Early on during the Expertnet consultation last year, I shared the following (sadly, the Expertnet wiki is locked due to its paid subscription having expired, but Google still has most of it cached):

re: Notifying Experts
tbonnema Dec 18, 2010 12:43 am

It looks like ExpertNet is trying to solve at least two distinct problems:

1) The matchmaking piece between experts (however defined) and opportunities to contribute: For some time now, I have suggested the creation of a national participation calendar (http://bit.ly/h7mwmv, http://bit.ly/6h18sc), so maybe this is something that ExpertNet could help accomplish.

2) The consultation piece once a group of participants has been assembled: There is already a broad range of tools available today to support these kinds of processes (see http://ParticipateDB.com). Depending on the circumstances, some are more appropriate than others, yet success will to a large extent depend on “soft factors” unrelated to the technology. My question is whether ExpertNet should build or buy a solution or whether it should rely on existing tools on an as-needed basis.

(Full disclosure: My company created ParticipateDB, and we’re developing a tool in this general e-consultation category.)

Just as a reminder, the range of processes Expertnet would potentially aim to support basically came down to this key question:

2. Fact-based advice or deliberative policy creation? The original draft focused on seeking verifiable, fact-based advice from citizen experts. However, later statements have hinted at a significantly broader scope that would allow officials “to pose questions to the public about any topic we’re working on.” Given the nature of many of the topics mentioned (job creation, preventing homelessness among veterans etc.), ExpertNet would have to support policy consultations that are much more deliberative by nature. This has huge design implications.

This general idea of a more agile approach whereby citizen expertise is solicited following a variety of processes and using a variety of existing tools was supported by several other participants. Here is Tim Huegerich (Google cache):

The benefits of using already established, external platforms for responses
TimHuegerich Dec 30, 2010 9:23 am

1. Easy and cheap – less work and expense for setting up ExpertNet
2. Allow the external organizations to perform moderation, etc., sidestepping concerns about how to moderate without the appearance of “Big Brother” trampling free speech.
3. Furthers the original principles:
   • Participation must be easy. (by allowing participation through platforms than citizens are already familiar with)
   • We are not building a new Facebook. (the original proposal does not really come to terms with this principle because it assumed that a community would form around the new platform to moderate responses, etc. – this alternative is much more consistent with the principle)
   • Innovation requires experimentation. (By allowing various partner platforms to compete in generating useful responses, this proposal encourages experimentation and innovation.)

David Karger also made the same point (on Januar 23, 2011), saying that “… I will argue as I have elsewhere that instead of building a [government-sponsored social networking site] we should look to leverage an existing system.” (Google cache).

They really did get a lot of smart answers during the Expertnet consultation, didn’t they?

To this date, there has never been an official follow-up or debriefing, so we can’t know for sure whether the current experiment is intentional or even related. But last week, the White House announced on their blog that they would be using social knowledge site Quora to solicit input on a number of questions: We Want to Hear from You on Quora: Announcing the Startup America Policy Challenge

From the post:

Yesterday, the White House announced $2 billion in public and private resources to help entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses. In the spirit of open and participatory government, we also announced the Startup America Policy Challenge. We’re calling on entrepreneurs and the broader public to share their ideas on how to accelerate entrepreneurial innovation in the areas of healthcare, energy and education. Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer, kicked off the challenge in a post on Quora and asked a few questions to get the dialogue going.

[...]

All Americans are invited to reply. But I’m especially interested in hearing from entrepreneurs in these areas – and so is President Obama’s Cabinet, particularly Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

You don’t have to be a policy wonk to respond, and you don’t need to describe a detailed policy solution—there are others in government and in academia who will help us with that, as part of the Startup America Policy Challenge. Just tell us what’s on your mind.

So have a good idea? Let us know…

Screenshot 1: Top of page

Screenshot 2: Question metadata

Let’s look at participation metrics to date for the three questions posted:

Education: In the U.S. education system, what can the government do to best enable the use of new learning technologies?

• 18 answers
• 12 comments
• ca. 70 votes
• ca. 6,000 word count (not including comments)
• ca. 325+ average word count per answer
• 516 views
• 53 followers

Energy: In the U.S. energy system, what can the government do to best enable the use of new clean energy technologies?

• 22 answers
• 29 comments
• ca. 50 votes
• ca. 6,000 word count (not including comments)
• ca. 250+ average word count per answer
• 609 views
• 65 followers

Healthcare: In the U.S. healthcare system, what can the government do to best enable the use of new health information technologies?

• 8 answers
• ca. 40 votes
• ca. 3,500 word count (not including comments)
• ca. 425+ average word count per answer
• 297 views
• 37 followers

At a glance, it looks like overall participation rates are still fairly modest so far. However, individual responses are much more detailed as compared to the roughly 125 average word count per comment we saw during previous online dialogues on Change.gov and the Open Government Dialogue (see our metrics update from June 2009).

Quora provides a few distinct features that allow participants to collaboratively improve their answers over time. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to measure the level of activity various answers have seen or whether they have been modified, but it is something that occurs regularly on the site. This an other design choices, such as the limitation to allow only one answer per participant, can greatly help improve quality and reduce overall word count.

As far as I’m aware, no end date has been defined by which input has to be submitted in order to be considered, nor has it been made clear what will happen with the input. Also, I’m not seeing the conveners (Aneesh Chopra and team) actively engage.

Having said that, this is a promising approach that will further advancing the idea of harnessing citizen experts. Assuming that the policy questions at hand are actually ripe for public input, using an existing tool is one way to get there relatively quickly. Given the intended audiences (technology entrepreneurs) and the type of input the White House is after (policy ideas), Quora appears to be an appropriate choice of tool.

If Expertnet were ever to be built as its own tool (which may or may not be necessary), it is experiments like this that will inform its design. Hopefully, we’ll see many more of these.

Over on the ParticipateDB blog, we ask: What’s Next for ParticipateDB?

If you’ve been following the project and find it a useful addition to your list of online resources, please let us know what we can and should do to make the site better. A few good ideas have already been added in the comments.

Thank you!

We know there are a lot of (online) tools for participation available today, and we find out about more examples of how they are being used almost every day.

About three weeks ago, someone asked me if I knew of any politicians strongly committed to voter participation who “have started to use these techniques sincerely and effectively.”  I thought my answer wasn’t good enough (frankly, I couldn’t come up with any examples), so here’s a call for a bit of community research.

Some of the use cases I think would qualify:

• Inform constituents about decisions or votes that have already been made
• Collect constituent feedback with regard to certain policy proposals with the goal of helping the politician make a more well-informed decision
• Collaborate with constituents on crafting a policy proposal
• Allow constituents to decide a certain issue with the politician being committed to carrying out that decision

In essence, any kind of examples of politicians using social media and other online tools to engage their constituents in their decision-making processes is what I’m looking for.

If you have any leads, please leave a comment below, shoot us an email or use hashtags #edem or #opengov on Twitter. Thanks!

One year ago today, we launched a neat little site: ParticipateDB

Here’s what the 40+ contributors have been able to collect so far:

• 160 tools
• 202 projects
• 118 references
• 20+ countries

There’s a lot more out there that deserves to be catalogued, but it’s a start.

Looking forward to year two!

I was recently invited to write a short article about ParticipateDB for the Spring edition of GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications’ Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (PDF, 3.4 MB).

Here’s a quote that describes one of the challenges ParticipateDB tries to address:

The Challenge

While public participation is at the core of our democracy, e-participation, as it is commonly referred to, is still a fairly young and emerging field with a much smaller and incomplete body of knowledge, and a tool landscape that can best be described as fragmented, if not confusing.

There is an almost overwhelming variety of tools and services available today that can be, and have been, applied in the context of public participation. Some of the more established tools were designed specifically for the purpose of e-participation, while others, such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and Facebook, are more generic and just happen to also support certain participation activities.

In addition, there is a considerable long tail of experimental applications and solution approaches covering different countries, languages, and participation areas, most of which never rise out of obscurity. No matter what tool is being used, information about actual implementations is often incomplete, distributed, or simply unavailable.

This poses a challenge that is twofold:

• On the demand side, practitioners often have very limited awareness of what’s available, what works, and what doesn’t, making it difficult to choose the right tool for the job.
• On the supply side, even some of the most innovative tools fail to get the exposure they need in order to gain enough traction to be able to validate their concepts and ideas through

ParticipateDB continues to grow.  While March and April were mostly about adding more content, we did manage to add one cool new feature earlier this month: ParticipateDB: Covering 23 Countries and Counting

Just a quick weekend update to share the latest ParticipateDB developments:

Today, we launched the site’s third main content bucket: references. Here’s how we define the term in the FAQ:

How do you define “references”?

A reference to us is any kind of related information on the web that can provide more context and detail to any of the tools and projects covered on ParticipateDB. For example, this may include but is not limited to: product brochures, white papers, video tutorials, any kind of research, case studies, or interviews.

Because it is a good read and because it is full with mentions of various e-participation tools and projects, we picked a paper titled “Promising Practices In Online Engagement” by Public Agenda’s Center for the Advances in Public Engagement (CAPE) as our first entry to this new section. Plenty  more resources will have to be added in the future, but hopefully this illustrates how the site is intended to work.

With the addition of references, the initial data model is pretty much complete and online. The last piece that’s missing now is proper user management before we can move the site into beta (and really start letting more people in).

In case you’re interested, feel free to follow ParticipateDB via the usual social channels: Identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook and GovLoop

Over on the recently re-launched Ascentum blog, Joseph Peters (Partner at Ascentum) and Joe Goldman (Vice President of Citizen Engagement at AmericaSpeaks) just published a neat list of ten key questions to consider before launching an online public consultation: Open Policy Making 101: 10 Questions To Ask Before Launching Your Online Public Consultation

1. What do you want to know?
2. What is your commitment to participants?
3. Who needs to participate?
4. How hot is the issue?
5. What type of contribution are you looking for?
6. What type of data will you collect and analyze?
7. What are your timelines?
8. What resources are available to support the process?
9. How can participants stay involved?
10. Which online tools should you use?

The document (PDF, 916 KB) lays out these principles in good details. Once again, the recommendations are concerned about good process first and tools second.

Their take on timelines is fairly specific, and I would like to hear if others in this field can either confirm or add to it:

Generally speaking, a process that is open to the general public should be live for four to six weeks to ensure adequate participation.

Finally, here’s their item number ten:

10.  Which online tools should you use?

This question is intentionally left until last in this list. Many organizations choose a shiny new tool and decide to use it before carefully considering their overall approach.  This ends up having the software drive the process and not the objectives. There are many tools and solutions to choose from, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. The options are endless, but you need to match the tool to your strategy based on the questions you have already answered from the list above.

Exactly. And supporting that mapping process of finding the right tools for the job is something we’d like to see ParticipateDB grow into over time.

A few weeks into this fun side project, we just added “projects” to ParticipateDB. As I mentioned at launch, the idea is to show where the various tools are being used in practice and how (there are only a handful of fairly unrefined entries available yet but you get the idea).

The project entries don’t aspire to be full-fledged case studies (far from it — if case studies or other related materials exist they will be linked to). Instead, entries should give the reader a quick overview of what each project was about. At a bare minimum, we’d like to capture the following project information:

• Title
• Description (specifically goals and outcomes)
• Time/duration
• Convener/organizer
• Country

What else is missing and would be useful? Please comment below.

We will be adding “resources” next (links to related online articles and resources for both project and tools, such as white papers, product brochures, case studies etc.) and add more seed content. We hope to let in a first round of beta testers in late November.

Probably the most memorable presentation at the 2007 Community Next conference in Stanford was “The Patent-Pending skinnyCorp Method for Creating Online Awesomeness and Other Cool Stuff” by Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of skinnyCorp, makers of Threadless and other entertaining projects large and small.

As Kalmikoff pointed out in one of the stories they shared (starts at around 4:50 into the video):

As things happen, the line you’re gonna hear at skinnyCorp a lot if you stop by is: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if…?”

My key take-away back then: watch out for that phrase, it might lead to fun projects! Plus, looking at the world with a wouldn’t-it-be-awesome-if mindset seems like a sure-fire way to delight your community (and your customers).

Well, the phrase has come up a lot over the past twelve months. At the conferences and events that I had a chance to attend (and even at some of the ones I followed remotely), the conversations often seemed to circle back to one recurring theme:

• Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a site that lists all the online tools for public participation and civic engagement that are out there?
• Wouldn’t it be great if we had a comprehensive guide to all the commercial and open source products that support online dialogues and e-consultations?
• Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could keep track of recently launched projects in this area and even compare them side by side?

Yes, yes, and yes.

We’ve been monitoring this space internally for quite some time now, occasionally sharing our findings. Yet while we’ve managed to build a decent list for our own use, it is by no means complete. And with so many new initiatives and interesting projects popping up left and right almost every week, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up.

To solve this problem, and since nobody else appeared to be going for it, we thought it might be a good idea to build a small app that lets anyone collect and share their favorite tools for participation. We call it:

ParticipateDB

A directory of online tools for participation that anyone can edit.

The site is live but is not fully functional yet. Over the next few weeks, we plan to seed it with some of our own data, add some basic site functionalities and then hope to open up to the public later this Fall.

Please contact us or leave a comment if you have feedback. You can follow ParticipateDB on Identi.ca or Twitter, and we will let you know when things are happening.

In the spirit of International Day of Democracy, which is today, we hope ParticipateDB will make the world of online participation a little more awesome.