I had heard of the DAD acronym before (decide, announce, defend) but was unaware of SCID until it came up during training last week. Here’s what SCID stands for:

• Solicit (ask stakeholders for input)
• Consider
• Ignore
• Decide

Obviously, this is not good practice as it violates a number of public participation principles (mainly, you don’t ask for input if the decision has already been made or if there is no genuine interest in having that input inform the decision to some extent).

Between the two, SCID is worse than DAD in that it first sets expectations regarding the level of impact participants will have only to then disappoint these expectations.

Even if the participation project is well-intentioned, the perception of SCID can set in easily and quickly. Take, for example, this recent announcement from the Spending Challenge blog:

Thank you for the ideas so far…

As you may have noticed, the site has been the subject to a small number of malicious attacks so we have unfortunately had to pause on the interactive features for now, but we’re still keen to hear any further ideas you have, which we may publish at a later date.

We are really grateful to have already received thousands of good ideas and we’re committed to giving as many of you as possible the chance to get involved and feed into the tough decisions that must be made in the Spending Review.

Without going into a lot of detail, the Spending Challenge consultation launched on June 24, at first for UK public sector workers only. Once it opened up to the general public on July 9, the site was soon overrun by objectionable content. The rich idea generation and commenting features including all content were eventually taken down on July 16 and replaced by a standard one-way feedback form.

For anyone who doesn’t have a lot of trust in the process, a statement like this may well seem like a cop out and prove that the public’s input never really mattered much in the first place (see the tweet shown above).

Better communication might alleviate some of these concerns, but in the end only actions that are in line with what was promised will build the necessary trust with the public. And trust and credibility — and obvious as this may seem, this was one of the key take-aways from last week’s IAP2 certification training — are what makes or breaks any public participation effort.

The good news here is that the D in SCID (the decide) hasn’t actually happened yet. It’s still entirely possible that a lot of the input that’s being gathered will have an impact and that this consultation will have been a meaningful exercise after all.

This is the second part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation. Part 1 was on Institutional Backing. Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis research.

Some e-participation projects originate from within (or from outside) public institutions, but are not decided at the top. Initiators of e-participation projects can come from outside a public institution and remain so, but in many cases the initiative comes from outside and efforts are made to then relocate the initiative within a public institution (this might be the case where an advocacy organization, a citizens association or academics are the driving force behind an initiative). The other possibility is that somewhere within an institution, an office or individual acts as the policy innovator (but it is somewhere in the middle belly of the bureaucracy, not at the top level).

In both of these cases, enormous leadership and advocacy efforts are necessary to get buy-in. With buy-in, I mean that those leading an institution are convinced of the merits and goals of an e-participation project and fully back it as an official act of their institution, resulting in the proper institutional backing for such a project. Even more broadly, buy-in is at the core of what the entire open government movement seeks to achieve: to instill the awareness for open government processes within the public sector and the public at large. What is necessary is to find the right arguments for the right audience to convince them of the benefits of e-participation or its suitability for a certain problem or challenge. However, in most bureaucracies, it is not only risky to start an intra-institutional campaign for openness, there is also usually little resources for it.

Books on leadership exist plenty, but aside from leadership skills, what are really helpful tips for advocates of e-participation from within and from outside? What are success stories? Does it help to skip “a few ranks” and talk directly to someone higher up? Where does one need to find allies? How long would one want to foster and plan the project before “giving it away” to the institution to see it rot away in a drawer? Should outside actors be brought on board (without authorization)?

Many questions remain, as we are figuring out proper ways to open up public administrations for more participation and collaboration. This is a reminder that it is primarily about people, not about software. What are your thoughts?

We’re still shuffling things around at this point, but here’s a list of items we’re considering (in no particular order):

Project basics

• Project name
• Project description
• Project start and (estimated) end date
• Major project phases and deliverables
• Estimated group size
• Where does this project fit on the overall timeline and how does it tie into past, present or future activities? (e.g. previous decisions, face-to-face events)

Convener profile

• Who is the convener of this consultation?
• Who is funding this project?
• Who will participate on behalf of the convener?

Participant profile

• Who is invited to participate?
• How are participants selected?
• What is your outreach plan?
• How are participants expected to contribute?
• Will participation be reimbursed/rewarded?
• What are the ground rules for participation?

Impact

• Is this consultation tied to a decision making process?
• What is the ultimate decision at stake?
• Who is in charge of making that decision?
• When will the decision be made?
• What is the scope and expected outcome of this consultation?
• What impact will this consultation have on the decision making process? (this is the “promise to the public” as per IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation)
• How do you define project success? (key success factors)

Follow-up

• What will happen next once the consultation is over?
• What will happen to the content generated by participants?

Risks

• What are the risks that the consultation might fail to have the intended impact?
• How are these risks being addressed?

We think that briefing the participants in a comprehensive manner will significantly reduce the risk of unrealistic expectations and the disappointment and frustration they cause.

Leave a comment if  you can think of other factors that participants should be made aware of before they join a consultation.

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) today announced submissions for their 2010 Core Values Awards are now open.  From the President’s email:

I am looking forward to reading the innovations in the 2010 Core Values Awards submissions. These awards are an opportunity to showcase what is leading the practice so that others experience, learn and improve. They also help to  build organisational reputation and attract respect from peers across the global P2 community.

There has been no better time to bring the power of public participation to the fore. As a world-wide community we have the chance to demonstrate the value of public participation to support sustainable decision-making and bring people together across countries and disciples.

This year’s awards honour those who step up to the mark and meet these challenges and opportunities. [...]

More details and award categories from the announcement (PDF):

The Call for Submissions is now open for the 2010 IAP2 Core Values Awards. In 2009 IAP2 made some changes to the awards entry process, including some format changes and a standardized style for all entries. These improvements helped the judging process and improved the production of the State of the Practice Report. We also introduced a new award category in 2009 – the Innovation Award – and we are offering this category once again but with a different theme.

There are three categories:

• The Project of the Year
• The Organization of the Year
• The Innovation Award – this year’s theme is: “Addressing wicked problems through public participation.”

For inspiration, here’s the full list of 2009 State of the IAP2 Core Values Award Nominees (PDF).

Via the Public Decisions blog (co-organizer of the Including the Excluded online conference we’ll be attending), I just found out about a new research effort by Involve, a UK-based not-for-profit offering public participation consulting and services: Quantifying the Value of Engagement: A call for case studies

Dear Colleague,

Involve are embarking on an ambitious project with Consumer Focus England, we are seeking to develop an equation for identifying costs and benefits associated with public engagement structures and processes. The proposed equation will be a practical tool, aimed at public sector workers who wish to make the case for effective engagement by exploring and quantifying the costs and benefits. It will also help authorities, civil society and the public to identify when public engagement is an effective use of public money. We need to work with public sector organisations to test our equation, in order to ensure it is useful and that it is able to be applied in a variety of circumstances.

[...]

Specifically we are looking for case studies which:

• Can demonstrate some tangible improvements in service outcomes as a result of the engagement, for example reduced crime levels, improved health outcomes, lowered bureaucratic requirements, or more targeted spending.
• Have some understanding of the costs and benefits of the exercise
• Includes some element of engaging with members of the public
• Occurred within the last twelve months

We are also interested in looking at examples which engaged people in issues around cuts in expenditure.

I look forward to their findings. In the spirit of moving this entire field forward, please make sure to make your cold, hard ROI data available.

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.

Over at Sunlight Labs, they have some design suggestions today around how federal agencies should approach their new /open website sections with regard to data.

Here’s the comment I just left (pretty much the same point I made on the OSTP blog a few weeks ago when they were seeking input on an Open Government Dashboard):

In addition to exposing the list of available data sets, agencies should publish — at the very minimum — a calendar of ongoing as well as upcoming consultations or any other participation initiatives they offer.

This would be a first step towards tracking the scope and quality of agencies’ public participation efforts.

Obviously, it would also make it easier for citizens to find the participation opportunities they are most interested in.

A lot of thought leaders in the area of public participation have freely and generously shared their advice over the past year, and agencies should draw on this knowledge as they continue to become more participatory.  The key success factors to meaningful, effective participation aren’t a secret, and over time I’m sure we’ll see smart solutions for consistently tracking, measuring and evaluating public participation efforts at all levels of government.

However, the very first step towards this goal is to simply give people (citizens, researchers and other participation evangelists) an easy way to find out about upcoming participation opportunities.

And who knows, making this information available may pave the way for other, more fancy ideas in this area.

Just came across a reference to this little gem of a conference right in our backyard:

2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy and U.S. Conference on Initiative and Referendum

“constitution making and direct democracy”

Saturday, July 31 through Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010

Richard Fahey has a detailed post up about an interesting crowdsourcing idea that has been proposed by the Conservative Party in the UK: £1m prize for citizen participation platform

Earlier this week the UK Conservative party promised to offer a £1m cash prize to a person or team that creates an online platform that can be used to solve “common problems”.

The prize – which the party says will be the largest offered by a British government in modern times – will be awarded for a platform in which citizens can post ideas in relation to government policy. The exact specifics of the platform have not been outlined, but it’s envisioned as a mesh between Fixmystreet,  Facebook, Spigit, IdeaScale and MixedInk.

The platform will need to be able to sift through millions of online comments and highlight the most sensible suggestions from those with experience of the area in question. Most current idea generation platforms use digg-like voting mechanisms as a means of highlighting the most popular suggestions. The £1million prize is on offer to anyone who can devise a more sophisticated way of sifting through suggestions and weighting relevant ideas in an appropriate manner.

According to the press release (quoted on the IdealGovernment from an email), the end goal here is to create a citizen participation platform that enables the soon-to-be-elected new UK government to — among other things — “tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges”.

The press release mentions a number of examples where some kind of online collaboration among citizens could be quite useful (e.g. identifying wasteful government spending, co-creating government how-to information or mapping out traffic routes around road construction sites). But it also goes into the area of public participation.

My comment on Richard’s blog makes for a nice follow-up to my previous attempt at comparing crowdsourcing and public participation, which is why I re-post it here:

Great post, thanks for the detailed write-up!

In the original email from MP Hunt (as quoted in the IdealGovernment post), he describes what they have in mind as “an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges. In government, we will use this platform to publish all Green Papers, and open up the entire policy making process to the public.” The press release goes on to state that using this platform the public would be able to “collaborate to improve government policy.”

Policy making ultimately means having to deal with difficult trade-offs and making tough choices. Contrary to the previous commenters, I’d argue that it remains a huge challenge to meaningfully engage citizens in this process, particularly online.

While the crowdsourcing initiatives that are often mentioned in this context (e.g. FixMyStreet, the Netflix Prize, the Next Stop Design contest etc.) may vary in terms of problem complexity and a few other aspects, they seem to share — to some degree, at least — a number of key characteristics:

• Nice-to have (non-critical projects, ok to cancel at any time)
• Not very time-bound
• Objective evaluation criteria or success metrics
• No concept of “stakeholders”
• No need for representativeness or inclusion (the requirement to have all stakeholders at the table)
• No need for consensus seeking/building among stakeholders/participants
• No need for deliberation

Unfortunately, public participation (engaging citizens in decision making) is almost never lucky enough to rely on conditions as easy as these.

There are a number of online tools out there that seem to support the process needs of public participation fairly well. However, they still tend to require a high degree of human moderation and facilitation (in essence, exception handling), which makes them really hard to scale. That, in my view, is the real challenge that a “citizen participation platform” contest might help address.

Just to state the obvious, here’s how an average policy issue at the local level, such as a broken city budget or a contested urban planning project, might differ from the conditions outlined above — further indication that crowdsourcing as we know it may not easily apply to public participation (or at least not in the straightforward ways that many seem to suggest all too eagerly):

• Critical issue (high impact and real consequences, decisions can’t be avoided)
• Critical timeline (internal/external dependencies, decisions can’t be postponed beyond a certain point)
• Often very subjective and/or conflicting evaluation criteria based on personal values and preferences (just to agree on the same success metrics or a formula for evaluating policy proposals and ideas may be a challenge of its own)
• Stakeholders (failure to involve the right people at the right time can seriously derail the overall process)
• Inclusion is key (failing to bring all major parties to the table can pose serious risks to the overall process)
• To achieve some degree of consensus is often desirable or needed (that means a lot of synthesizing and integrating of differing viewpoints and opinions is necessary, an often slow and painful process that requires good process design and skilled facilitation)
• Deliberation (required as one preferred method of allowing larger groups to work through a decision-making process)

This is just a quick list of differentiators I came up with on the fly; there may be more, of course.

At this point in time, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of work remains to be done before we see technology that can handle these requirements. Running a contest that might help improve our understanding of the challenges and how they might be solved (while producing some open source software along the way) maybe isn’t a bad idea at all. Definitely worth watching!

Being eagerly awaited by many in the field, the Open Government Directive was released this morning: Open Government Directive (PDF, 84 KB)

Here’s a summary of snippets that deal with participation and engagement:

Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that their government can make policies with the benefit of information that is widely dispersed in society.

[...]

3. Components of the plan

[...]

b. Participation: To create more informed and effective policies, the Federal Government should promote opportunities for the public to participate throughout the decision-making process.  Your agency’s Open Government Plan should explain in detail how your agency will improve participation, including steps your agency will take to revise its current practices to increase opportunities for public participation in and feedback on the agency’s core mission activities.  The specific details should include proposed changes to internal management and administrative policies to improve participation.

i. The Plan should include descriptions of and links to appropriate websites where the public can engage in existing participatory processes of your agency.

ii. The Plan should include proposals for new feedback mechanisms, including innovative tools and practices that create new and easier methods for public engagement.

[...]

e) Public and Agency Involvement: Your agency’s Open Government Plan should include, but not be limited to, the requirements set forth in this attachment.  Extensive public and employee engagement should take place during the formation of this plan, which should lead to the incorporation of relevant and useful ideas developed in that dialogue.  Public engagement should continue to be part of your agency’s periodic review and modification of its plan.  Your agency should respond to public feedback on a regular basis.

3. Components of the plan

b. Participation:  To create more informed and effective policies, the Federal

Government should promote opportunities for the public to participate

throughout the decision-making process.  Your agency’s Open Government

Plan should explain in detail how your agency will improve participation,

including steps your agency will take to revise its current practices to increase

opportunities for public participation in and feedback on the agency’s core

mission activities.  The specific details should include proposed changes to

internal management and administrative policies to improve participation.

i. The Plan should include descriptions of and links to appropriate

websites where the public can engage in existing participatory

processes of your agency.

ii. The Plan should include proposals for new feedback mechanisms,

including innovative tools and practices that create new and easier

methods for public engagement.

The other day, I mentioned on Twitter how I sometimes wish there were a glossary of the key terms and definitions that guide our conversations around participation.

With the Open Government Directive expected to be released within a few weeks, one challenge remains that people don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they discuss participation and participatory government. While some use the same terms for slightly different concepts, others rely on different terms for essentially the same ideas.

Here’s a list of just a few of the general concepts that seem to be commonly implied in these conversations (in no particular order):

• Participation as general citizen-related activities: this includes voting in elections, attending local city council meetings, writing a letter to the editor etc.
• Participation as general community activities: e.g. volunteering
• Participation as involvement in decision making: giving people meaningful ways to be part of and contribute to a decision-making process, maybe following IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation (PDF) or the recently released Public Engagement Principles developed by NCDD and others (our endorsement here)
• Participation as consensus building: getting everyone to agree on something
• Participation as interaction with government data: for example, citizens building applications or mash-ups using open government data

In order to be effective, the Open Government Directive will have to clarify  the concepts it tries to promote. Maybe we can expect some very specific language, who knows?

At any rate, more people using more precise language would be very helpful. Here’s one working definition we prefer.

Earlier today, the FASTForward Blog hosted a webinar discussion with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, titled: Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government

A recording of the webinar is available on the FASTForward Blog. I was lucky enough to get one question in (starts at around 45:50):

With regard to public participation, what are the next milestones for the Open Government Initiative as we’re going into 2010?

Here’s what Beth Noveck had to answer (transcript mine):

Number one, the creation of an Open Government Directive that will ask every government agency to develop its own Open Government plan, a plan that will ask agencies to develop strategic priorities around the release of data, the development of citizen engagement pilots and projects and the greater use of collaboration and the kind of collaborative problem solving and really the use of innovative policy approaches that we mentioned a bit of on the phone.

So I think that that’s very important and everything that will follow from that in terms of the institutionalization, organization  and best practice sharing, and idea exchange.

I think the second big milestone will be the move towards development of new platforms, in other words, making technologies more widely available across government as we learn what works and what doesn’t work so that people can take advantage of the new tools to do these things. So for example, there already is — completely ad hoc — a group who are sharing best practices and tools around employee brainstorming and innovation. So one agency was already doing it, asking employees for ideas and advice, several other agencies said “We’d like to do the same thing” and they spontaneously essentially come together to share code, to share ideas about how to do that. So institutionalizing those practices and platforms around a range of more open projects.

The last thing is really trying also to link up more effectively major presidential priority areas around specific open government projects. In other words, you’ve seen something like the VA’s project to reduce the backlog of veteran benefits applications. Similarly, other kinds of priority areas like that where there is really an imperative to get something done, whether it’s around STEM education (science and technology, engineering and math), or entrepreneurship, or climate change, in which I think the application of these principles of transparency, participation and collaboration and the tools that enable them can be brought to bear to enable us to address these problems more effectively and in new ways.

So I guess that means we can expect to see more e-participation pilots at various levels of government. Very exciting times indeed!

As I noted last week, I see widespread confusion around some of the key terms in the conversation about government 2.0 in general and participation in particular: public participation, crowdsourcing and “the wisdom of the crowds” — unless I am terribly mistaken, the three don’t mean the same thing and hence should not be used interchangeably.

Over on Andrea DiMaio’s blog, I just left a comment that takes a first stab at trying to clear up the confusion:

It seems to me there is quite a bit of confusion in terms of some of the terminologies that are being thrown around. In my view, crowdsourcing and public participation are not the same. In fact, there may be less overlap between the two than some people think.

Here’s where I see the main differences:

For example, crowdsourcing usually involves clearly defined goals and measurable outcomes (e.g. improving an algorithm, doing pharmaceutical research, vetting satellite imagery etc.). In cases where there aren’t any objective success criteria (e.g. some design contests), at least there is a committee that has full authority to rate and rank contributions and pick a winner. It is irrelevant who participates in a crowdsourcing initiative, and there is no concept of participants having to buy into or agree with the outcome or winning proposal.

Public participation, on the other hand, is about engaging citizens in decision making that often involves making difficult trade-offs based on conflicting values systems (very subjective). It is extremely important that all stakeholders have a seat at the table and feel they have ownership of the process. Most of the time the process will be guided by consensus seeking of some kind and achieving a certain level of agreement across all participants is required in the end in order for things to be able to move forward politically.

Can and should crowdsourcing as we know it be applied to help with certain pieces of policy making? Absolutely. But will it be sufficient to qualify as and achieve the goals of public participation? Most certainly not.

I think this is an important piece of the discussion. Let me know in the comments how you make sense of the two concepts, how the differ or complement each other. Thanks!

I just came across this project today (a sure sign I need to refactor my RSS reading habits). From their about page:

Background

Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry declaration.

We feel the urge to add an open declaration, collaboratively built and endorsed by EU citizens who share the view that the web is transforming our society and our governments. We feel e-government policies in Europe could learn from the open, meritocratic, transparent and user-driven culture of the web. We also feel that current web citizens should engage more positively with government to help designing a strategy which is genuinely difficult to adopt in the traditional culture of public administration.

We trust that if we manage to deliver quality of insight and quantity of endorsement, we will present this declaration officially at the EU ministerial conference on e-government, in Malmo on November 2009.

The open declaration will consist of a short manifesto and a more detailed supporting document with ideas on how the manifesto might be implemented.

The first phase ran from June 15 through July 15 of this year and used Uservoice to collect a first round of ideas around the following question: “What are the top things EU governments should do in the next 3 years to use the web to transform public services?”

Phase 2 is still ongoing (ends September 30) and uses MixedInk to collaboratively write the manifesto.

And finally, there is also a wiki which will “pull together a more detailed document to support the declaration itself.”

The project was launched by David Osimo and Paul Johnston and is supported by a group of well-known European experts in this field.

Intellitics will attend the 2009 IAP2 Annual Conference “Making Sustainable Decisions”, September 21-23, 2009 in San Diego, CA. From their website:

Making Sustainable Decisions

In recent years, sustainability has become the watchword for many human, social, corporate and governmental endeavors.  In some formulations, there are three “pillars” and in others there are four.  Others refer to this concept as the “triple bottom line.”  Whichever version one subscribes to, however, IAP2 sees people and governments around the world struggling both to incorporate sustainability into their decisions and with how to involve stakeholders in participating in those decisions.

Sustainable decision making has long been an underlying principle of public participation. IAP2’s emphasis on inclusionary processes is predicated on the belief that better decisions are made when community and social implications of that decision are fully factored into the decision making process.  When the IAP2 Core Values were reviewed and revitalized in 2005, sustainable decision making was explicitly added as part of our values going forward.

The 2009 IAP2 conference will provide the opportunity to discuss the multiple facets of sustainability.  In a kind of double entendre, we want to explore the state of the art both in terms of how to make decisions that reflect sustainability principles, as well as, how to make decisions that are themselves “sustainable.”  We believe these two facets feed into each other, but as the world’s premier organization focused on public participation in public decisions, IAP2 believes that the sustainability of the decision itself is in need of closer examination.

More from the preliminary conference program (PDF):

The 2009 IAP2 conference will provide the opportunity to discuss the multiple facets of sustainability. In a kind of double entendre, we want to explore the state of the art both in terms of how to make decisions that reflect sustainability principles, as well as how to make decisions that are themselves “sustainable.” IAP2 believes that the sustainability of the decision itself is in need of closer examination.

IAP2 wants to expand the definition of sustainability to encompass all the characteristics that make decision‐making processes and the resulting decisions sustainable. Specifically, presentations will be focused around the following themes:

• Sustainable decision‐making processes: what characteristics are necessary for a public participation process to be sustainable?
• Sustainable decisions: In what ways does public participation lead to decisions that are more workable and enduring than those made without public participation?
• Sustainable outcomes: How do public participation processes and better decisions specifically contribute to the sustainability of projects and programs?

Starting September 18, additional training sessions will be offered via an extensive pre-conference program.

For conference updates, subscribe to the IAP2 blog or follow @iap2 on Twitter.

]]> http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2009/07/17/2009-iap2-annual-conference-september-21-23-in-san-diego-ca/feed/ 5 http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2009/06/08/open-government-dialogue-agenda-for-phase-2-discussion-about-citizen-participation/ http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2009/06/08/open-government-dialogue-agenda-for-phase-2-discussion-about-citizen-participation/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:47:47 +0000 Tim http://www.intellitics.com/blog/?p=331

The White House Office of Public Engagement just shared in an email the agenda for the phase 2 discussion about citizen participation, which is scheduled to start Wednesday, June 10 over on the OSTP blog:

As we wrap up the transparency conversation with a final posting about information access and the Freedom of Information Act tomorrow, we want to preview what’s coming this week in the discussion about Citizen Participation and Civic Engagement. Beginning on Wednesday we’ll start conversations on Participation:

• Creating More Opportunities for Citizen Participation in Government Decision making
• Increasing Citizen Participation and Civic Education
• E-Democracy: New Tools and Technologies for Participation
• Web 2.0 Policy Framework
• Public Participation in Federal Rulemaking

Good stuff! Really looking forward to this part.

Back in February, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), along with a number of other established associations and organization in the field of dialogue, conflict resolution and public participation, launched a collaborative effort to craft a set of principles for public engagement that would inform the Open Government Directive currently being worked on by the Obama administration.

After two months of insightful discussions, the final version of the Core Principles for Public Engagement Document (PDF, 144 KB) has now been released. It starts:

In a strong representative democracy, citizens and government work together to build a society that protects individual freedom while simultaneously ensuring liberty and justice for all.  Engaging people around the issues that affect their lives and their country is a key component of a strong democratic society.

Public engagement involves convening diverse yet representative groups of people to wrestle with information from a variety of viewpoints all to the end of making better, often more creative decisions. Public engagement aims to provide people with direction for their own community activities, or with public judgments that will be seriously considered by policy-makers and other power-holders.

The more any given public engagement effort takes into consideration the following seven Core Principles, the more it can expect to effectively build mutual understanding, meaningfully affect policy development, and/or inspire collaborative action among citizens and institutions.  These seven interdependent principles serve both as ideals to pursue and as criteria for judging quality.  Rather than promoting partisan agendas, the application of the Core Principles creates the conditions for authentic engagement around public issues.

The Seven Core Principles

In practice, people emphasize or apply these principles in many different ways, and often embrace additional principles. These seven principles reflect the common beliefs and understandings of those working in the fields of public engagement, conflict resolution, and collaboration.

1. Careful Planning and Preparation

Through adequate and inclusive planning, ensure that the design, organization, and convening of the process serve both a clearly defined purpose and the needs of the participants.

2. Inclusion and Demographic Diversity

Equitably incorporate diverse people, voices, ideas, and information to lay the groundwork for quality outcomes and democratic legitimacy.

3. Collaboration and Shared Purpose

Support and encourage participants, government and community institutions, and others to work together to advance the common good.¹

4. Openness and Learning

Help all involved listen to each other, explore new ideas unconstrained by predetermined outcomes, learn and apply information in ways that generate new options, and rigorously evaluate public engagement activities for effectiveness.

5. Transparency and Trust

Be clear and open about the process, and provide a public record of the organizers, sponsors, outcomes, and range of views and ideas expressed.

6. Impact and Action

Ensure each participatory effort has real potential to make a difference, and that participants are aware of that potential.

7. Sustained Engagement and Participatory Culture

Promote a culture of participation with programs and institutions that support ongoing quality public engagement.

————-

¹ In addition to reflecting the democratic ideals of liberty, justice, and freedom for all, the term “common good” refers to things that optimize the well-being of all (like a traffic light in a dangerous intersection) or conditions that serve to benefit all involved (as in a consensus agreement focused on cleaning up the water supply).

There’s also an expanded version that goes into more detail:

PEP Expanded Text

Although we are not seeking endorsements for the expanded text under the principles and their one-sentence descriptions, the text under the headers “In high quality engagement” and “What to avoid” was developed alongside the basic seven principle, in a highly collaborative and transparent manner.  The purpose of the expanded text is to illustrate and breathe life into the principles, and should accompany the list of Core Principles whenever possible.  The expanded text can be tweaked or revised for a variety of different audiences.

Intellitics is proud to be among the group of initial organizational endorsers.

44: The Obama Presidency, one of the Washington Post’s blogs, today came out with a new monthly feature where they’ll have a group of five experts (for today, that’s Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, Jon Henke, and David Weinberger) examine the new WhiteHouse.gov website: Grading WhiteHouse.gov

Excerpt:

For all the innovations of Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov — yesterday, officials announced that it will distribute tickets to the Easter Egg Roll online — online observers, a sometimes prickly, often exacting, let’s-get-ahead-of-the-curve bunch, are left wanting for more. Take the issue of generating comments. Allowing comments on blogs is a given, nothing more than an online SOP. BarackObama.com and Change.gov allowed comments. But WhiteHouse.gov doesn’t — at least not yet.

To which I left the following comment:

Citizen engagement (in the form of public participation) covers a whole range of activities from merely providing citizens with useful and timely information, to soliciting citizen feedback, to collaborative drafting of policies, and last but not least all the way up to granting citizens certain decision making powers.

First and foremost, this is about process: Where can participation be helpful or required, and to what degree? What promises are being made to the public at each level and phase of public participation and how can the organization leading the engagement effort make sure these promises are consistently being kept? Only then does the question of tools come into play.

Anyone serious about public participation must get these basics right for it to achieve the desired outcomes.

With that in mind, I seriously doubt that simply turning on comments on the WhiteHouse.gov official blog would qualify as meaningful participation. Worse yet, in some cases it might even be counter-productive to quality citizen engagement.

The experiments we saw on Change.gov were definitely a step in the right direction. However, from a public participation standpoint there were many best practices the transition team did not yet manage to adhere to. Moreover, none of the tools that were used on Change.gov (IntenseDebate, Google Moderator, Salesforce Ideas) were really built to scale (much less in a public participation environment), and they all struggled with the massive onslaught of user contributions.

So rather than getting impatient with the new administration, my advice to them would be to address the participation piece with great care and caution and to innovate one step at a time. Identify the most promising use cases and work your way up the ladder of public participation. Definitely continue in the spirit of experimentation that was visible on Change.gov, but make sure you don’t fail too badly too often as the participants’ trust, once broken, will be hard to recover.

For all I know, the current linear models of commenting on the web (be it threaded or non-threaded comments, with or without ratings, advanced sorting etc.) do not scale. If the activity we’ve seen on Change.gov is any indication, the WhiteHouse.gov web team might be well-advised to hold off on any general roll-out and only use comments where they absolutely don’t have any better alternatives.

Over the past few weeks, there has been an interesting discussion over on the main NCDD discussion list about “pseudo-dialogue” and “pseudo-civic engagement” and the need for some sort of quality assurance guidelines for the public participation efforts that the new administration is bound to undertake.

The discussion touches upon many principles and critical success factors of public participation, one of which has to do with the participants’ need for complete and unbiased information. Pseudo-engagement, in this context, refers to any effort that claims to do public participation or civic engagement but in fact does not adhere to these principles.

As one example of such false labeling, Pete Peterson, executive director of Common Sense California, wrote an article in City Journal about the recent “Health Care Community Discussions,” which the Obama transition team had initiated via their Change.gov website late last year (emphasis mine):

Obama’s One-Way Social Networking

[...]

Particularly telling were the guides that Change.gov provided for hosts and guests. Hosts, explained the six-page Host and Moderator Guide, should invite “friends, family, colleagues and neighbors,” and moderators “should not strongly advocate for specific health policy positions.” Further, “everyone should conduct the meeting like President-elect Obama would: respecting everyone, listening to everyone’s opinion, and engaging in spirited discussion without being disagreeable.” The five-page Participant Guide, meanwhile, devoted one page to over a dozen bullet points outlining the dire condition of the current health-care system, and followed it with a second page highlighting Obama’s solutions in 13 bullet points. This two-page treatment of national health policy was followed by three pages of mostly leading questions. At the conclusion of each meeting, questionnaires were collected, a consensus Group Submission was agreed upon, and the submission transmitted to the president-elect. What happened to it next is anyone’s guess.

[...]

Second, the information provided to both moderators and participants is scant and biased. Missing from the discussion materials is any mention of competing proposals or any hint of possible downsides to the president’s positions. “First sell the problem, then sell the solution,” an old sales axiom holds. Boiling hugely complex issues like health-care reform and economic stimulus down to one page of problems and one page of solutions isn’t educating—it’s marketing.

In his book, The public participation handbook : making better decisions through citizen involvement, James L. Creighton has the following to say about the need for information integrity (emphasis mine):

Chapter Six: Techniques For Getting Information to the Public

This chapter provides an overview of techniques for getting information to the public. Inside every public participation program is a good public information program. Before people can participate, they need information so they can participate in an informed manner. In particular, they need information about how a decision could affect them and their interests.

Participants need complete, unbiased information. They need the same kind of information (although perhaps written more simply) that you would provide decision makers within your own organization. And like your decision makers, if the public senses you are biasing the information to produce a particular outcome or omitting information that might change the outcome, they will stop trusting you as the source of information and start looking to others. In fact, if your organization is seen as an advocate for a particular outcome, the public will assume that you are manipulating information to produce the outcome you desire.

The media will always write stories that maximize controversy. This is their idea of newsworthiness. Interest groups will provide information that is slanted or given spin to support their particular position. They assume you will do this too.

This leaves the organization sponsoring the public participation program in a difficult position. You are usually the only potential source of complete and unbiased information. But you are also likely to be viewed with suspicion, particularly by groups advocating a particular outcome.

You must make exceptional efforts to ensure the information you give to the public is as objective as possible. You may want to have your materials reviewed by other agencies, such as regulatory agencies or an existing citizen advisory group or peer review panel. In some case, organizations have contracted with outside groups, such as the League of Women Voters (a nonpartisan organization committed to the informed involvement of the public) to write documents.

You may never convince advocacy groups that your material is objective. They have a stake in being critical. The target is the middle. The goal is to ensure that people who do not have a predetermined position perceive the information they receive from you as useful and trustworthy.

Be aware that your efforts to achieve objectivity may not be supported by people in your own organization who are more used to a public relations orientation. They may define their job as making the organization look good, even if it means spinning the story by leaving out certain facts or controlling the emphasis. One of the reasons it takes so much time to get documents reviewed inside organizations is that there can be struggles between people with a public participation orientation and people with a public relations orientation.

I’ve consulted to several government agencies for a number of years, some as many as thirty years. Based on that experience, my judgment is that in the long run, any organization comes out ahead  if it is perceived as a source for complete and unbiased information. There are times this will cause temporary embarrassment. But credibility, once lost, is very hard to regain.

He then goes on to describe “some of the most frequently used techniques for providing information to the public,” such as briefings, information repositories, mass mailing, the internet etc.

We often talk about the obvious shortcomings of e-participation as compared to face-to-face engagement. In this case, however, I see a lot of opportunities how web-based tools could be used to allow the participants to collaboratively improve the quality and completeness of the informational materials provided, in ways that could ultimately strengthen the credibility of the organizer/sponsor or convener organization.

About a couple of weeks ago, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) — in collaboration with a few other organizations in this field — launched the Public Engagement Principles project, an effort to craft a recommendation for the Obama administration as they work on the Open Government Directive. From the NCDD website:

Get involved in the Public Engagement Principles project, a collaborative effort to see if our broad field can present a united front to the Obama administration. We are starting by developing and describing a set of core principles or criteria for quality public engagement that are broad enough yet meaningful enough that we can all endorse. Help us get there!

Here’s how Sandy Heierbacher, NCDD’s director, introduced the project:

We are facing an unprecedented opportunity in the fields of public engagement, conflict resolution and collaboration. President Obama has demonstrated his commitment to participation, transparency and openness in his administration in numerous ways we’ve all taken note of

There are a number of established associations and organizations in the U.S. that unite professionals and promote the practice and principles of consensus, dialogue, participation, collaboration, conflict resolution and other means of achieving largely the same end.

We suspect that many of these groups will try to communicate with the administration about how to best move forward, but we are concerned about the fact that although most of us speak the same basic language to describe this work, we tend to use many different dialects. This could weaken each of our cases, and overwhelm members of the administration rather than support them.

Rather than each of us contacting the administration separately with mixed messages and various levels of success, we believe we could make a greater impact working together. Can we collaborate or unify to present a collective source of principles, practices, talent and resources that this administration and nation will need in the next four years?

The discussion forum has quickly become a treasure trove for anyone interested in making public engagement work. The list of over a dozen tried and tested sets of principles from around the world as well as the conversations about which pieces are generally applicable or how they should be framed in the context of a guideline or recommendation to the administration is a valuable asset in and by itself and I hope NCDD will preserve the results.

Here’s the latest revision of the public engagement principles:

CRITERIA FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

The following principles describe high quality public engagement in public conversation on public issues.  While each is distinct, they overlap considerably and reinforce each other in practice.  They serve both as ideals to pursue and as criteria for judging quality.  Their proper use is to generate authentic engagement in public problem-solving, collective creativity, and social healing.  They are not designed to promote partisan agendas.

1. Preparation – Consciously plan, design, convene and arrange the engagement to serve its purpose and people.
2. Inclusion – Incorporate diverse people and ideas to lay the groundwork for quality outcomes and democratic legitimacy.
3. Collaboration –  Support organizers, participants, and those engaged in follow-up to work well together for the common good.
4. Learning – Help participants listen, explore and learn without predetermined outcomes — and evaluate events for lessons.
5. Transparency – Promote openness and provide a public record of the people, resources, and events involved.
6. Impact – Engage official and public attention and follow up — in context — so that each participatory effort actually makes a difference.
7. Participatory Culture – Promote programs and institutions that sustain quality public engagement and advance democratic principles and competence.

Tom Atlee did a lot of the integration and synthesis work on this.

I want to start a conversation about how these principles can best be applied to online participation efforts and tools.