These were our three most popular posts in January:

• Response to White House Request for Input: What Are the Most Effective Web Tools for Public Participation?
• 2012 Event and Conference Radar
• What Is Public Participation?

Thanks for following along, everyone!

Possibly not of global relevance (yet), but since it is my home town I thought I’d give it a quick shout-out:

Earlier today, Offenes Köln (Open Cologne) was officially announced. It’s a grassroots project by Marian Steinbach in Cologne, Germany that aims to make information, documents and data related to local government available (and accessible) to the general public by way of aggregating, enhancing and presenting government information from various sources from the “Ratsinformationssystem” (city council information system), the official platform of the City of Cologne.

Open Cologne appears to have been inspired by Frankfurt Gestalten, whose creator Christian Kreutz I interviewed a while back.

Steven Clift just alerted me to a new report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government: A Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation (PDF), authored by Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University.

I admit I haven’t fully read it yet, but a couple of issues jumped out that I wanted to point out really quick.

1) Terminology

First off, I like this explanation of the term “citizen participation” (page 6):

What is Citizen Participation?

Citizen participation can be broadly defined as the processes by which public concerns, needs, and values are incorporated into decision-making. Citizen participation happens in many places (e.g., civil society, electoral, legislative, and administrative arenas) and can take many forms (e.g., methods may range from information exchanges to democratic decision-making). [...]

Citizen participation may be indirect or direct:

• Indirect participation, such as voting or supporting advocacy groups, occurs when citizens select or work through representatives who make decisions for them .
• Direct participation occurs when citizens are personally and actively engaged in decisionmaking

It appears that the term “citizen participation” as applied here is more narrow than civic engagement but considerably broader than public participation.

That’s why I don’t quite agree with the statement that “many of the assumptions behind the IAP2 and other organizing principles for citizen participation do not always hold” (page 7), as the side-by-side comparison of “Assumptions and Realities about Citizen Participation” (page seems to slightly confuse the terminology.

For example, the table lists as an assumption that “[p]articipation is focused on decisionmaking and helps direct government allocation of resources” and  contrasts this with the reality that “[p]articipation can be done for reasons other than decisionmaking. Even when focused on decision-making, participation might not (and often need not) address resource allocation issues.”

It’s true that “citizen participation” (as defined above) may not always focus on directly engaging citizens in decision making. “Public participation” as defined by IAP2, on the other hand, is always about decision making and the various levels the public can be directly involved. Furthermore, IAP2′s framework is not limited to resource allocation issues.

For more on this, see our previous posts on terminology (here, here) or browse the dictionary.

2) Mapping tools to IAp2 Spectrum impact levels

On pages 10-12, the report provides a number of examples of online and offline tools as they map to certain levels on the IAP2 Spectrum. This is something I’d love to work on in more detail at some point, especially to help categorize the many online tools out there. It’s been tried several times before but I haven’t quite seen it work.

The challenge, as I see it, is that most group processes or tools don’t map neatly to one level on the Spectrum or another. For example, Deliberative Polling and AmericaSpeaks 21st Century TownMeeting can fall on the Involve or Collaborate part of the Spectrum but only if the decision maker is on board. If, on the other hand, the process is used without a clear link to a decision making process then the Spectrum does not apply.

Both the 2007 CaliforniaSpeaks project (21st Century TownMeeting) and the 2011 What’s Next California project (Deliberative Polling) are examples where either process has been applied for opinion research and advocacy purposes but where the outcomes did not have any concrete impact in terms of decision making.

* * *

At any rate, the main focus of the report is on evaluation and metrics and looks quite useful. Hope to dig in later tonight.

As an IAP2 USA Board member, I would like to take a short moment to plug the membership drive we kicked off in October and which will end tomorrow, January 31, at midnight: IAP2 USA Fall Membership Campaign: $99 Deal, Good for 99 Days!

I don’t have the latest numbers handy, but it looks like we’re getting very close to reaching our goal of signing up 99 new members.

New local chapters, monthly practitioner calls and our soon-to-be-launched communities of practice are only some of the things we have in store for 2012. If your work has to do with public participation in any way, IAP2 USA is a great place to connect with fellow practitioners and share, learn and grow together.

Here are two things you can do to support us:

1. If you aren’t a member yet, now would be a great time to join. You can apply online, or call +1 (855) 500-5767 during office hours.
2. If you know any friends or colleagues who should be members but aren’t, please forward this information.

30 hours left to take advantage of the $99 special rate. Thanks!

In case you’ve been following We the People (see our coverage), this upcoming conference call might be for you.

From the IAP2 USA blog: We the People Follow-Up: February 1, 2012

Last October, we asked you to help us improve We the People, the new White House e-petition site. Collaborating with our partners, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), AmericaSpeaks and the Open Forum Foundation, we have since collected comments over on our idea site: http://wethepeople.uservoice.com

We are currently preparing a draft summary of all the input we have received and would like to invite you to join us for a conference call to discuss what we’ve heard:

Wednesday, February 1, 2012
2pm Eastern Time (11am Pacific Time)

To RSVP, simply email us at info@iap2usa.org. We will share the dial-in information in time for next week’s call.

If you have additional comments or feedback, make sure to add them. Thanks!

It’s that time of year, and SXSW Interactive (that week-long mass pilgrimage of web, film, music and — for the first time this year with a conference track of their own — education innovators to beautiful Austin, TX) is almost around the corner.

Since there’s a good chance I’ll make the trip out there yet once again, I thought I’d take a quick look at the schedule. Here are some of this year’s sessions in the areas of politics, open government, crowdsourcing and the like that look particularly promising:

Friday, March 9, 2012

• Rethinking Civilization for the Social Age

Saturday, March 10, 2012

• Crowdsourcing a Revolution: Can We Fix Healthcare?

Sunday, March 11, 2012

• How Is Internet Helping People Make Their Own Laws
• We the People: Creating a Consumer’s Bill of Rights
• Fixing Broke(n) Governments Through Serious Games
• Public Lab: Mapping, DIY Activism & Civic Science
• But Hasn’t Politics Always Been Social?
• What Civil Society Can Learn from Social Web
• A New Culture of Learning: Gaming, Tech, Design

Monday, March 12, 2012

• Sunspots: The Promise and Pitfalls of Gov 2.0
• Utah.gov: Breaking the Mold for eGovernment
• Future of Cities: Technology in Public Service
• Play Time?: Kids and Game-Based Learning
• The Next Frontier of Public Services
• Artists in Labs: Participatory Design at Eyebeam
• Democracy 2.0 in the German Parliament
• How Social Media Imperils Political Parties
• Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

• Do People Really Want Participatory Government?
• 2012: Social Media’s New Role in Politics

Obviously, there’s lots more to look forward to (and I’m not just talking about the sessions). Hope to see everyone there!

In the second chapter from his upcoming book, Tom Atlee picks up the topic of learning in deliberation, something he has written about previously. It’s a thorny issue and generally applies to public participation as well.

One problem, as I see it, is that quality deliberation requires informed participants, but properly framing the issue and creating the necessary briefing materials can be quite costly. The challenge is how can we meaningfully involve participants in the co-creation of the briefing process and its outcomes in order to improve quality, lower costs and help make quality deliberation more widely available.

Here’s Tom’s take (as pre-released on Reality Sandwich last month):

Deliberapedia

As noted earlier, framing an issue for deliberation means providing balanced information that helps deliberators take into account the range of views on their issue and the trade-offs connected to whatever choices they might make. Traditionally, it involves condensing a lot of information about that issue into 3-5 approaches for addressing the issue — representing as broadly as possible the full public debate — with the arguments and evidence for and against each approach. Sometimes issue framings also include information about who supports and opposes each option, and a profile of the values that it represents and appeals to.

Most citizen deliberations are framed by professionals who produce “issue books”, videos and other briefing materials, many of which are available at low or no cost, but are quite expensive to put together in the first place. Framing for broad self-organized grassroots deliberations, in contrast, would be crowdsourced, using the fact that advocates for various solutions to a public problem have already developed arguments for their solution and against their opponents’ solutions. Our challenge is to create a context where opponents in the fight over an issue end up participating in co-creating a wiki that channels their information into a coherent frame that clarifies that issue for everyone else. Most of the partisans involved would not participate out of their civic-mindedness but because they wanted their viewpoint to be well represented in this public document. This is the idea behind “Deliberapedia”.

The Deliberapedia vision is inspired by Debatepedia, a leading debate society’s online forum to collectively work up and share arguments pro and con various propositions, creating a database that can be used by debaters everywhere. Deliberapedia would be a massive, readily searchable, rapidly expanding and developing wiki database of organized arguments for and against all sorts of policy solutions to all sorts of public issues.

Deliberapedia would provide a powerful — perhaps even necessary — foundation for a self-organizing grassroots citizen-based deliberative system capable of generating empowered public wisdom with minimal ongoing cost. It would also constitute one of the greatest contributions we could make to democracy even if the rest of the deliberative system for which it was designed is never developed.

Note from the author: The final version of Empowering Public Wisdom will include an appendix showing one way in which Deliberapedia could function, including a special network of grassroots groups focusing on issues they’ve chosen, as well as a chapter on the creation of official legislature of ordinary citizens, who could both contribute to and use Deliberapedia.

It’s still true today that “[i]nside every public participation program is a good public information program.” However, I think we need to be moving from simply informing participants (if understood as a top-down, one-way activity) towards a more participant-centric model that takes into account the entire learning experience. Last Spring at SXSW, I took the liberty to slightly rephrase the guideline as follows: ”Inside every public participation program is a good public learning program.”

The wiki approach Tom proposes has opportunities but also many challenges. In order for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts some level of editorial leadership would still be required, and the need to coordinate non-expert contributors will create certain overhead costs which may at some point outweigh the benefits.

In the context of specific projects, though, one possible solution might be found somewhere in the middle between a top-down and a purely participant-driven (crowdsourced) approach. As I started to outline last year, I agree there is a lot of potential in granting the participants a much more active role in this important pre-phase of any deliberation, consultation or general public participation effort:

• Building on the diversity of participants’ knowledge and experiences could help improve briefing materials in terms of scope, accuracy and accessibility.
• Giving participants ownership of the research process and the outcomes it produces may build buy-in and increase trust.
• Offering participants more variety in the ways they can contribute (e.g. by taking on the role of “researcher, interviewer, fact checker, curator, editor etc.”) might increase overall engagement, with more people participating at a higher enjoyment factor and hence more likely to stick around, invite others etc.

I’d be interested to know who has integrated innovative content co-creation and e-learning components into their online consultations. If you have any leads, please leave a comment. Thanks!

As has been discussed intensively elsewhere on the web for the past several weeks and months, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act currently before Congress are ill conceived and, if passed, would have terrible consequences for the internet as we know it.

At the heart of the matter is the question how society should best balance the conflicting needs of copyright holders and the general public in the era of the internet, when co-creation and sharing of content are increasingly becoming the cultural norm. It’s a complex question that requires careful consideration and moderation, not the kind of knee jerk approach manifested in these bills. As a startup company that lives and breathes on the internet, we are particularly worried about these developments.

In this brief talk, Clay Shirky gives a bit of historical background and explains the main issues with the two bills:

For more information on the topic and to take action, check out Wikipedia’s FAQ, which includes links to several recent media articles on the topic.

Over at Human Transit, public transportation planner Jarrett Walker points to yet another online budget puzzle, this one from Portland, OR and still ongoing: portland: balance the budget yourself

Portland’s Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they’ve come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services to cut. It’s one of those “balance the budget yourself” tools that’s becoming increasingly necessary to bring voters into contact with reality about government budgets.

Here’s a screenshot showing the progress bar under the combination of revenue increases and spending cuts that yield the maximum impact.

In the comments, readers point out a number of issues with this setup:

• Options don’t appear to cover the full spectrum of solutions.
• Appears to only include options that are generally within the scope of convener’s institutional authority.
• Options appear to be biased.
• Financial impact calculations seem questionable.
• Low combined impact volume means some “options” aren’t really that optional.

Whether these concerns are justified or not, at this point the damage is already done: the perceived shortcomings put this public participation exercise in a pretty bad spot right from the get-go.

Here’s the comment I left:

Interesting, anyone know what kind of software they’re using or whether this was built in-house?

There are two things I look at when I come across online budget tools like this one:

1) What’s the maximum impact of all options combined as a percentage of the deficit? In this case, the deficit is $17m, but only $25.7m (151%) in deficit reduction measures are offered. It’s clear right there that there probably isn’t a lot of flexibility for participants in choosing their path to solving the deficit.

2) Are there any options that are impossible to avoid? In this case, the budget deficit cannot be resolved unless fares are increased. As long as a participants [sic] chooses “no fare increase” she won’t be able to solve the puzzle. Failure to make this more transparent to the participant can be a simple oversight or, worse, an effort to push a hidden agenda.

Obviously, the options shouldn’t be biased (as much as that’s possible). At the very least, TriMet should provide information as to how the various options were selected and share the assumptions behind their financial impact calculations.

There are better ways to do this, though it certainly isn’t the first project to struggle.

Tom Atlee will be presenting at this week’s NCDD Confab Call. From his blog:

I’ll be doing an online dialogue in the 2-hour National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Confab Call on Tuesday, January 17th at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Ben Roberts, a principal in both weDialogue and Occupy Café, will be facilitating the call on the Maestro conference call platform (which enables questions, voting, breakout groups, etc.).

Tom will cover various themes from his new book “Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics” (to be published in August 2012), including this question related to e-participation:

• What is gained and lost in the choice between online and face-to-face citizen engagements? Do conference calls and video conferencing have a potential role to play in formal citizen deliberations? Is it actually possible to have quality online deliberation among ordinary citizens – especially if they are randomly selected? What do we need to know and do in order to achieve high quality online deliberation?

Great question, and I look forward to the conversation. Our short answer is that a combination of good process, skilled facilitation and the appropriate technology can make high-quality online deliberation possible, whether stand-alone or in combination with face-to-face.

Head over to Maestro to RSVP for this event.

Like last year, we’re taking a quick moment to look back at the topics that stood out over the past twelve months. Here are our top 10 most popular posts of 2011:

• February 14: Calgary Budget Consultation: 13 Design Principles
• February 21: CRS Report on Open Government Initiative
• March 7: How To Create Policy on a Wiki
• March 12: SXSW Future 15: Designing Successful Online Consultations
• March 28: New Guide from NAPA: Tools for Online Idea Generation
• April 21: Micro-Participation In Online Consultations
• May 7: What Is Civic Engagement?
• October 13: Tree Bressen: The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes in Consensus Process
• October 19: Occupy Research Wiki
• November 28: 2012 Event and Conference Radar

Thanks for all the smart, timely comments we’ve received here and elsewhere. Always much appreciated!

I’m probably the last person to see this, but the Canadian Government provides a comprehensive directory of consultations from various departments and agencies. From the English language version homepage:

Welcome to the Consulting With Canadians site!

The Government of Canada is committed to finding new and innovative ways to consult with, and engage Canadians.

Consulting With Canadians provides you with single-window access to a list of consultations from selected government departments and agencies.

Look at some of the consultations in progress and get involved.

We would like your feedback regarding this site. Please take a few minutes to complete a brief User Survey. Your views are important to us and will be considered in assessing the value of this site to Canadians.

Please feel free to submit any additional comments regarding this site that might allow us to serve you better.Contact-Us.

Would be nice to have this in the US.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) have put out a joint response to the recent White House call for input.

It’s very solid, so please make sure to read it in full: Strengthening the Public Participation Elements of the Open Government Plan (PDF). Especially noteworthy is a list of resources that show in detail the benefits of “planned, structured participation”, namely:

• Raising the level of civility and trust in public discourse
• Reducing government costs through closer public oversight and better understanding of citizen needs and attitudes
• Creating more realistic budgets, either by raising “tax morale,” building support for spending cuts, or both
• Generating new policy ideas and tapping the problem-solving capacity of citizens
• Breaking through legislative gridlock on high-profile policy questions

You are invited to sign the document in support. From the blog post:

Though we didn’t have the time to put a draft out to the whole field before the deadline as we would have preferred, we welcome you to add your feedback here via the comments field. And if you or your organization support what we submitted in the joint statement, please add a comment signing on with your support! We’d love to show the White House that groups in our field are indeed “seconding” the statement.

Sign here.

In light of the recent call for input regarding public participation best practices, it’s always interesting to compare how that question is being answered abroad.

Here’s a 2010 document by Planning Aid England, which is part of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the UK’s “leading planning body for spatial, sustainable, integrative and inclusive planning”: Good Practice Guide to Public Engagement in Development Schemes (PDF)

For developers, communities and decision makers, one of the biggest challenges in taking forward a development scheme is to ensure that public engagement is undertaken in a way which is meaningful, inclusive and brings benefits for all involved.

This guide is intended to provide practical advice for all those involved in public engagement in development schemes which require planning consent. It is illustrated by real examples of good practice and provides information and assistance to those planning, engaging in, or assessing community consultation.

The guide lists the following eight principles:

• Research and analysis – explore the context, history, different communities and groups in the area who may affected. Identify what will motivate people, what else is happening in the area, establish if it is connected and if so consider the potential to share events. Establish the goals – what are the benefits of engaging with communities and how will these be realised?
• Learn from the process – identify what people think of the way the consultation has worked. What could be done better, what else needs to be done, was it a balanced and inclusive process. Identify the lessons learned and take these forward into other projects.
• Continuing to engage – Has feedback been given and how will the relationships developed be continued into the construction and operational phases of a development project?
• Monitor and evaluate – monitor engagement and use the results to identify gaps and inform actions to widen the process and ensure a balanced community response is achieved. Consider the comments received and how they can be taken into account in the design – is further engagement required?
• Relationship building, knowledge and skills – develop links with key groups and individuals who can assist and advise on what matters in the area. Consider how existing community groups, networks and representatives might be involved, what barriers might exist and what help might be needed to build the capacity to engage.
• Communications – ensure that the information provided is clear, accessible and sufficient to tell people what they want to know, and to allow them to decide whether to engage. Be clear about what is fixed and why, and what is ‘up for debate’. Check that mechanisms are in place to allow information to flow in all directions and that response dates are clear.
• Timing – be realistic, allow sufficient time to achieve the goals set at the start. Provide a clear timetable for the project identifying consultation opportunities. Ensure engagement takes place when things can be changed and when it is cost effective to do so. Allow sufficient time for considered and informed response. How and when will feedback be provided?
• Inclusive – ensure under represented individuals and groups are included and that they have an equal opportunity to be heard. Be clear when making changes that these do not respond to a vociferous minority but are a response to a wider community view.

The “Delivering Good Practice” FAQ at the end seems quite useful, too, to help market public participation to planners, developers and the public.

The guide has been endorsed by IAP2 UK/Ireland.

Hat tip: IAP2 via Twitter.

Via Alex Moll on Twitter, I just came across OpenGov.gr, the website for the Greek Open Government Initiative. From the English language version:

Opengov.gr has been designed to serve the principles of transparency, deliberation, collaboration and accountability and includes three initiatives:

Οpen calls for the recruitment of public administration officials. Top level and mid-level openings in the public sector are available on the Internet. Applications are submitted on-line using a platform available on the opengov.gr website. See the latest Open Calls here (in Greek).

Electronic deliberation. Almost every piece of draft legislation or even policy initiative by the government, are posted in a blog like platform prior to their submission to parliament. Citizens and organisations can post their comments, suggestions and criticisms article-by-article. See the latest Electronic deliberations here (in Greek).

Labs OpenGov. An open innovation initiative that brings together ideas and proposals from citizens, the public and the private sectors. Labs.OpenGov.gr attempts to release the power of decentralised knowledge and explore new ways to tackle modern public administration problems. See the latest Labs events here (in Greek).

The online deliberation site runs on WordPress using at least one plugin (for up-or-down voting).

A couple of screenshots below (using Google Translate).

This particular “Public Consultation on the creation of new corporate structure” ran from November 22 through December 7, 2011. Two documents related to the consultation are available for download (PDF). The results are available for download as well (Excel) and include the list of full-text comments including number of positive and negative votes received.

If any of our Greek readers familiar with this site could share some additional information, that would be great. For example, how popular is this offering? How are comments being processed? The usual stuff. Ευχαριστώ!

For the past three years (ever since attending “The Underlying Dynamics of Conversations that Matter”, a most excellent pre-conference workshop with Tom Atlee and Peggy Holman at NCDD 2008 in Austin, TX), I’ve been following the Group Pattern Language Project, a very exciting endeavor led by Tree Bressen, Sue Woehrlin and Dave Pollard and involving dozens of contributors from a variety of backgrounds, that aims to build — you guessed it — a pattern language of group processes.

Here’s how they describe the concept:

A Pattern Language is an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of what brings aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor, through a set of interconnected expressions arising from that wisdom. Aliveness is one placeholder term for “the quality that has no name”: a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace, that while of varying form, is precise and empirically verifiable.

The term was originally coined by architect Christopher Alexander, who, together with five colleagues, published A Pattern Language for building in 1977. Others have since applied the term to economics, software design, liberatory communication, wikis and more.

The intention behind this ambitious project is to share knowledge that goes to the “deeper core of what brings a group conversation alive”. Their goals include:

1. To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function. The most important part of any meeting planning is to get clear on why you are having the meeting. That choice drives all subsequent choices for that event.
2. To deepen the skills of those who serve as group process guides, leaders, hosts, and facilitators. To assist with their learning in how to do design. To help them choose among many possible processes to create something that will be the best possible fit for their situation at a given time. [...]
3. To serve as a resource for those who are teaching others to design, lead, facilitate group process.
4. To increase process literacy among people who are users of process(es)–which is all of us. Our world needs us to wake up and get more savvy about this.

Throughout the three-year period, progress was documented on a public wiki, as new patterns were identified and went from seed stage to full maturity.

Yesterday, the group launched the Group Works Card Deck, a collection of 91 cards to help facilitators and participants make their group process work more effective:

The Group Works card deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The people who developed this deck spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we had ever witnessed. We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.

More from the about page:

About the Group Pattern Language Project and the Card Deck

Why are we doing this? Our world is, to a very real extent, based on dialogue. Every action taken that involves more than one person arises from conversation that generates, coordinates, and reflects those actions. Those actions have impact. If our human world is based on conversations, then the work of creating and supporting those conversations is central to shaping a world that works. Designing and conducting meetings and other group sessions well is vital to determining our common future. This project grew around a shared understanding that in an urgent way, our survival depends on our ability to work and play well together, and on discovering and creating group processes which are at the same time effective and life-affirming. Because this is easier said than done, we wanted to deepen and spread the insights, skills, and capacity to make that promise real.

The following core beliefs guide our work:

• Seeing a world in flux and deep need, we believe the work of facilitators, both formal and informal, can make a significant difference to the quality and outcomes of essential conversations. Thus we accept a responsibility, as facilitators and participants in group process, to act for the common good.
• We expect convenors of group process to act with full transparency regarding the motives and expected results of the sessions we organize and run. With honesty and humility, we strive to continuously improve the calibre of our work.
• We choose to assume the best of people. We believe people flourish when entrusted with the opportunity to authentically self-manage, collaborate, and make decisions collectively, as true respected equals. Because the most critical issues facing us in the world and in our organizations are complex and interconnected, we need each other to do this—the challenges we face are beyond solving by leaders or experts in isolation. We believe in sharing power, that we are wiser when we work together.
• We believe that effective group processes are clearly driven by the purpose for which they are called. We respect participants’ life energy by invoking processes that productively use their time, resulting in cooperative sessions that meet a high standard in engagement, achievement and connection. We draw on experience and knowledge to create elegant designs with great care, yet remain flexible and open to change as the circumstances, will of participants and flow of events may dictate.
• Good process builds strong communities. Our work is an act of love in service to the world.

The  print version of the deck can be purchased for $25. A PDF is available for download free of charge.

While this marks a major milestone in the project’s history, the work is not done yet:

Because of space limitations, each card aims only to name the essential What and Why of that particular element. In order to actually use the patterns, you’ll need to come up with the How. A lot of Hows are supplied on our website, where you will find a growing pool of information about the patterns represented in this deck. Some cards have plenty of resources already on the website, while others remain to be fleshed out. Over fifty people were involved in the creation of this card deck, and we’d be delighted for you to join the circle by helping explain how to apply the patterns—see more on this below.

It will be fun to watch how this work evolves next.

And to everyone who played a role in this: Congratulations!

Last April, Stephen Buckley started OpenGov Metrics, a Google group about “the adoption and use of standard metrics for measuring progress in ‘Open Government’ efforts, i.e, to make government more ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative’.”

In light of the recent White House request for input regarding best practices and metrics, the group is currently being relaunched.

If you’re interested in this topic, please join and share your insights.

You can read Stephen’s submission here: My Response: White House asks for OpenGov “Best Practices & Metrics”

A couple of months ago, we set up our Intellitics company page on Google+, a new social networking thingy from Google.

It’s still early days for this service, but more people and organizations are joining every day so things are bound to get more interesting over time.

If you’re already using Google+, feel free to circle us. Thanks!

In December, the White House issued a request for input regarding the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Their list of seven questions included one on e-participation. To jog your memory, here it is once again:

What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and academic communities, and provide the public with greater and more meaningful opportunities to influence agencies’ plans?

The following response was intended to be a group collaboration between various practitioners, researchers and other thought leaders in the field of e-participation and online engagement, mainly from the U.S. but welcoming contributions from abroad. Despite the very short notice, Intellitics was able to host an informal call on December 16 that drew 14 attendees and expressions of interest from several others. Thank you to everyone who showed up.

We enjoyed a refreshing conversation. Due to the holidays, however, there simply wasn’t enough time to draft and finalize a collective response, especially since some of the people involved were busy preparing statements from their respective organizations, namely the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) and the International Association for Public Participation–United States of America (IAP2 USA). All in all, the January 3, 2012 deadline was a bit unfortunate, to put it mildly.

Not knowing just how strictly the deadline will be enforced, I have decided to go ahead and submit something now rather than wait for our little group effort to run its course. Below, I provide a few initial thoughts as my personal response to the White House request. I seriously hope that the conversation doesn’t end here and that the White House Open Government team will still be open to receiving input in a few weeks from now when a coordinated group response is more likely.

First off, I think the question is a particularly important one. Why? Because if current trends continue, and there is little reason to doubt that they will, public participation will continue to move onto the web just like everything else: from the way we work, to banking, to commerce, to entertainment, to education, to the way we connect socially. Increasingly, we rely on the web to deliver and receive these important functions in our lives, and I expect the same to hold true for community problem solving and decision making and the many ways people participate in the political process. That’s why this question not only deserves a thorough one-time response now but warrants a continued dialogue and exchange between the administration and the experts and innovators in this emerging field.

One of the insights a continued dialogue might reveal early on is that the question ought to be reframed slightly. There is no one single “most effective” e-participation tool available yet and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. Rather, there are hundreds of tools — whether built specifically for particular e-participation scenarios or being used simply because they are available — which, by and large, all have their strengths and weaknesses and tend to be more or less appropriate depending on the purpose and the circumstances.

Given that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in support of public participation is still fairly new, this is hardly surprising.

The key thing to understand here is that the effectiveness and overall benefit of any particular tool depends a lot on the context: the objectives, the immediate project parameters and numerous other factors, many of which have nothing to do with technology. Hence, a better way to frame the question might be to ask for the known or likely success factors for applying technology rather than focusing prematurely on specific tools.

Whether involving the public in person, online or both, the most important thing to get right in public participation is the overall process. Without the basics properly in place, no tool will ever be adequate. Those basics include but obviously aren’t limited to the following items:

• What are the decisions to be made?
• To what extent can, should and will the public get to influence the decisions?
• Who is the public?
• What is the timeline?
• Etc.

As I pointed out in my brief talk at SXSW 2011: Even the best tools won’t save you if you get the process wrong! Luckily, we have a global community of practice to build on whose countless decades of experience have produced well-established good practice guides and ethics for designing public participation processes, most notably from IAP2 but also other organizations in the field.

Once an e-participation effort has been scoped, during the planning and design stages, it should become more clear which tools or category of tools are potential candidates. Factors to be considered when choosing a tool for, say, a generic ideation or policy deliberation project might include the following (in no particular order):

• Cost
• Optimal group size / scalability
• Multi-language support
• Facilitation and moderation capabilities
• Ease of use (participants)
• Ease of set-up (administrators)
• Training requirements
• Maintenance needs
• Reporting capabilities
• Proprietary vs. open source software
• Self-hosted vs. cloud solution
• Participant acquisition potential
• Integration with face-to-face processes
• Integration with other technology
• Bandwidth requirements
• Data retention / archiving options
• Support for (quasi-)anonymous participation
• Identity support
• Cross-platform and cross-browser support
• Support for mobile devices
• Branding options
• Customization options
• Fee structure
• Contractual aspects
• Legal aspects
• Accessibility aspects
• Etc.

It’s easy to see how any odd combination of the trade-offs inherent in this short list might have a seemingly weaker tool win out over a more robust one under certain conditions.

Another interesting question that should certainly inform the tool selection process is to what extent any of the perceived shortcomings of any given tool might be remedied by applying a certain structure or manual/human interventions, e.g. framing, scheduling, or facilitation. For example:

• Scalability issues might be overcome by dividing the participants into smaller groups or by breaking up the topic into a series of shorter cycles, each focusing on one sub-topic at a time.
• Lack of moderation capabilities might be overcome by providing participants with more thorough training upfront and by applying higher levels of hands-on facilitation.
• Lack of certain critical features might be overcome by using a combination of tools.

In closing, I’d like to point out that despite these caveats I believe a set of tangible guidelines could be produced to inform the administrations e-participation efforts, and we wouldn’t even have to start from scratch. A lot of research is available to inform this discussion. It will be a matter of pulling together the right resources and sufficiently engaging the experts. This will require significantly more time than was given in the original request. However, based on what I’ve been hearing, there seems to be a great deal of interest among this community of e-participation practitioners, researchers and other interested parties to continue the conversation. Let’s see if the White House will take us up on this offer.

Following their very successful 2010 budget puzzle (see our coverage here, here and here), the New York Times today has released another exercise, this time asking participants to identify their preferred approach to cuts to the U.S. defense budget. From their site:

The Future Military: Your Budget Strategy

The Pentagon has committed to $450 billion in reduced spending over the next 10 years, but may have to come up with a total of $1 trillion in cuts if Congress follows through with deeper reductions. Make your own plan to reduce the budget by choosing some of the most common, interesting or provocative cuts that have been proposed by various parties.

The total amount of cuts available is $1,499B, or 322% of the required $450M minimum. Once again, the designers at the Times give participants plenty of options to solve the puzzle.

One big challenge still remains unaddressed, though. As I just stated in a comment on their Google+ page, it’s relatively easy for any individual participant to come up with the required $450M in cuts, but things gets much harder once the exercise involves a group of participants to agree on a list of cuts.