating with the public on improving the proposed policies but many or most of the key internal stakeholders (the various departments) hadn’t bought into it. In which case someone didn’t do their homework.
Whatever the case may be, any of these would constitute a major and inexcusable failure, in my view.
I’d be interested to hear HMG’s side of the story, though based on how their other online projects have been going so far I’m not convinced they know what they’re doing.
Two of the other online projects I mention are the Spending Challenge, which is still ongoing and has already raised concerns, and Your Freedom, which for a lot of the same reasons has received mixed reviews at best.
The cornerstone of quality public participation, whether online or offline, is process integrity. This is not it!
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