Thanks to a tweet by Evgeny Morozov I came across this new research paper by W. Ben Towne and James D. Herbsleb, published in the current edition of Journal of Information Technology & Politics (Volume 9, Issue 1, 2012, pages 97-115): Design Considerations for Online Deliberation Systems (subscription required)

ABSTRACT. Online deliberation enables structured, topical discussion about particular questions or concepts. A number of Web-based deliberation systems have been independently introduced in recent years, and reported on as single-point examples. This article reviews several of these systems, focusing on the design principles behind them and how they worked out. From this literature, we distill another iteration of design considerations that can be used to design online deliberation systems to “inform the debate.” These considerations focus on the mutually reinforcing goals of attracting contributions, navigating through content, improving usability, focusing on quality content, and promoting wide-scale tool adoption

On page 100, the authors explain that in selecting these guidelines, they sought ideas that are “understandable, robust, likely to remain stable, and consistent with one another” and that they are presented “at a reasonably high level”:

These are general guidelines that should apply to most online deliberation systems. As noted in Lindström’s (2006) description of general principles for IT systems, “The principles are not imperative; they are only supposed to provide operative directions and guidance” (p. 3). We recognize that not every item below will be appropriate in every context; [...] We propose that each of these items should be considered during the development of an online deliberation system, hence the term “considerations.”

Table 1: Considerations for the Design of Online Deliberation Systems

Below the list of considerations:

Design to Attract Contributions

• Maintain low entry barriers for contributions of value
• Make contributions immediately visible
• Divide and conquer
• Self-selection of roles
• Well defined tasks and questions
• Overcome or accept access bias
• Accommodate but identify content bias
• Link in outside resources
• Loosen up on structure

Design for Navigability

• Relate solutions to one another
• Allow hyperlink exploration, but not as the only option
• Organize content topically, rather than temporally
• Minimize or eliminate duplication
• Use visual aids to navigation
• Include an effective search utility

Design for Usability

• Build clear affordances
• Stick with the principles of Robert’s Rules
• Open windows to the content in many places
• Interoperate with other systems, e.g. through APIs
• Attach unchanging URLs to specific content
• Automate nonsemantic operations
• Use stable, functional, secure, responsive technology

Design for Quality Content

• Identify contributors
• Maintain accountability for decision-making outcomes
• Institute an effective rating and reputation system
• Allow iterative “horizontal” interactions between users

Design for Adoption

• Improve the decision-making process; don’t overthrow it
• Have a “plausible promise” and achieve it
• Open opportunities for communities to form
• Open up the design process

The authors conclude (page 112):

[...] We strive to take a step beyond case studies by surveying the literature and its many single-point evaluations, examining them for common themes, and deriving a set of design considerations that can be used for the next iteration of online deliberation tools. These considerations are derived from the online deliberation literature, and we have described the justifications offered for each of them.

An online deliberation system does not need to perfectly match all the guidelines presented here, but its designers should consider these points when making their design decisions, as a way of learning from the work that has already been done in this field. [...]

We hope that this work will broaden the reach and improve the quality of future online deliberation systems by enhancing their usability, utility, and ability to attract and organize quality contributions. We also hope that through further experimentation and exchanges of experience, future work will systematically test each of these design considerations to produce a solid foundation of proven design principles leading to high quality online deliberation and further development of this field.

This article complements another design-oriented paper we covered recently (Five Design Categories for Online Deliberation), and the guidelines presented here should prove quite useful not only for tool builders but for anyone trying to make the best use of existing tools:

• Some of the considerations are in fact process questions that don’t necessarily require any particular technical implementation.
• With any tool, it’s important not to overlook the functionality and features that are already in place and which might help achieve the design goals.
• There may be more than one way to achieve a certain outcome, and lists like the above can serve as a good starting point to discuss possible work-arounds should a necessary feature be missing.

The paper mentions several online deliberation tools, most of which are already being tracked on ParticipateDB. Accordingly, I’ve added this paper to the list of references.

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.

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!

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.

Peter M. Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, just announced the arrival of a new book he has co-edited with Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds: “Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication”

From the NCDD listserv:

Dear Colleagues:

I am thrilled to announce the publication by MIT Press of, “Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication,” edited by Stephen Coleman and me. The book is a collaborative project of 19 researchers investigating the experience and potential of online consultation in the United States and Europe.

The following paragraph from the introductory chapter gives a flavor of our framework: “A useful understanding of the online consultation phenomenon has to go beyond how particular consultations might or might not affect the outcomes of individual policy- making episodes. We need to consider what such consultations provide, or could provide, to the larger flow of political communication within a society. This also means regarding online consultations as something more than simple two-way dialogues between citizen-participants and public decision makers. Instead, they represent a kind of networked communication involving citizens (both participants and auditors), public decision makers (of both the legislative and administrative sort), bureaucrats, technicians, civil society organizations, and the media generally. Exploring the meaning of online consultations to these diverse actors requires evidence -gathering through multiple methods, comparative study, and analysis across a variety of key disciplines. We have to appreciate how the experience is constructed by social, political, and legal forces, including, but not limited to the design of the online consultation experience itself. This sort of approach yields an understanding that the online consultation can best contribute phenomenon’s greatest contribution to democratic practice depends by inspiring and supporting a reimagining on it becoming both an impetus to, and a form of support for, a re-imagination of democratic citizenship—a robust form of citizenship that is enhanced by arguably rendered more practical (but hardly inevitable) because of new forms of information and communication technology.”

Just ordered it. Can’t wait to read it this weekend.

The Assembly of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) recently adopted recommendations regarding Agency Innovations in E-Rulemaking (PDF) after having reviewed the websites and e-rulemaking initiatives of 90 agencies.

The Conference studied the websites and e-rulemaking initiatives of 90 agencies, each of which had reported completing an average of two or more rulemakings during each sixmonth period covered by the semiannual Unified Regulatory Agenda in 2009-2010. The study reveals that individual agencies have used websites in innovative ways to promote erulemaking. For example, agencies have developed portions of their own websites to support rulemaking efforts. Some agencies have specialized webpages that allow users to submit and view comments on all of the agency’s open rulemakings, or to view information on the status of their priority rulemakings. Links from some agency home pages make rulemaking information easy to locate. Other agencies have innovated by using social media to get the public involved in the rulemaking process from the earliest stages. These social media tools include blogs, Facebook, Twitter, IdeaScale, and other online discussion platforms.

Their recommendations apply to other areas of online community engagement as well:

Increasing the Visibility of Rulemakings

1. Agencies should design and manage their presence on the Web (including the Web as accessed by mobile devices) with rulemaking participation in mind.

2. Each agency should provide access to a one-stop location, which should be easily reachable from its home page, for all of its pending rulemakings, highlighting those that are currently open for comment. This may take the form of providing pinpoint links to specific information about the agency’s rulemakings available on websites such as Regulations.gov, RegInfo.gov, Federal Register 2.0, and so forth, which would allow the agency to efficiently enable the public to retrieve all available information the federal government has about its ongoing rulemakings.

3. Agencies should consider, in appropriate rulemakings, using social media tools to raise the visibility of rulemakings. When an agency sponsors a social media discussion of a rulemaking, it should provide clear notice as to whether and how it will use the discussion in the rulemaking proceeding.

Making Comment Policies Easy to Locate

4. Agencies should display or link to their comment policies in prominent or multiple locations on their websites.

Improving Access to Agency Websites

5. Agencies should continue to improve the accessibility of their websites to members of the public.

6. Agencies should take steps to improve access for persons who have faced barriers to effectively participating in rulemaking in the past, including non-English speakers, users of lowbandwidth Internet connections, and individuals with disabilities.

Ensuring Access to Materials from Completed Rulemakings

7. Agencies should develop systematic protocols to enable the online storage and retrieval of materials from completed rulemakings. Such protocols should, to the extent feasible, ensure that website visitors using out-of-date URLs are automatically redirected to the current location of the material sought.

Periodically Evaluating Agency Use of the Internet in Rulemaking

8. Agencies should periodically evaluate their use of the Internet in rulemaking and should continue to innovate and experiment with new and cost-effective ways to engage the public in rulemaking via the Internet.

Here is the full list of adopted recommendations, including links to additional background information.

As you know, the White House is asking for input on public participation best practices and metrics, including for e-participation.

I’m informally pulling together a few fellow IAP2 USA members to discuss how we might want to answer the technology part. We might take this opportunity to kick off our community of practice around online engagement (originally planned for Q2/2012).

We’d like to open it up to others who are interested in the topic, not just IAP2 USA members. Ping me if you’re interested, and I’ll share dial-in information:

Friday, December 16, 2011
at 9am Pacific (60 minutes)
Online note pad

This will be a casual conversation. We’ll do a quick round of comments followed by discussion. Any output will be OK to share and could inform whatever formal or informal responses are being worked on, by individuals or organizations.

Earlier this summer, I happened to come across an excellent new article on online deliberation design. Now that it’s out of draft mode, I can finally share it here.

Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence (PDF, final working version) by Todd Davies and Reid Chandler is currently in press and will appear as chapter 6 in Tina Nabatchi, Michael Weiksner, John Gastil, and Matt Leighninger (Editors), Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement, Oxford University Press, Fall 2011:

Abstract: This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the spatiotemporal distance separating participants, the communication medium, and the deliberative process to be followed. After a brief overview of criteria for evaluating different design options, empirical findings are organized around design choices. Research has evolved away from treating technology for online deliberation dichotomously (either present or not) toward nuanced findings that differentiate between technological features, ways of using them, and cultural settings. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on how well the communicative environment is matched to the deliberative task. Tradeoffs, e.g. between rich and lean media and between anonymous and identifiable participation, suggest different designs depending on the purpose and participants. Findings are limited by existing technologies, and may change as technologies and users co-evolve.

Table 6.1: Summary of Five Design Categories

The authors present a number of design issues, grouped into five multi-dimensional categories (click to enlarge image on the right):

[...] These issues have been selected for inclusion mainly because they have been the subjects of empirical research. As should be apparent, the issues discussed below represent a relatively small subset of all the potential choices a deliberation designer faces. Nevertheless, these issues do provide a way to organize the empirical literature relevant to deliberation design. [...]

Table 6.1 (page 3 in the PDF) illustrates the five design categories and the dimensions they include:

1. Purpose: Why is the deliberation being designed?
   • Outcome (decisions-beliefs-ideas)
   • Collectivity (group-individual)
2. Population: Who will be involved?
   • Recruitment (random-selected)
   • Audience (public-private)
3. Spatiotemporal Distance: Where and when will participants be interacting with each other?
   • Colocation (face to face-telecommunication)
   • Cotemporality (synchronous-asynchronous)
4. Communication Medium: How will communication occur?
   • Modality (speech-text-image-multimodal)
   • Emotivity (impeded-enabled)
   • Fidelity (transformed-unaltered)
5. Deliberative Process: What will occur between participants
   • Facilitation (moderated-unmoderated)
   • Structure (rules-free form)
   • Identifiability (identifiable-anonymous)
   • Incentivization (reward-no reward)

Under “Design Criteria” (page 9), the authors share “some of the [success] criteria that have been applied in the past, especially by researchers evaluating different design choices [...]“. They are:

• Quantity
• Quality
• Inclusiveness
• Preference
• Efficiency
• Efficacy

The article goes on to describe empirical findings related to each of the design dimensions, touching upon some of the key trade-offs involved in choosing either between online and face-to-face or between various online setups, and mentions plenty of opportunities for future research, including:

• Effects of random versus non-random sampling for participant recruitment
• Effects of audience (public versus private deliberations)
• Effects of various modalities
• Effects of structure (specifically, particular techniques)
• Effects of incentives

This research potential is summed up as follows (page 22):

Remarks on Result Specificity and Culturalism

The studies we have cited in this section, together with the design dimensions into which we have organized them, demonstrate that the main question facing future deliberation designers as they contemplate online designs will increasingly be not whether but how to use online tools. Early research in this area tended to treat technology as “a dichotomous variable … either present or not.” But as technologies have evolved, the range of experiences they offer now span a broad spectrum from the simple and truncated text of a Twitter message to the high verisimilitude of the most advanced virtual reality environments, as well as augmented reality systems that attempt to give us the best face-to-face and online experiences simultaneously. Online deliberation and its public version – online deliberative civic engagement – are rich areas of study and design because of the huge space of possibilities within them.

Great stuff! It is clear that given certain objectives, requirements and conditions a variety of design choices may be viable. Furthermore, every tool has its strengths and weaknesses and must generally fit the design approach in order to perform well. There can never be a single most effective web tool for online deliberation (or for public participation, for that matter). That question falls short as long as it’s not based on at least some specifics.

Back in September, when the United States released its U.S. Open Government National Action Plan (PDF), I listed the initiatives it contains in the area of public participation: Open Government Partnership: Public Participation in the US National Plan

One item I found particularly appealing. Under ”New initiatives”, the plan states that the U.S. will:

• Develop Best Practices and Metrics for Public Participation. We will identify best practices for public participation in government and suggest metrics that will allow agencies to assess progress toward the goal of becoming more participatory. This effort will highlight those agencies that have incorporated the most useful and robust forms of public participation in order to encourage other agencies to learn from their examples.

In a follow-up post today, United States CTO Aneesh Chopra is asking the public for further assistance on this item and to “provide input and ideas on best practices and metrics for public participation”: Seeking Your Input on the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan

All seven questions are great conversation starters, but one specifically deals with online participation:

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?

Plenty to discuss! Deadline for submissions is January 3, 2012.

It’s been a little over two months since we last took a look at We The People adoption metrics. Lucas Cioffi, NCDD Board member, on Thursday attended a meeting on the Open Government Partnership (OGP), specifically the U.S. Action Plan. He was able to score the following metrics: White House Meeting on OpenGov Action Plan

Of all the stats mentioned in the meeting, I think that the most relevant ones were about the Administration’s We The People petition website which has now received 1.5 million signatures on nearly 20,000 petitions. 82 petitions have crossed the minimum threshold of 25,000 signatures, at which point the Administration has committed to issuing a formal response. 32 petitions have received a formal response already in the last 2.5 months and they are aiming to respond to roughly one per day in the months going forward.

Yesterday, the White House shared their latest update (though the growth chart shown at the top somehow does not include November data): We the People Update

We the People is averaging nearly 20,000 new users and 31,000 new signatures every day. Our most active day for new users and signatures was the day of our launch, but we certainly haven’t slowed down: more petitions were created on October 26 than any other day since We the People has been active. [...]

They had around 800,000 registered users at the end of October, maybe around 900,000 by now.

At less than three months into the project, these numbers are quite impressive, making We The People the most successful Open Government initiative in the participation column to date.

I’m quoted in the Economist today:

Government by (all) the people

[...]

Successful examples of legislation by the masses are rare. Most people don’t know how to write laws. Tim Bonnemann, the founder of Intellitics, an American firm specialising in public-participation tools, says a better method is to canvas views widely but use a small team to write a draft. The hard part is not the technology (a simple online discussion forum is adequate) but creating a fair and transparent process that assures people their voices have been heard.

For a more detailed take, check out our three-post series from March of this year:

• How To Create Policy on a Wiki
• Blast from the Past: Experiments in Wiki-Based Political Discourse from Way Back When
• Challenges for Wiki-Based Consultations

If you speak Russian and find the time to review the Wikivote.ru site, please share your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Yesterday’s first look at We the People was cut short since the site was experiencing performance or maintenance issues. Today, it’s back online again. Time to continue our review.

First, a few screenshots:

More first impressions:

7. Petition detail pages use infinite scrolling to expose list of people who have signed the petition (infinite scrolling allows users to browse through content without clicking on pagination links, they just continue to scroll to the bottom of the page)
8. Unique short URLs for each petition (e.g. http://wh.gov/gba opens the “Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline” petition)
9. Sharing via social media is highly encouraged (currently offering Facebook and Twitter as the two very popular options)
10. Ability to flag petitions as inappropriate (a common and necessary tool to help enforce the ground rules)
11. Clear, 4-step process for creating new petitions, including plenty of tips (e.g. for creating good petition headlines, good descriptions)
12. Step 2 shows petitions “similar to yours” (in order to help avoid duplication)

As of a few moments ago, fourteen petitions have been submitted, garnering a little over 50,000 signatures total.

As adoption increases and we see the first official responses, there will be a lot more to look into over the coming days and weeks. Being somewhat familiar with e-petition offerings in other countries (namely, Germany and the UK), though, I must say that so far the site looks really solid all around.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a few questions related to the public participation aspects of the new We The People e-petition site. Earlier today, the White House went into some detail answering all six of them: What the People Want to Know About We the People

In the same post, White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips also picked up on the trust issues I had outlined in my previous post:

We know there are more questions out there. One common theme we’re hearing is distrust about how seriously the petitions will be reviewed and considered. That’s an understandable skepticism and one that is best addressed with action, so we invite everyone to judge for themselves once we’re up and running.

Making the effort to answer the skeptics and ensure that the participation process is transparent is certainly a good and necessary first step in building that trust. Nice work!

The newly-announced We The People e-petition initiative by the White House has been getting a lot of coverage (for example, see here, here, here, here, here).

I spent Saturday reading through comment threads on various sites to look for additional feedback, criticisms and concerns related to the public participation process, some of which I’m listing below. Try if you can spot any themes.

1. Youtube: A Big Change Coming to WhiteHouse.Gov

• Will they actually listen, or is this something to distract people?
• This could be totally amazing or totally useless, depending on how the petitions work and if anything is done because of the most popular ones.
• Sounds like a good idea to give people another way to try to influence govt besides rants, blogs, complaining letters, etc. Will attention really be paid to a good idea coming from outside DC?
• Is this just a mechanism by which tax dollars will be used to pay for the collection of information about “likely voters” in preparation for the 2012 campaign?
• The biggest hole in this idea is that because it’s based online, completely public, foreigners can create and sign petitions. This negates the opinions of the true citizens of this country whose government’s policies affects the greatest.
• … and even if they redirect IP’s, it won’t stop those who are not citizens of the US inside of this country who are using the computers to get access to the site. (illegal immigrants for instance).
• A new way to voice your concerns or a new way for the govt. to data mine? [...]
• [...] We found yet another way to spend your money on useless programs. [...]
• trying to gain respect back from the american people eh… AIN’T GONNA WORK!!!!
• ….so Obama is so scared of what the unfiltered (in person) American people will say! He has created an online filter system. Who monitors this? Van Jones?The whole thing will be a liberal lie. Producing Liberal mcfacts.

2. Hotair: White House introduces new online petition website for some reason

The post itself gives this assessment:

If, as I suspect, the site is really just a ploy for his campaign so that they can direct Obama donors there and crank out talking-point petitions for him about how “the people” demand tax hikes on the rich or whatever, then it’s very much true to form. Petitions are supposed to be grassroots populist measures aimed at getting the government to act; if this is a campaign device then it’s really the opposite, a way for the head of government to get his supporters to act on his behalf so that he can get reelected. In fact, tea-party groups are already looking into this as a type of lobbying venture paid for with taxpayer money. I doubt it’s illegal, but it tells you a lot about how far the 2008 magic has faded that Captain Charisma might now be relying on Internet petitions to try to influence Congress.

A few comments head in the same general direction:

• Depending on whether they like the petition or not, you end up on one of two lists: “donors” or “enemies”.
• Or, it could be an email harvesting platform… it needs to be looked out how the information submitted is used… will his campaign cross reference email addresses with his campaign?
• Exactly, how will the email addresses who petition on something like Fast and Furious be used? Just look at what is happened to Gibson Guitars… I would be afraid to petition against Obama with my real email address…
• Time to collect email addresses for the 2012 campaign I guess.
• This is another example of Obama trying to make Congress seem irrelevant to the masses.
• [...] if you go through the site and to the email link page you’ll see there is no privacy policy (they ask for your email address & zip code). Looks like another DNC data-mining operation….
• [...] Astroblogging on the taxpayers’ dime.
• I always thought the government organized things called elections to see what the people wanted. So if requiring an ID disenfranchises poor citizens, what does needed a computer and an internet connection do?
• This has nothing to do with “petitions”. This is social media networking/marketing gathering as many emails and names as possible and using those lists for fund raising. Pretty obvious just like those GOP “surveys” I chuck in the trash every other week.

3. Politico: White House: Send us your petitions

The article quotes a number of people in the government, politics & technology space:

• Joe Newman (a spokesman for the Project On Government Oversight): “Encouraging citizens’ participation is never a bad thing, [b]ut part of me is very skeptical that they’ll be able to handle the number of petitions that come in and give it any sort of thorough review.”
• Patrice McDermott (director Open The Government): “The other test is that range of issues [...] Is it going to be only issues that are only of political benefit to the White House, or — who designs that, and how’s it going to be limited, and will it change over time?”
• Patrick Ruffini (a partner at the Republican-leaning digital media firm Engage): “It’s just more people that they can communicate with [...] It’s the government equivalent of, ‘you may win an iPad,’”
• Kirsten Kukowski (RNC spokeswoman): “[...] more campaign tactics coming out from the official White House”

Again, a few comments:

• [...] Who in the right mind would ever believe for a “NewYork Second” that this Administration would pay attention to anything that any non Ivy League educated American would put forward to them. [...]
• [...] Pure gimmick. For one, they are not going to “consider” ANYTHING that they would rather avoid for political reasons [...] Besides, these “petitions” are so easy to fake and rig”. [...]
• You can bet your bottom dollar that this is just a political gimmick to make the public feel better. So, it’s my opinion, that you would be wasting time in participating.
• A symbolic gesture at best, even if a few coherent petitions with enough genuine signatures are selected for “action”.

* * *

Despite the fact that many of these comments are buried in a sea of noise (follow the links to Youtube or Hotair to appreciate first-hand the quality and tone of the conversation), I believe that most of the concerns expressed are very valid indeed and that they deserve to be addressed by the White House, ideally in the same venues where they’ve been raised.

In public participation, so much depends on trust. Just looking over this small and non-representative sample of comments, it’s obvious that the White House lacks trust among many citizens and potential participants. In order to increase trust, difficult as that may seem, the White House is well-advised to not let these comments go unchallenged or unanswered.

There are a number of recurring themes (with regard to impact, privacy, ethics etc.), so answers to those comments should probably be added to the official FAQ I suggested on Friday.

As was hinted at late Wednesday night, the White House yesterday announced a significant new Open Government initiative: online petitions!

From the official announcement:

Something exciting is coming to WhiteHouse.gov. It’s called We the People and it will significantly change how the public — you! — engage with the White House online.

Our Constitution guarantees your right to petition our government. Now, with We the People, we’re offering a new way to submit an online petition on a range of issues — and get an official response.

We’re announcing We the People before it’s live to give folks time to think about what petitions they want to create, and how they are going to build the support to get a response.

According to one definition, online or e-petitions can be considered a type of e-consultation whose purpose is “to affect formal (institutional) political and decision making processes.” Hence, public participation best practices apply to e-petitions just as well.

Public participation projects can fail for many reasons, but what it often boils down to from the participants’ point of view is a mismatch between expected and actual impact. One best practice, then, is for the convener to ensure that the participants fully understand the scope, process and desired outcomes of the project or initiative.

While the We the People website provides a general overview and answers a few basic questions, it doesn’t go into too much detail. The White House has encouraged the public to ask questions and give feedback. Again from the announcement:

As we move forward, your feedback about We the People will be invaluable, and there are a few ways you can share it. Numerous pages on WhiteHouse.gov, including the We the People section, feature a feedback form. In addition, you can use the twitter hashtag #WHWeb to give the White House digital team advice and feedback. I’ll also try to answer questions when I have time today — you can pose them to @macon44.

Since the announcement, a broad range of questions have been raised (anything from the White House’s motivation and goals, to the rules of engagement, to the technology, to privacy aspects etc). Earlier today, the White House gave a few more answers on their blog, and I strongly suggest that these be consolidated into one FAQ as part of the We The People website, along with other answers provided via other channels.

Here are a few additional points I’d like the White House to address prior to the official launch:

• According to the announcement, petitions can call for action by the federal government “on a range of issues”. That seems to imply that issues outside of this range may be off-limits. What, if any, guidelines will the White House provide to ensure participants know upfront which issues they can or cannot address via this tool?
• What are the ground rules that will govern the petition process? For example, will certain kinds of offensive or abusive behavior or language be deemed unacceptable?
• How will these ground rules be enforced? For example, does the White House reserve the right to moderate or delete content, ban users etc.?
• What will happen to petitions that fail to reach the required minimum number of votes within the 30-day period?
• Once a petition has been fully processed (reviewed and answered), how will participants be notified?
• How does the White House plan to measure the quality and effectiveness of this process? For example, will there be feedback mechanisms that allow participants to indicate wether they are satisfied with the responses?

Please leave a comment if you can think of other questions related to the public participation aspects of this initiative.

I look forward to the launch of the site. It will be interesting to watch how it compares to previous experiments in this area in other countries, namely Germany and the United Kingdom.

There’s an interesting new book project launching in Europe, scheduled to come out next year: Sustainable eParticipation

Here’s the introduction:

In the past 5-10 years, eParticipation emerged as a novel theoretical and practical domain, and it will further characterise the policy agendas of most industrialised and developing countries in the near future. By eParticipation, we mean the take-up of ICT solutions to empower citizens and involve/engage them in the public decision making process.

Its state of the art is now characterised by a number of achievements worldwide. In Europe, the eParticipation Preparatory Action 2007-2010 has funded 20 demonstration projects including 30 pilot sites, 100,000 citizens, 50 public sector entities and 70 MEPs from 18 EU Member States. Recently the Bertelsmann Foundation recognized 150 Government-led initiatives worldwide (see www.vitalizing-democracy.org), demonstrating that excellence in eParticipation is a growing and international endeavour.

However, documented practice shows mixed results from eParticipation initiatives, and concerns about sustainability-related matters (the likelihood that an expensive trial program will become “embedded” as a stable practice in the institutional setup of the concerned public sector organisation) have started to emerge. As a result, scholars and practitioners face an increasing need to learn and apply the best methods for creating long-term sustainable eParticipation.

The site lists the following target deliverables:

• a collection of European and international best practice of sustainable eParticipation
• a set of evaluation exercises to be used as guidelines for political understanding and future action
• an overview of existing methods, tools and ICT solutions available as a result of prior experiments
• an initial assessment of the “market potential” of the above.

Francesco Molinari and Rolf Luehrs are the people behind the project. Should make for a great read.

For those who have been following the Give a Minute project (our coverage here, here, here), they just launched in New York City, NY under a new name, Change by Us. According to the blog, a beta version had already launched back in April.

The about page explains the site’s focus: users can share ideas, join or create projects, build teams, and find resources.

Ready to read ideas, follow projects, and connect online.

From the blog post announcing the launch: Welcome to Change by Us NYC!

We’re very excited to be launching Change by Us NYC today. It’s the City’s new website for helping residents connect online and take action toward creating a greener, greater New York.

Lots of New Yorkers have ideas about how to make our City better. And Change by Us NYC is a great place to share them with others and make your voice heard. But don’t stop there. Join a project with similar goals, or start your own to turn your idea into reality.

You can also use the site to discover resources from City agencies and community-based organizations. Our network of government and nonprofit partners has the expertise – and even funding – to help you get your project done.

[...]

It’s an interesting proposal, for sure. As a citizen, if you put some energy into getting a project started and if it qualifies (can’t quite make out what the details are), there may be support available, money or otherwise, from government or otherwise, to get it implemented.

It’s an effective filter, potentially, to focus scarce government resources on projects driven by citizens willing to roll up their collective sleeve and keep those at bay who are merely complaining but unwilling or unable to actively contribute to solutions.

Back in February, looking over early announcements of Change by Us NYC (then Give a Minute NYC), I wrote this:

If you look carefully for any commitments regarding the impact participants will have on City decision making, there isn’t any. To me, what this translates to is this: The City will provide participants with a venue to connect around ideas, but participants will be on their own to figure out if and how their ideas can be realized.

If that’s the case, maybe Give a Minute is an effort that more accurately belongs in the civic engagement category, not the public participation category.

The second part still stands, but it looks like there does seem to be considerable commitment to support and fund certain ideas and projects (more than I expected, at least).

Project detail page: Car-free Central Park

One thing that will be interesting to watch is the number of ideas and projects that actually move forward in some way. A quick look around the more than 100 projects that have been created to date shows that some are bound to run square into local policy issues. Car-free Central Park, anyone? My guess is that that is an issue that has been decided (and fought over) time and again and will be difficult to change. Other ideas, like this one to improve subway maps, might be more fortunate.

I wonder if this calls for coaching: to ensure that none of the project teams waste their time and energy on obviously hopeless causes.

Catching up on tons of good stuff in my feed reader, I just came across a publication by the Knight Foundation that was released earlier this month: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks

In the full report, I found an interesting tidbit about the recent Give A Minute Chicago project (emphasis mine):

“An easy way to lock up bikes.” “Tax break for not owning a car.” “Cleaner train cars.” Chicagoans have posted thousands of ideas in response to an open call for input on how to increase walking, biking and the use of public transportation in their city. This exchange was made possible by Give a Minute, a public-input platform piloted in Chicago in November 2010. The formula is simple: The city poses a call for ideas, citizens post their suggestions on the website or send them in by SMS, and they’re read and responded to by the local agencies, nonprofits and other civic groups working on the issue. Citizens are asked the question on billboards, an idea they post shows up immediately on the website, and the city’s top leaders respond to at least one insightful concept each day. The result has been 2,893 suggestions as of January 2011, of which 97 percent were on-topic. The most common: Heated bus stops, better train security, discounts on monthly passes, more bike lanes and better clearing of multiuse paths in the winter. The Chicago Transit Authority will incorporate them all into its policy making this year.

According to the footnotes, this last piece of information is based on “[e]-mail correspondence with Julia Klaiber at CEOs for Cities in January 2010 (sic!)”.

With regard to any potential impact on decision making that Give A Minute Chicago may have, this is the most concrete statement I’ve read to date. It remains interesting to watch how things will play out eventually. I’m happy to revise my interim assessment if proven wrong.

Looks like I never quite finished setting up the #edem IRC channel on Freenode last year, but with so many conferences and events coming up I thought I’d give it another try.

From the FAQ:

What is freenode about? Why is it here? freenode is a special-purpose, not a general-purpose, discussion network, currently implemented on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It exists to support specific communities. It provides an interactive environment for coordination and support of peer-directed projects, including those relating to free software and open source. Our aim is to help our participants to improve their communicative and collaborative skills and to maintain a friendly, efficient environment for project coordination and technical support. For more information about the network philosophy, please take a look here.

From the list of accepted on-topic use:

As a program of a not-for-profit entity, freenode was established to provide resources to specific communities for activities which advance the public good.

Among the categories considered to be “on-topic” they state that “non-geographical interest groups covering a variety of subjects may be on-topic.”

So, assuming that as a group of e-democracy and e-participations professionals and enthusiasts we would qualify, I’ve registered a new channel last night:

irc.freenode.net #edem

If you still use IRC, please stop by and check it out.

We’ll have our first coordinated group chat on Wednesday, May 4 at 2pm Central (3pm Eastern).

Having a persistent, real-time backchannel that goes beyond Twitter’s 140 characters should be especially useful around the many conferences and events that are happening globally and which the majority of us cannot attend in person.

Next week, e-participation folks will gather in Krems, Austria for this year’s Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM11). The conference is hosted by Danube University Krems’s Center for E-Government and “brings together e-democracy, e-participation, e-voting and open government specialists working in academia, politics, government and businesses”.

A number of sessions look quite interesting, for example:

• Axel Bruns: Towards Distributed Citizen Participation
• Rebecca Schild: Engaging Policy Communities Online?
• Manuel J. Kripp: Electronic Decision making: bridging e-participation and e-voting
• Noella Edelmann and Peter Parycek: Collaborative Behaviours in E-participation

Sadly, I won’t be able to attend, but I certainly hope to follow the event remotely (as much as that’s possible). Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the Digital Government & Society blog
• Follow @e_society on Twitter
• Watch the #cedem hashtag

That’s a great start, of course, but I sometimes wish these niche conferences made remote attendance a core part of their offering. It would be great to get timely access to the slides, any audio or video recordings or better yet live audio or video. A kind of backchannel (chat room) to meet and mingle with attendees would be very useful as well.