Archive for the 'E-participation' Category

Share Your OpenGov Forum Tracking Data on GovLoop

Published by Tim on February 9, 2010 in E-participation and Research. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

Following up on my list of ten things to monitor, I’ve started a thread on GovLoop: Monitoring and continuous evaluation of OpenGov forums

Here’s my initial post:

As part of my ongoing efforts to monitor the various feedback channels that have been launched as part of the Open Government Directive, I’ll be tracking some basic metrics. I thought I’d share the raw data here on a regular basis so people can chime in and add any other insights they’ve come across.

23 agencies are using IdeaScale, which exposes the following in real-time:

  • Number of ideas
  • Number of comments
  • Number of votes
  • Number of registered users

So that’s nice. I’ll check in on the other two forums occasionally as well (here, here).

Aside from cold, hard numbers, I will be looking for examples that illustrate how various agencies are doing in terms of the other nine items on my list. Here it is again in short form:

  • Expectation management
  • Community ground rules
  • Level of convener involvement/participation
  • Quality of moderation
  • Quantity of participation over time
  • Outreach and diversity of participants
  • Conclusion and impact
  • Tech support
  • Project communications
  • Mood

I’m using this RSS feed for easy scanning but don’t expect to catch everything. Please share your impressions in the comments.

A set of screenshots will be available on Flickr.

I hope this will attract enough metrics junkies so that we’ll end up with a fairly complete picture in the end. It would certainly be great to see not only a breadth of data points but also to have a discussion about what should be measured and how. After all, the participation piece of the upcoming dashboard still hasn’t been designed in detail yet. Maybe this little exercise will create a few valuable insights.

Ten Things to Monitor As Agencies Invite Input On Open Government Plans

Published by Tim on February 7, 2010 in E-participation, Public Participation and Research. 16 Comments Tags: , .

Now that a whole lot of agency.gov/open websites are live and many agencies have indeed set up a ”mechanism for the public to [...] [p]rovide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan” it’s time to figure out what to watch out for over the coming weeks and months in order to evaluate the success of these initiatives.

As I noted back in January, my hope is that these new projects will address and improve upon three key issues that we saw during last year’s Open Government Dialogue (namely, lack of convener involvement, insufficient moderation, herding).

All in all, I’ll keep an eye on the following (in no particular order):

  1. Expectation management: Is the agency clear about the scope of their participation initiative and their promise to the public? Do participants know what impact they can reasonably expect and when?
  2. Community ground rules: Every agency should have these “rules of engagement” in place and be ready to enforce them if needed. Bonus points for friendly, easy-to-understand language!
  3. Level of convener involvement/participation: Does the agency become actively engaged in the discussions?
  4. Quality of moderation: Will the agency manage to keep discussions on topic and moderate distractions in a fair but timely manner?
  5. Quantity of participation over time: How many participants will sign up? How much content will they produce? (luckily, IdeaScale exposes a few basic metrics in real time, such as number of ideas, comments, votes and registered users)
  6. Outreach and diversity of participants: Does the agency manage to attract a broad range of participants from various backgrounds? Or do usual suspects dominate the discussions?
  7. Conclusion and impact: This one will be especially interesting as there doesn’t seem to be an end date defined for any of these initiatives. In case of ongoing participation programs, does the agency at least share interim results? Looks like this effort is scheduled to go through March 19, 2010.
  8. Tech support: Does the agency address technical support questions and resolve any issues in a timely manner?
  9. Project communications: Does the agency offer ways for participants to stay in the loop (or get up to speed quickly) with regard to current state of the discussion, frequently asked questions, highlights, interim results, next steps etc.?
  10. Mood: Overall, how happy is everyone with the process? What’s the energy level? Are things productive? Etc.

What else should be on the radar? Sound off in the comments.

Video from Future of the Forum: Epic Win

Published by Tim on February 4, 2010 in E-participation and Games and Play. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Jane McGonigal is a leading game designer and game researcher with an interest in public problem solving. I just learned about a new game she’s been working on and which I’ll write about shortly. As a preface to my upcoming post I wanted to briefly share this video of a talk she gave at the Future of the Forum symposium in Berkeley, CA last December (which I had the great pleasure to attend): “Epic Win – Games as a Forum for the Future”

I have a feeling that game design will play a key role in developing the next generation of e-participation solutions so it’s worth paying attention.

GSA to Offer IdeaScale to Federal Agencies

Published by Tim on January 20, 2010 in E-participation and Radar. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

As was already mentioned at last week’s Open Government Directive Workshop event in DC (see video, starts at around 1:14:20), the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced it will offer IdeaScale to federal agencies free of charge in order to help them comply with the tight deadlines presented in the Open Government Directive. From the press release: Further Opens Government, Launches Online Public Dialog Tool for Agencies

WASHINGTON – To help federal agencies fulfill President Obama’s Open Government Directive, the U.S. General Services Administration has introduced a public dialog tool to federal agencies at no cost. GSA hosted more than 70 government officials last week from more than 20 agencies to introduce the tool, answer questions, and gather feedback.
“To help agencies answer President Obama’s call for a more citizen-centered, open government, GSA is making sure those agencies have the necessary tools to meaningfully engage the public,” said David McClure, Associate Administrator for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications. “By leveraging a single solution governmentwide, GSA can simplify the public engagement process for both agencies and the citizen, helping to build and offer uniformity and consistency in how the public engages with their government and move toward making the process as efficient as possible.”
On Dec. 8, 2009, President Obama issued the Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to launch an open government Web page that incorporates a public feedback mechanism by Feb. 6, 2010. To help agencies meet this benchmark, GSA is providing this tool at no cost to agencies, along with technical, management, and policy support. Agency officials will be able to devote their attention to running, moderating, and analyzing public input.
GSA’s public dialog tool will allow agencies to provide citizens a forum to share ideas, give feedback, and engage in Web-based discussions with their government.
GSA’s Office of Citizen Services, which fosters public engagement by using innovative technologies to connect citizens to their government, will continue to develop additional tools and practices to help agencies provide more opportunities for the public to engage with their government.

CNET News has more details: Feds get new tool for online public feedback

The new tool, which was built by a company called Ideascale, is very cheap to work with and implement, said Bev Godwin, the GSA’s director of new media and citizen engagement. All told, she added, it is expected to cost the GSA just $3,000 and will be free to each agency that wishes to use it.

[...]

Although the tool will display real-time results of the most popular publicly-submitted ideas on each agency’s Web site, there are no guarantees that those ideas will ultimately be implemented. But the point, said Dave McClure, who heads up the GSA’s Office of Citizen Services, is that the tool empowers the spirit of the Open Government Directive, by giving the public an easy way to submit ideas and become involved in the decision-making process.

[...]

All told, McClure said, 21 out of 24 “major” federal departments have signed on to use the tool, which is not mandatory under the Open Government Directive’s guidelines.

As you may remember, IdeaScale was used during phase 1 of the Open Government Dialogue back in May of last year. Three issues were widely noted then:

  • Little participation by the convener/host
  • Lack of moderation
  • Information cascades/herding: like most other tools in this space that allow idea generation and up-or-down voting to happen in parallel (while also exposing the leader board, often as the default view), IdeaScale tends to favor those ideas that gain an early advantage (see my detailed tracking notes on Flickr)

It will be very interesting to see if and how these issues will be addressed during upcoming projects.

To see how IdeaScale has already been used in practice, check out the IdeaScale entry on ParticipateDB. A handful of e-participation projects using this tool have already been captured. Looks like quite a few more will have to be added shortly.

Los Angeles Budget Challenge: When Surveys Won’t Take No For An Answer

Published by Tim on January 7, 2010 in E-participation and Participatory Budgeting. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Via Twitter today, I came across a new online consultation by the City of Los Angeles: Los Angeles Budget Challenge

How will you balance the City’s budget?
The Mayor of the City of Los Angeles is given the responsibility by the City Charter to evelop a budget plan that must be presented for City Council consideration by April 20th of each year.
This year, the City of Los Angles will be challeneged by many issues, including declining revenues, increased service demands, and soaring City pension contributions.
As we begin the planning process for Fiscal Year 2010-11, I invite you to help me develop my proposed budget by participating in the Los Angeles Budget Challenge where yuo will be asked to make some of the tough choices necessary to balance the City’s budget.

How will you balance the City’s budget?

The Mayor of the City of Los Angeles is given the responsibility by the City Charter to develop a budget plan that must be presented for City Council consideration by April 20th of each year.

This year, the City of Los Angles will be challenged by many issues, including declining revenues, increased service demands, and soaring City pension contributions.

As we begin the planning process for Fiscal Year 2010-11, I invite you to help me develop my proposed budget by participating in the Los Angeles Budget Challenge where you will be asked to make some of the tough choices necessary to balance the City’s budget.

The site does not require registration, but participants are asked to identify their age group and zip code. Following a brief overview of the current budget situation and some instructions, the site leads into a total of twelve survey items, a selection of key issues and related policy proposals. Each item provides participants with a bit of basic background information. Participants can then choose between two to four pre-defined options, each of which with more or less of a deficit-reducing impact on the budget.

According to the site, the city is facing a $400 million budget deficit in FY 2010/2011. The eight survey items under spending offer participants up to $293 million in budget cuts and savings. The four items under revenue offer up to $280 million in additional revenue.

Screenshot gallery

From a participation perspective, there are always a lot of questions one could ask for further analysis: How were the issues and policy proposals chosen that made it onto the survey? What will happen to the input? How binding is it? How does this fit into the overall budgeting process? Etc.

However, I just wanted to point out one easily overlooked detail that struck me as odd. Turns out there is one item among the twelve that won’t take “no” for an answer (the last one, which also happens to be the biggest, relatively): Public Private Partnerships for Parking Structures/Meters

Public Private Partnerships for Parking Structures/Meters

If you do the math, it is impossible to balance the budget unless a participant chooses option 2 (“Yes. The City should pursue a P3 agreement for City parking structures only.”) or option 3 (“Yes. The City should pursue a P3 agreement for CIty parking structures and City parking meters.”).

Honi soit qui mal y pense…

It’s not apparent if this site uses an off-the-shelf tool. I’ve added it to ParticipateDB, nonetheless.

Update: Looks like they’re using the Next 10 Budget Challenge tool (also added to ParticipateDB).

Multi-Language Online Dialogue With Google Wave

Published by Tim on December 8, 2009 in Collaboration, E-participation and Research. 6 Comments Tags: .

Here’s one reason why I believe Google Wave (or whatever similar service will emerge in the future) holds a lot of potential for the world of e-participation:

As Bengt Feil outlined in his excellent interim summary of our e-participation wave, one potential application for using Wave are small-group online dialogues or deliberations. On the web, these participation processes can be supported with conventional chat or forum technology. However, the thing that makes Wave especially interesting is its already impressive list of bots (small applications that can be added to a wave).

According to Wikipedia, extensions are “program robots to automate common tasks and/or build gadgets to extend or change user interaction (e.g., posting blips on microblog feeds or providing RSVP recording mechanisms).”

One of these little extensions is called Translatey. Here’s how the Google Wave Bots Wiki describes what it does:

Translatey is a lightweight Multilingual Translator Based on Google Translate.
Imagine you are chatting with friends from different countries, where no one speaks other’s language ? Yes, now this is possible using Translatey.
To add Translatey, simply add: translatey@appspot.com to your contacts and whenever you want it to help, just add it to your wave as a prticipant, enjoy speaking your own language, and let Translatey do the translation job.
[...]
Translatey has a built-in Auto-Detect feature, used in Google Translate, which allows Translatey to detect the creator’s language. Example, If I chose French to translate to, then I can write in ANY language, and Translatey will detect my language and translate it to French.

Translatey is a lightweight Multilingual Translator Based on Google Translate.

Imagine you are chatting with friends from different countries, where no one speaks other’s language ? Yes, now this is possible using Translatey.

To add Translatey, simply add: translatey@appspot.com to your contacts and whenever you want it to help, just add it to your wave as a prticipant, enjoy speaking your own language, and let Translatey do the translation job.

[...]

Translatey has a built-in Auto-Detect feature, used in Google Translate, which allows Translatey to detect the creator’s language. Example, If I chose French to translate to, then I can write in ANY language, and Translatey will detect my language and translate it to French.

I tried out the Translatey bot earlier today. Here’s a screenshot of a little chat I had (with myself) that mimicked a conversation between a German speaker and an English speaker:

Translatey

Not perfect, but I’m sure you can see the potential here. As I had mentioned on the wave a few weeks back, this type of real-time translation could be really useful whenever you need to engage people across borders or language boundaries.

For example, the European Union currently has 27 member states and supports 23 or so official languages. Hiring interpreters can be cost-prohibitive for many projects. However, with tools like these Wave extensions a good deal of multi-language dialogue might become feasible if the help of an interpreter is not required. One could use Wave for the 80 percent where the quality a translation bot provides is good enough, and use interpreters only for the other 20 percent.

Translation is  just one example of how bots can support collaboration on Wave. Who knows, maybe there’s even room for a bot that supports some very basic online facilitation or moderation processes. Once again, this could help bring more e-participation projects to scale and allow the real facilitators to focus on those conversations where they are needed the most.