Following up on my earlier post, I was trying to find out how exactly the Programme for Government online consultation had been announced when it launched. When evaluating consultations, a lot depends on the commitment the sponsoring organization has made, their promise to the public.
I couldn’t find anything on the website (on a side note, it’s not a good sign if this content disappears from the website that hosts the online consultation as it makes it so much harder to hold the convener accountable) so I searched around a bit and came across this excellent post by Tim Davies: Comment on government: How should I be interacting?
He quotes part of the original invitation to participate, which helped me find it quoted in full elsewhere:
This website is the online version of The Coalition: our programme for government. It sets out a programme for partnership government over the next five years. These plans are inspired by the values of freedom, fairness and responsibility, and a shared desire to work in the national interest. Working together, we are confident that we can take the country through difficult times to better days ahead.
We believe the programme can deliver radical, reforming government, a stronger society, a smaller state and power and responsibility in the hands of every citizen. Great change and real progress lie ahead.
Have your say
This programme is a historic document in British politics – it’s the first time in over half a century that two parties have come together to prepare joint plans in this way.
This website gives you the opportunity to enter public discussion on the programme. We’ll take all your comments and suggestions on board and publish the Government’s response to those policy areas receiving the most feedback.
In a way, this already confirms what I suspected was poor expectation management. Looking at the language I’d guess they were aiming at a Consult-level engagement (the implied promise being to keep participants informed, listen to and acknowledge concerns and aspirations, and provide feedback on how public input influenced the decision but without any further commitments). The general public, however, reading the same statement, would usually be quick to expect a lot more influence. That’s why it’s always a good idea for the sponsor or convener to be very specific in outlining what participants can and cannot expect.
As Tim Davies noted back in May:
[...] it goes no further to explain who will be reading the comments, what sort of feedback to expect, and whether the goal is discussion between members of the public, or dialogue between the public and government.
[...]
As the Government team behind this online document, and, hopefully future online documents, iterate the development of such spaces, it would be good to see a lot more attention paid to the forms of interaction between citizen and state that are to be facilitated. Personally, I’d like to see a clear statement about exactly who will be reading and summarising the comments; how that will take place; and who the summary will be shared with. And it would be good to have something more nuanced than simply a numbers game for knowing what will get considered.
To be fair, it’s worth pointing out that this project was carried out in an “insanely short” timeframe, as Simon Dickson, who built the Programme for Government website, notes in his comment.
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In this post, Simon Dickson talks about the intended scope of the project: Commenting is not crowdsourcing
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