Archive for the 'Dialogue' Category

Web-Based Dialogue: What is The Next Frontier?

Published by Tim on November 8, 2009 in Dialogue, E-participation and Research. 0 Comments Tags: .

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may well be one of the leading government agencies in the world when it comes to public participation. Their public engagement site offers a plethora of useful information including tools, definitions, case studies and much more. Their Public Involvement Network News electronic newsletter is another great resource.

A feature article in the Fall 2009 edition (PDF, 1.3 MB) provides a nice summary of a recent online dialogue with a group of ”twenty individuals with experience hosting, developing, facilitating, and/or researching web-based public engagement” that aimed to discover “what works, unanswered questions, and promising new strategies” with regard to web-based engagement: Web-Based Dialogue: What is The Next Frontier?

From the article:

What Are Best Practices for Online Dialogues?

There is enough experience with online dialogues that a body of “best practices” is beginning to emerge. This section describes key lessons identified by practitioners—starting with up-front planning, moving into dialogue facilitation, and finally describing how dialogue content affects policy.

It then goes on to list the following eight best practices in considerable detail:

  • Establish a clear purpose––and design the dialogue to accomplish it
  • Actively market the dialogue and recruit people to participate
  • Develop a compelling and constructive agenda
  • Use effective facilitation techniques to help people participate and keep the dialogue focused
  • Make it easy for people to get started and stay focused on the topic
  • Ensure worthy content with lasting value
  • Ensure an active and constructive role for dialogue “hosts”
  • Make sure participants are being heard—and that they know it

Note that these recommendations are, for the most part, completely independent of any underlying technology — something that’s at the core of our proposed session at SXSW next year.

Towards the end, the article lists a number of remaining challenges. If you’re working in e-participation today, this is pretty much the work that’s cut out for you, which is why I’m quoting this section in its entirety:

What Are Key Remaining Challenges and Questions About Online Dialogues?

Although much has been learned about how to make online dialogues effective, there are still remaining challenges to be addressed through refinements to dialogue design, facilitation, and other techniques. Key challenges include:

  • Different levels of engagement—while some people are reluctant to post, some are “chomping at the bit” to get discussions going and can deluge other participants with overwhelming numbers of messages.
  • Promoting effective interactions when dealing with participant populations having significantly different levels of expertise, experience, and expectation. When dialogues are open and inclusive, diversity can result in a much more interesting dialogue that produces a rich and varied knowledge product. However, in other instances, a great disparity in threshold knowledge, experience, and expectation can result in a dialogue that is less effective and also more frustrating to participants. Those with a greater threshold knowledge who hope to focus on tangible outcomes may become frustrated with those having a more casual interest (and the casual participants may feel intimated by those with more knowledge and experience).
  • Involving people with limited Internet access or other cultural, social, or psychological constraints on participating. (In one dialogue the hosts heard that someone had no access to a computer, and they arranged to receive his faxes, post them, and get the related responses to him for several days.)
  • Sorting and organizing the wealth of contributions in an efficient way so that participants and sponsors can find and participate in the parts of the dialogue that are most relevant to them. In some cases, the “noise” of irrelevant postings can eclipse the “signal” of on-topic content.
  • Balancing the need to keep conversations focused while also not limiting insightful conversations or unique ideas that are “outside of the box.”
  • Helping participants stay current with the evolving dialogue conversations that can run over hundreds of messages posted each day.
  • Overcoming some well-intentioned, but limiting government rules, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act’s limits on asking questions of participants or asking them to take surveys as part of the dialogue process.

The web dialogue was hosted by WestEd and the archive can still be viewed online.

Network News is an electronic newsletter for public involvement and collaborative problem solving practitioners. The purpose is to assist EPA’s staff and any other interested individuals to improve the quality and consistency of involvement/collaboration processes and activities.
First distributed in the summer of 2005, Network News has regularly carried news of upcoming conferences, new publications and emerging tools and techniques. Each issue also has a few feature articles, sometimes fitting under a single theme, sometimes not.
Network News issues are archived at this site.  You may access them at the following links: links

Change.gov launches online discussion around healthcare

Published by Tim on December 1, 2008 in Dialogue and E-participation. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Last Tuesday on Change.gov (the official website of President-elect Barack Obama), the transition team launched a public online discussion on the topic of healthcare. From the announcement on their blog:

Join the Discussion

Today we’re trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues — with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top.

The question they are asking:

What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?

The site uses IntenseDebate, which — at a very basic level — is a threaded discussion forum (with a few added features, such as reputation points, comment ratings, OpenID support).

More than 3,500 comments have been posted so far.

One of the reasons this is interesting is because it may hint at a more participatory approach to government by the new administration, something for which a lot of people have expressed high hopes during the recent US presidential campaign. Accordingly, the initial feedback — from some in the web community, at least — has been very positive: Over on techPresident, Micah Sifry calls it “the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system,” and Eric Eldon of VentureBeat thinks of it as “a great early step in making government more open.”

I wanted to share a few initial observations, mainly with regard to process quality. How to best address some of these issues will be left for future posts but feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. For those interested in this discussion, there are a couple of threads going on on the NCDD main mailing list as well as on one of the groups at Democracies Online.

First off, though, kudos to the people behind Change.gov for experimenting with large-scale e-participation so early in the process (remember this is still just the transition, not the presidency). Despite the many challenges that have yet to be mastered in order to make it work at scale, I believe the opportunities for online dialogue and deliberation to help boost civic engagement and to improve public decision making at all levels of government are tremendous.

That said, a few things that immediately caught my eye:

  • No clear process model: Judging from the information available on the website, it is not entirely clear how exactly the comments will be processed, what impact realistically they may or may not have on any policy decisions, or what kind of follow-up and follow-through either the transition team or the new administration are willing to commit to. This can become a problem since it risks disappointing participants (e.g. when assumed impact doesn’t match actual impact and participants are left frustrated over the time and energy they spent in vain).
  • Lack of focus in the comments: Instead of simply answering the question (“What worries you…?”), many participants choose to share rich combinations of personal stories, experiences, concerns, assumptions, questions, ideas, solutions, values, priorities, resources, data etc.  While this shows just how much energy the participants bring to the table, it also tends to leave the discussion somewhat directionless. There is no process in place to further organize this input, nor does the forum software support participants in being more disciplined or structured.
  • Lack of organizer participation: I was able to spot one instance of comment deletion by the forum administrators, presumably according to their comment policy (screenshot). I may be wrong, but other than that the transition team does not seem to actively engage in the discussions (e.g. ask or answer questions, express agreement or disagreement, or otherwise facilitate the process or provide general community management etc.). I only looked at a few sample pages, though, so I may be wrong.
  • Overwhelming amounts of unstructured data: The discussion on Change.gov was off to a fast start, reaching 2,000 comments in the first 24 hours. As with many online discussion forums that reach a certain activity level, the amounts of content produced by the participants can be quite staggering. For example, total word count on this forum may well be approaching 500,000 words already (for details how I got this number, see my rough calculations). That means it becomes extremely time-consuming to keep up with even a small fraction of overall input (poor navigation adds to the problem). Moreover, the fact that this data is largely unstructured makes further processing very difficult if not impossible.

Again, this is an early assessment of a work in progress, and it wouldn’t at all surprise me if these issues will be addressed over time. The combination of a more demanding public (with regard to opportunities for meaningful e-participation) and a more interested and supportive administration (from what we’ve heard of the past year from some of the people involved) looks quite promising.

How to listen online?

Published by Tim on November 26, 2007 in Dialogue and Research. 2 Comments

It came up in the last post, and it is something we’ve been thinking about quite a bit: How to listen online?

Listening in real life is sometimes hard enough. It may require skilled facilitation. Oftentimes, we’re not trained to listen well. It is much easier to talk than to listen, and listen carefully.

Online, however, listening seems to become that much harder. Many of the cues we are used to in real life are missing: for example sound, tone of voice, facial expressions etc. — even silence.

So, if listening is essential to leading meaningful dialogue and the same holds true for online dialogue, then the 1,000,000 dollar question is:

How to listen online?

Over the coming weeks, I plan to share some of our findings here in this blog. If you have resources to share or questions you want to see addressed, please comment.

Dialogue and Deliberation

Published by Tim on July 13, 2007 in About, Deliberation, Dialogue and Dictionary. 2 Comments

The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) provides a good definition of dialogue and deliberation, and describes how the two relate to each other:

So what are dialogue and deliberation anyway?

Dialogue is a process that allows people, usually in small groups, to share their perspectives and experiences with one another about difficult issues we tend to just debate about or avoid entirely. Issues like racial disparities, youth violence and gay marriage.

Dialogue is not about judging, weighing or making decisions, but about understanding and learning. Dialogue dispels stereotypes, builds trust and enables people to be open to perspectives that are very different from their own. Dialogue can, and often does, lead to both personal and collaborative action.

Deliberation is a closely related process with a different emphasis. Deliberation emphasizes the use of logic and reasoning to make better decisions. Decisions about important public issues like health care and immigration are too often made through the use of power or coercion rather than a sound decision-making process that involves all parties and explores all options.

Dialogue and deliberation processes tend to use skilled facilitators and carefully constructed ground rules or agreements to ensure that all participants are heard and are treated as equals. For groups that want to move from talk to a decision or action, NCDD recommends starting with dialogue and encouraging deliberation after people have had the chance to tell their personal story (in relation to the issue at hand) in a respectful environment.

Dialogue lays the groundwork for the vital work of deliberation. The trust, mutual understanding and relationships that are built during dialogue allow for participants to deliberate more effectively, and to make better decisions.

Dialogue and deliberation are used for a variety of reasons: to resolve conflicts and bridge divides; to build understanding about complex issues; to foster innovative solutions to problems and launch action; and to reach agreement on or recommendations about policy decisions.

At Intellitics, our goal is online dialogue and deliberation.