Possibly not of global relevance (yet), but since it is my home town I thought I’d give it a quick shout-out:

Earlier today, Offenes Köln (Open Cologne) was officially announced. It’s a grassroots project by Marian Steinbach in Cologne, Germany that aims to make information, documents and data related to local government available (and accessible) to the general public by way of aggregating, enhancing and presenting government information from various sources from the “Ratsinformationssystem” (city council information system), the official platform of the City of Cologne.

Open Cologne appears to have been inspired by Frankfurt Gestalten, whose creator Christian Kreutz I interviewed a while back.

Steven Clift just alerted me to a new report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government: A Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation (PDF), authored by Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University.

I admit I haven’t fully read it yet, but a couple of issues jumped out that I wanted to point out really quick.

1) Terminology

First off, I like this explanation of the term “citizen participation” (page 6):

What is Citizen Participation?

Citizen participation can be broadly defined as the processes by which public concerns, needs, and values are incorporated into decision-making. Citizen participation happens in many places (e.g., civil society, electoral, legislative, and administrative arenas) and can take many forms (e.g., methods may range from information exchanges to democratic decision-making). [...]

Citizen participation may be indirect or direct:

• Indirect participation, such as voting or supporting advocacy groups, occurs when citizens select or work through representatives who make decisions for them .
• Direct participation occurs when citizens are personally and actively engaged in decisionmaking

It appears that the term “citizen participation” as applied here is more narrow than civic engagement but considerably broader than public participation.

That’s why I don’t quite agree with the statement that “many of the assumptions behind the IAP2 and other organizing principles for citizen participation do not always hold” (page 7), as the side-by-side comparison of “Assumptions and Realities about Citizen Participation” (page seems to slightly confuse the terminology.

For example, the table lists as an assumption that “[p]articipation is focused on decisionmaking and helps direct government allocation of resources” and  contrasts this with the reality that “[p]articipation can be done for reasons other than decisionmaking. Even when focused on decision-making, participation might not (and often need not) address resource allocation issues.”

It’s true that “citizen participation” (as defined above) may not always focus on directly engaging citizens in decision making. “Public participation” as defined by IAP2, on the other hand, is always about decision making and the various levels the public can be directly involved. Furthermore, IAP2′s framework is not limited to resource allocation issues.

For more on this, see our previous posts on terminology (here, here) or browse the dictionary.

2) Mapping tools to IAp2 Spectrum impact levels

On pages 10-12, the report provides a number of examples of online and offline tools as they map to certain levels on the IAP2 Spectrum. This is something I’d love to work on in more detail at some point, especially to help categorize the many online tools out there. It’s been tried several times before but I haven’t quite seen it work.

The challenge, as I see it, is that most group processes or tools don’t map neatly to one level on the Spectrum or another. For example, Deliberative Polling and AmericaSpeaks 21st Century TownMeeting can fall on the Involve or Collaborate part of the Spectrum but only if the decision maker is on board. If, on the other hand, the process is used without a clear link to a decision making process then the Spectrum does not apply.

Both the 2007 CaliforniaSpeaks project (21st Century TownMeeting) and the 2011 What’s Next California project (Deliberative Polling) are examples where either process has been applied for opinion research and advocacy purposes but where the outcomes did not have any concrete impact in terms of decision making.

* * *

At any rate, the main focus of the report is on evaluation and metrics and looks quite useful. Hope to dig in later tonight.

As an IAP2 USA Board member, I would like to take a short moment to plug the membership drive we kicked off in October and which will end tomorrow, January 31, at midnight: IAP2 USA Fall Membership Campaign: $99 Deal, Good for 99 Days!

I don’t have the latest numbers handy, but it looks like we’re getting very close to reaching our goal of signing up 99 new members.

New local chapters, monthly practitioner calls and our soon-to-be-launched communities of practice are only some of the things we have in store for 2012. If your work has to do with public participation in any way, IAP2 USA is a great place to connect with fellow practitioners and share, learn and grow together.

Here are two things you can do to support us:

1. If you aren’t a member yet, now would be a great time to join. You can apply online, or call +1 (855) 500-5767 during office hours.
2. If you know any friends or colleagues who should be members but aren’t, please forward this information.

30 hours left to take advantage of the $99 special rate. Thanks!

In the second chapter from his upcoming book, Tom Atlee picks up the topic of learning in deliberation, something he has written about previously. It’s a thorny issue and generally applies to public participation as well.

One problem, as I see it, is that quality deliberation requires informed participants, but properly framing the issue and creating the necessary briefing materials can be quite costly. The challenge is how can we meaningfully involve participants in the co-creation of the briefing process and its outcomes in order to improve quality, lower costs and help make quality deliberation more widely available.

Here’s Tom’s take (as pre-released on Reality Sandwich last month):

Deliberapedia

As noted earlier, framing an issue for deliberation means providing balanced information that helps deliberators take into account the range of views on their issue and the trade-offs connected to whatever choices they might make. Traditionally, it involves condensing a lot of information about that issue into 3-5 approaches for addressing the issue — representing as broadly as possible the full public debate — with the arguments and evidence for and against each approach. Sometimes issue framings also include information about who supports and opposes each option, and a profile of the values that it represents and appeals to.

Most citizen deliberations are framed by professionals who produce “issue books”, videos and other briefing materials, many of which are available at low or no cost, but are quite expensive to put together in the first place. Framing for broad self-organized grassroots deliberations, in contrast, would be crowdsourced, using the fact that advocates for various solutions to a public problem have already developed arguments for their solution and against their opponents’ solutions. Our challenge is to create a context where opponents in the fight over an issue end up participating in co-creating a wiki that channels their information into a coherent frame that clarifies that issue for everyone else. Most of the partisans involved would not participate out of their civic-mindedness but because they wanted their viewpoint to be well represented in this public document. This is the idea behind “Deliberapedia”.

The Deliberapedia vision is inspired by Debatepedia, a leading debate society’s online forum to collectively work up and share arguments pro and con various propositions, creating a database that can be used by debaters everywhere. Deliberapedia would be a massive, readily searchable, rapidly expanding and developing wiki database of organized arguments for and against all sorts of policy solutions to all sorts of public issues.

Deliberapedia would provide a powerful — perhaps even necessary — foundation for a self-organizing grassroots citizen-based deliberative system capable of generating empowered public wisdom with minimal ongoing cost. It would also constitute one of the greatest contributions we could make to democracy even if the rest of the deliberative system for which it was designed is never developed.

Note from the author: The final version of Empowering Public Wisdom will include an appendix showing one way in which Deliberapedia could function, including a special network of grassroots groups focusing on issues they’ve chosen, as well as a chapter on the creation of official legislature of ordinary citizens, who could both contribute to and use Deliberapedia.

It’s still true today that “[i]nside every public participation program is a good public information program.” However, I think we need to be moving from simply informing participants (if understood as a top-down, one-way activity) towards a more participant-centric model that takes into account the entire learning experience. Last Spring at SXSW, I took the liberty to slightly rephrase the guideline as follows: ”Inside every public participation program is a good public learning program.”

The wiki approach Tom proposes has opportunities but also many challenges. In order for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts some level of editorial leadership would still be required, and the need to coordinate non-expert contributors will create certain overhead costs which may at some point outweigh the benefits.

In the context of specific projects, though, one possible solution might be found somewhere in the middle between a top-down and a purely participant-driven (crowdsourced) approach. As I started to outline last year, I agree there is a lot of potential in granting the participants a much more active role in this important pre-phase of any deliberation, consultation or general public participation effort:

• Building on the diversity of participants’ knowledge and experiences could help improve briefing materials in terms of scope, accuracy and accessibility.
• Giving participants ownership of the research process and the outcomes it produces may build buy-in and increase trust.
• Offering participants more variety in the ways they can contribute (e.g. by taking on the role of “researcher, interviewer, fact checker, curator, editor etc.”) might increase overall engagement, with more people participating at a higher enjoyment factor and hence more likely to stick around, invite others etc.

I’d be interested to know who has integrated innovative content co-creation and e-learning components into their online consultations. If you have any leads, please leave a comment. Thanks!

As has been discussed intensively elsewhere on the web for the past several weeks and months, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act currently before Congress are ill conceived and, if passed, would have terrible consequences for the internet as we know it.

At the heart of the matter is the question how society should best balance the conflicting needs of copyright holders and the general public in the era of the internet, when co-creation and sharing of content are increasingly becoming the cultural norm. It’s a complex question that requires careful consideration and moderation, not the kind of knee jerk approach manifested in these bills. As a startup company that lives and breathes on the internet, we are particularly worried about these developments.

In this brief talk, Clay Shirky gives a bit of historical background and explains the main issues with the two bills:

For more information on the topic and to take action, check out Wikipedia’s FAQ, which includes links to several recent media articles on the topic.

Over at Human Transit, public transportation planner Jarrett Walker points to yet another online budget puzzle, this one from Portland, OR and still ongoing: portland: balance the budget yourself

Portland’s Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they’ve come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services to cut. It’s one of those “balance the budget yourself” tools that’s becoming increasingly necessary to bring voters into contact with reality about government budgets.

Here’s a screenshot showing the progress bar under the combination of revenue increases and spending cuts that yield the maximum impact.

In the comments, readers point out a number of issues with this setup:

• Options don’t appear to cover the full spectrum of solutions.
• Appears to only include options that are generally within the scope of convener’s institutional authority.
• Options appear to be biased.
• Financial impact calculations seem questionable.
• Low combined impact volume means some “options” aren’t really that optional.

Whether these concerns are justified or not, at this point the damage is already done: the perceived shortcomings put this public participation exercise in a pretty bad spot right from the get-go.

Here’s the comment I left:

Interesting, anyone know what kind of software they’re using or whether this was built in-house?

There are two things I look at when I come across online budget tools like this one:

1) What’s the maximum impact of all options combined as a percentage of the deficit? In this case, the deficit is $17m, but only $25.7m (151%) in deficit reduction measures are offered. It’s clear right there that there probably isn’t a lot of flexibility for participants in choosing their path to solving the deficit.

2) Are there any options that are impossible to avoid? In this case, the budget deficit cannot be resolved unless fares are increased. As long as a participants [sic] chooses “no fare increase” she won’t be able to solve the puzzle. Failure to make this more transparent to the participant can be a simple oversight or, worse, an effort to push a hidden agenda.

Obviously, the options shouldn’t be biased (as much as that’s possible). At the very least, TriMet should provide information as to how the various options were selected and share the assumptions behind their financial impact calculations.

There are better ways to do this, though it certainly isn’t the first project to struggle.

I’m probably the last person to see this, but the Canadian Government provides a comprehensive directory of consultations from various departments and agencies. From the English language version homepage:

Welcome to the Consulting With Canadians site!

The Government of Canada is committed to finding new and innovative ways to consult with, and engage Canadians.

Consulting With Canadians provides you with single-window access to a list of consultations from selected government departments and agencies.

Look at some of the consultations in progress and get involved.

We would like your feedback regarding this site. Please take a few minutes to complete a brief User Survey. Your views are important to us and will be considered in assessing the value of this site to Canadians.

Please feel free to submit any additional comments regarding this site that might allow us to serve you better.Contact-Us.

Would be nice to have this in the US.

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!

Last April, Stephen Buckley started OpenGov Metrics, a Google group about “the adoption and use of standard metrics for measuring progress in ‘Open Government’ efforts, i.e, to make government more ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative’.”

In light of the recent White House request for input regarding best practices and metrics, the group is currently being relaunched.

If you’re interested in this topic, please join and share your insights.

You can read Stephen’s submission here: My Response: White House asks for OpenGov “Best Practices & Metrics”

Following their very successful 2010 budget puzzle (see our coverage here, here and here), the New York Times today has released another exercise, this time asking participants to identify their preferred approach to cuts to the U.S. defense budget. From their site:

The Future Military: Your Budget Strategy

The Pentagon has committed to $450 billion in reduced spending over the next 10 years, but may have to come up with a total of $1 trillion in cuts if Congress follows through with deeper reductions. Make your own plan to reduce the budget by choosing some of the most common, interesting or provocative cuts that have been proposed by various parties.

The total amount of cuts available is $1,499B, or 322% of the required $450M minimum. Once again, the designers at the Times give participants plenty of options to solve the puzzle.

One big challenge still remains unaddressed, though. As I just stated in a comment on their Google+ page, it’s relatively easy for any individual participant to come up with the required $450M in cuts, but things gets much harder once the exercise involves a group of participants to agree on a list of cuts.

Tom Atlee is working on a new book (due out this Summer). From an email he sent this morning:

My new book – “Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics” – has gone through two rounds of editorial review. It is scheduled for publication in early August 2012. The publisher – North Atlantic Books, whose books are sold and distributed by Random House – has agreed to post two chapters on the web for pre-publication public review and comment. (This is not something that is ordinarily done, and they are, to their credit, going out on a limb to do this.) In addition to crowd-sourcing editorial perspectives, we want to seed the book’s ideas into the public conversation (in a very hot election year!) and get an early sense of public reaction.

You can get the sneak peek here (one chapter this week, another one next week): Empowering Public Wisdom

From the introduction:

“Public wisdom” results when the public — as a whole or in randomly selected “mini-publics” — engages in learning about, reflecting on, and discussing public affairs in ways that take into account what needs to be taken into account to decide what will produce long term, inclusive benefits.

The chapters being posted on Reality Sandwich describe that kind of randomly selected mini-public — the various forms of temporary, well-informed “citizen deliberative councils.” They tell us about the hundreds of these councils that have been held around the world and how they have been used. They tell us about new forms of councils that could be developed and new ways they could be used-including organizing them at grassroots levels and through using the Internet.

These councils provide a way to readily and affordably generate a legitimate, authentic, coherent, and wise voice of “we, the people” — a voice for “the general welfare” that is not currently present in our political discourse. It moves us beyond partisanship to a place of collective responsibility for our shared destiny. It reclaims the idea of “we, the people” as a coherent political force that integrates the diversity of the whole citizenry rather than a catchphrase used by one more special-interest group that attempts to speak for “the people” but doesn’t really embrace our full range of perspectives and needs.

And here are the eight characteristics Tom has identified:

The purpose of a citizen deliberative council is to inform officials and the public of what the people as a whole would really want if they were to learn about a public concern or issue, carefully think about it and productively talk it over with each other.

The eight characteristics shared by every current form of citizen deliberative council are:

1. It is an organized face-to-face assembly.

2. It is made up of 12‑200 people selected randomly (and usually demographically) so that their collective diversity fairly reflects the diversity of the larger community from which they were drawn. (In this context, “community” means any coherent civic population, whether a block, a citizens’ organization, a city, a province, a country, or any other such public grouping.)

3. It is convened temporarily, for a specified time, usually a few days to a week of actual meetings, sometimes distributed over several weeks. (A rare version goes for many months of meetings every other weekend.)

4. Its members deliberate as peer citizens, setting aside any other role or status they may have for the brief duration of their deliberations, after which they return to their previous lives in their community.

5. It has an explicit mandate to address a specific public situation, issue, concern, budget, group of proposals or candidates, or other public matter.

6. It uses forms of dialogue and deliberation, usually facilitated, that enable its diverse members to really hear each other, to expand and deepen their understanding of the issues involved and to engage together to identify the best ways their community might address those issues.

7. When it is addressing a specific issue, budget, or public policy, its deliberations feature inclusive balanced briefing materials and, usually, interviews with, testimony from, and/or conversations with diverse experts, advocates, and other stakeholders involved with that issue.

8. At its conclusion, it releases its findings and recommendations to its convening authority, concerned officials, the media, the electorate, and/or the larger community from which its members came — and then it disbands.

Ideally, further community dialogue is stimulated by the report and this is sometimes organized as part of the overall process.

Citizen deliberative councils in most current forms have no permanent or official power except the power of legitimacy and (hopefully) widely publicized common sense solutions to compelling public problems.

The chapter goes on to share some of the rich history of citizen deliberative councils and how they could and should be used today.

This looks like a publication to really look forward to. And who knows, maybe subsequent editions will have to revise the first characteristic to also include online assembly.

Reading Clay Johnson’s response to the White House’s request for input, I came across Roundtable, a new take on building an online environment for “meaningful conversations” currently under development. From their blog:

At Roundtable we’re all about empowering meaningful conversations – between thought leaders, between friends, and between curated communities of strangers.

There is little information available on the site as to the process design by which the Roundtable team hopes to achieve this goal, but it looks one element may be a sort of semi-fishbowl setup (a small group at the center of the conversation, a potentially much larger group engaging in second-level comments).

Other things worth noticing: a very sleek design and an appropriately named “applaud” gesture (the ability for participants to express support for each others’ comments).

Screenshots

Roundtable discussion entry page:

Post with three comments:

Comments expanded:

Look forward to playing with it once I get my invite. By the way, great name.

Over the weekend, I came across you+me+politics, a new online dialogue research project coming out of New York University. From their about page:

For our midterm assignment, our class was tasked with creating a conversational space centered on a specific piece of content. Our group decided to focus our work around something controversial. So often, online conversations based on contentious topics are overwhelmed by ugly insults and flame wars. Our aim is to circumvent these all-too-typical cruel and circuitous debates, and, instead, to encourage intellectual and civil conversation.

[...]

Which brings us to the unique structure of our site — conversational enclosures. You’re locked into a discussion with another user on our site, so that you’re forced either to engage in a meaningful discussion, or to bow out. There isn’t a peanut gallery of support for rude comments here; 50 users can’t gang up on one person for having a different opinion. Our hope is that most users won’t be able to sling solely insults for an hour, that those who would typically become bullies in a political debate online might be forced to back up their opinions. In the short term, our goal is to force users from a variety of political creeds to develop civil discourse and to engage with each other.

This reminded me of RedBlue, a project from a few years ago, which aimed to pair US citizens from different sides on the political spectrum (red for conservative, blue for liberal) in an effort to “explore our differences and find out what we have in common.” From their sign-up page:

RedBlue will create a private, one-on-one online dialogue process by matching participants with contrasting views. “Counterparts” will learn about the ground rules of productive dialogue, then engage on a difficult issue by viewing or reading a fictional narrative scenario that frames a front-page issue in personal, rather than theoretical, terms. Their email-style discussion will be monitored by a “virtual facilitator” that will make suggestions, provide feedback, and offer to step in when the heat of the moment threatens to derail the civility of the dialogue.

And this from their about page:

Why RedBlue? Surveys consistently reveal that most Americans hold nuanced perspectives on many issues. The majority is uncomfortable with today’s online political culture, where debate over our policy differences so often ends up in polarized name-calling and demonization. In this regard, citizens are underserved and disempowered, and the integrity of the political system is undermined.

While the RedBlue project begins with the familiar labels that have so often pigeonholed Americans into uncomfortable stereotypes—“red” vs. “blue,” “conservative” vs. “liberal”—participants in the RedBlue process will be able to connect with counterparts whose contrasting views are as subtle as their own, re-introducing a middle ground of public discourse where there is room for reasonable people to disagree.

As far as I remember, RedBlue — for reasons I’m not familiar with — never evolved past the prototype stage.

I still believe that paired dialogue, whether applied stand-alone or in combination with other small and large-group processes as part of a larger consultation or deliberation, holds a lot of promise.

Paired dialogue is a feature that’s already available today on Zilino (our Roundtable module allows for large groups to be split up into smaller units of two or more participants to engage in asynchronous, text-based online dialogue).

Are you familiar with other examples of one-on-one online dialogue? Please share your notes in the comments. I’ve already added both projects to ParticipateDB (here, here).

Update: This post is being continuously updated. Check the comments section for the change log.

It’s that time of year again, and so I’ve started to add a few 2012 events to my calendar, both the kind I hope to attend in person as well as the ones I’ll likely have to follow remotely.

The core focus of this list are events at the intersection of public participation and technology (e.g. e-democracy, e-participation) plus events with overlap from neighboring areas such as dialogue, deliberation, conflict resolution, facilitation, planning, local government, open government, civic engagement etc.

Got any other events on your radar? Please let me know, and I’ll update the list. Thanks!

Dates to be announced

Open Gov West 2012 (OGW2012)
May 2012
Website: http://www.opengovwest.org

Fifth International Conference on Online Deliberation (OD2012)
Summer 2012
Location TBA
Website: http://online-deliberation.net

2012 NCDD Conference (unconfirmed)
October 2012
Seattle, WA

January 2012

TransportationCamp DC
January 21, 2012
Washington DC
Web: http://transportationcamp.org

February 2012

9th Scandinavian Workshop on E-government (SWEG 2012)
February 9–10, 2012
Copenhagen (Denmark)
Website: http://www.cbs.dk/sweg2012

Social Cities of Tomorrow
February 17, 2012
Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Website: http://www.socialcitiesoftomorrow.nl
Note: According to their background page, the conference will explore  a “new take on community and participation models”, from traditional top-down to more horizontal models.

March 2012

ASPA 2012 Annual Conference
March 2–6, 2012
Las Vegas, NV
Website: ASPA 2012 Annual Conference

CeBIT
March 6-10, 2012
Hanover (Germany)
Website: http://www.cebit.de
Note: Their Public Sector Park section covers topics such as eGovernment 2.0, eParticipation/eInclusion and Open data/Open government.

South by South West Interactive (SXSWi)
March 9–13, 2012
Austin, TX
Details: http://sxsw.com/interactive

IADIS International Conferencee-Society 2012
March 10–13, 2012
Berlin (Germany)
Website: http://www.esociety-conf.org

International Conference: Participatory Budgeting in the US and Canada
March 30–31, 2012
New York, NY
Website: http://pbconference.wordpress.com

April 2012

2012 National Planning Conference
April 14–17, 2012
Los Angeles, CA
Website: http://planning.org/conference/index.htm

Collective Intelligence 2012
April 18–20, 2012
Cambridge, MA
Website: http://www.ci2012.org
Related post: Collective Intelligence 2012: April 19-20, 2012 in Cambridge, MA

CampaignTech 2012
April 19–20, 2012
Washington, DC
Website: http://campaigntechconference.com

Gov 2.0 L.A.
April 21, 2012
Santa Monica, CA
Website: http://gov20la.org

International Conference on e-Democracy, e-Government and e-Society (ICDGS 2012)
April 25–27, 2012
Venice (Italy)
Website: http://www.waset.org/conferences/2012/italy/icdgs/

Transparency Camp 2012
April 28–29, 2012
Greater Washington DC area (details to be confirmed)
Website: http://transparencycamp.org

May 2012

International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2012 (CeDEM ’12)
May 3–4, 2012
Krems (Austria)
Website: CeDEM12

International Association of Facilitators North America Conference 2012
May 9–12, 2012
Halifax, NS (Canada)
Website: http://www.iafna2012.org

2012 ACR EPP Section Conference
May 21, 2012
Tucson, AZ
Website: http://www.acrepp.org

ECR2012: Working Across Boundaries
Seventh National Conference on Environmental Collaboration and Conflict Resolution
May 22–24, 2012
Tucson, AZ
Website: ECR2012: Working Across Boundaries

Digital Governance in Latin America, LASA 2012 XXX International Congress
May 23–26, 2012
San Francisco, CA
Details: http://www.certop.fr/DEL/spip.php?article2465

June 2012

2012 Digital Government Society Conference (dg.o 2012)
June 4–7, 2012
University of Maryland
College Park, MD

2012 American Democracy Project and The Democracy Commitment Annual Meeting
June 7–9, 2012
San Antonio, TX
Website: http://aascu.org/Meetings/adp12/

University Network for Collaborative Governance 2012 Annual Meeting
June 10–12, 2012
Syracuse, NY
Website: http://www.policyconsensus.org/events/uncg_2012.html
Notes: The conference theme is “Embedding Collaborative Governance in Universities, Communities, and Government”.

GFOA 106th Annual Conference
June 10–13, 2012
Chicago, IL
Website: GFOA 106th Annual Conference
Note: Public participation is not the core focus of this conference but worth listing here given the audience (public finance professionals).

Personal Democracy Forum
June 11–12, 2012
New York, NY
Website: http://personaldemocracy.com

12th European Conference on eGovernment (ECEG 2012)
June 14–15, 2012
Barcelona (Spain)
Website: 12th European Conference on eGovernment– ECEG 2012
Notes: Mini track eParticipation (call for papers)

25th Bled eConference
June 17–20, 2012
Bled (Slovenia)
Website: http://www.bledconference.org
Notes: special interest track eDemocracy: From eRevolution to eParticipation (PDF)

9th Annual Games for Change Festival
June 18–20, 2012
New York City, NY
Website: http://www.gamesforchange.org

The 11th International Online Dispute Resolution Forum (ODR2012)
June 27–29, 2012
Prague (Czech Republic)
Website: http://www.odr2012.org

July 2012

7th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA 2012)
July 5–7, 2012
Tilburg (The Netherlands)
Website: http://www.ipa-2012.org

5th International Conference on Electronic Voting (EVOTE2012)
July 12–14, 2012
Bregenz (Austria)
Website: http://www.e-voting.cc/topics/conference2012

The Democracy Imperative (TDI) National Conference
July 18–21, 2012
Boston, MA
Website: http://unh.edu/democracy/

Frontiers of Democracy 2012
July 19–21, 2012
Boston, MA
Website: http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/?pid=1096

IADIS International Conference e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice (ED 2012)
July 21–23, 2012
Lisbon (Portugal)
Website: http://www.edemocracy-conf.org

August 2012

No events yet.

September 2012

Fourth International Conference on eParticipation (ePart 2012)
September 3–6, 2012
Kristiansand (Norway)
Website: http://www.epart-conference.org

International Conference on Electronic Democracy (EDEM 2012)
September 3–7, 2012
Vienna (Austria)
Website: http://www.dexa.org/egovis2012

League of California Cities Annual Conference & Expo
September 5–7, 2012
San Diego, CA
Website: http://www.cacities.org/AC

Web of Change (WOC)
September 5–9, 2012
Cortes Island, BC (Canada)
Website: http://webofchange.com/web-of-change-hollyhock

Association for Conflict Resolution 12th Annual Conference
September 12–15, 2012
New Orleans, LA
Website: http://www.acrnet.org

2012 NAGW National Conference
September 12–14, 2012
Kansas City, MO
Website: http://nagw.org/national-conference

IAP2 Canada National Conference (tentative)
September 30–October 2, 2012
Halifax, NS (Canada)

October 2012

98th ICMA Annual Conference
October 7–10, 2012
Phoenix, AZ
Website: http://icma.org

EAINZ Annual Conference 2012
October 24–25, 2012
Sydney (Australia)
Website: http://www.eianz.org

November 2012

Involve 2012
November 13-14, 2012
Nottingham (United Kingdom)
Website: http://www.profbriefings.co.uk/involve2012/

Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy
November 14–16, 2012 (tentative)
Montevideo (Uruguay)
Website: http://www.2012globalforum.com

December 2012

No events yet.

Late last month, a new online community launched in Germany for people and organizations that “want to advance citizen participation in political decision making and shape the future of public participation” (translation mine).

From the website (in German):

Die Partizipation der Bürgerinnen und Bürger an gesellschaftlichen und politischen Entscheidungsprozessen ist ein elementarer Grundpfeiler der Demokratie: Das demokratische Gemeinwesen braucht die Beteiligung der Bürger/innen, um Akzeptanz und Rückhalt zu gewinnen und zur »gelebten« Demokratie zu werden. Darüber hinaus ist unsere Gesellschaft auf die Beteiligung der Bürger/innen angewiesen, um das Wissen und die Ansichten aller Akteure einzubeziehen und zukunftsweisende, nachhaltige Entscheidungen zu treffen.

Das »Netzwerk Bürgerbeteiligung« hat das Ziel, der politischen Partizipation in Deutschland dauerhaft mehr Gewicht zu verleihen und sie auf allen Ebenen (Bund, Länder, Kommunen) zu stärken. Das Netzwerk fragt danach, wie eine »partizipative Demokratie« ausgestaltet und vorangebracht werden kann. Es sucht nach Wegen zur politisch-strategischen Förderung der Bürgerbeteiligung.

Auf Basis dieser Grundidee führt das »Netzwerk Bürgerbeteiligung« Menschen und Organisationen aus allen Bereichen zusammen, die die Partizipation von Bürger/innen an politischen Entscheidungen voran bringen und die Zukunft der Bürgerbeteiligung mitgestalten wollen. Das Netzwerk wird dabei gespeist vom Engagement der einzelnen Netzwerker/innen – dies können Einzelpersonen und/oder Organisationen sein. Grundgedanke ist, dass Netzwerker/innen aus den verschiedensten Kontexten und unterschiedlichen demokratischen Ebenen ins Gespräch kommen und zusammen arbeiten – dass sie sich austauschen, gemeinsam Ideen für notwendige Initiativen und Maßnahmen entwickeln und umsetzen.

This new initiative is lead by Bonn, Germany-based Stiftung Mitarbeit. As of this morning, more than 50 members are listed in the public member directory.

Someone on Google+ shared this very cool feature the New York Times is offering on their website today. It’s a graphic interface for a poll asking readers to indicate their position in the current debate about the US debt ceiling: The Debt Crisis: What Should Congress Do?

The instructions are given as follows:

Congress must raise the debt ceiling by Tuesday or run the risk that the government will fail to meet its financial obligations. The House and the Senate continue to debate proposals. What do you think Congress should do: raise tax revenues, cut programs, or just increase the debt ceiling? Plot your response on the graph. Make sure to indicate your level of willingness to compromise and leave a comment to explain the choice. Each dot represents one comment. Darker shades represent multiple comments made on a single point.

Here’s what the results look like as of a few hours ago:

Needless to say, this is a very fun way to visualize polling results, especially for large result sets. However, the question “Should we cut spending (increase tax revenue) to reduce the deficit?” is poorly phrased for this purpose as it warrants a binary yes/no response. It would seem that to a majority of people the central question is not whether or not either of the the two options should be pursued but to what degree. So a preferred way to phrase the question would be one that encourages sliding-scale answers, e.g. something like “To what degree should we cut spending (increase tax revenue) to reduce the deficit?”

Here’s a simple sketch:

The bottom left corner represents ”do nothing”. The top right corner represents “cut spending a lot and increase tax revenue a lot”. Interestingly, President Obama’s “balanced approach” (a combination of somewhere in the area of 3/4 spending cuts and 1/4 tax revenue increases) would appear to fall into the top left quadrant.

If you were to include the the full spectrum of options to also include “increase spending” and “decrease tax revenue” as valid options, the appropriate question would simply be: “To what degree should we adjust spending (tax revenue) to reduce the deficit?”. Including those options may not make a lot of sense in the current context but it certainly applies in other situations.

The graphic user interface essentially asks participants to answer two questions at once. From a usability standpoint, I’m not entirely convinced this is suitable for everyone (I had to think twice to make sure I understand where my preferences belong on the matrix). I’d prefer to see a two-step approach whereby participants answer each question individually (sliding scale) and then see and interact with the matrix.

The poll also asks participants to indicate their willingness to compromise (see the colored scale in the screenshot below):

Again, the phrasing is a binary yes/no question when the interface is asking the participants to indicate their position on a scale. And again, it’s not so much a matter of whether or not there is willingness to compromise but rather what areas on the matrix participants might still find acceptable.

At the time of this post, more than 8,000 comments have already been submitted. So far, a clear majority lands in the top right quadrant, favoring a combination of reduced spending and revenue increases.

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.

The Open Government Research and Development Summit is being held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington DC today and tomorrow.

According to early reports on Twitter (here, here, here), the US Government is still actively pursuing the idea of creating an ExpertNet. Shelley Metzenbaum (OMB) is quoted saying that they hope to begin a pilot for ExpertNet in the next few months. This ExpertNet pilot would allow them to find experts, ask them structured questions and get expert answers. ExpertNet would create and use a network to allow experts to comment on each other’s input and to help government filter information.

There has not been an official follow-up since the ExpertNet online consultation ended in January, and today’s news still doesn’t provide enough information to answer my six questions. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Follow the #OpenGovRD hashtag for more live coverage from the event.

Over the weekend, I learned about LexPop, a new wiki-based site that invites participants to collaboratively craft public policy on any issue (see their current project: Policy Drive: MA Net Neutrality). From the about page (emphasis theirs):

Just as pamphlets were once the most efficient and effective means for distributing ideas, so too was this type of democracy the best solution at one point. But that moment is long since passed. A legitimate twenty-first century democracy will invite the public into meaningful collaboration.

And that’s the theory behind LexPop. The idea is that we (the People) can do a better job. The idea is that by introducing more voices, the policies that win out won’t be limited to the best-funded.

The project is ambitious, but something similar is already working in Brazil. The Federal Government is experimenting with collaboration through ExpertNet and Peer-to-Patent. Yet neither of these projects opens the gates to policy making by the people. LexPop is a start that, and while imperfect, it will help bring public participation into public policy.

A recent blog post provides more background:

The notion that participants can create real policy is bold. But it’s no more so than the idea that users (in their spare time) could collaboratively create the world’s best encyclopedia, improve the US Patent and Trademark Office, and, well, develop Linux and Firefox.

I’m aware of a few attempts at wiki-based policy making, but as far as I can tell the results have been rather mixed. A big fan and regular user of wikis myself, I certainly find the idea intriguing. However, the analogies (Wikipedia, Peer-to-Patent or the development of certain open source software) don’t really apply to the policy making process. For example:

• Wikipedia and Peer-to-Patent both deal with facts, whereas policy always involves a combination of positive and normative issues. The process of collaboratively collecting facts is quite different from a policy argument or deliberation, and it has to be managed differently.
• Wikipedia as well as most open source projects are open-ended, whereas policy creation is very much a time-bound process. You can always make another edit on Wikipedia, but you need to agree on a final version of a policy draft in order for it to move forward and through the legislative process.
• Wikipedia and Peer-to-Patent both benefit from large numbers of small, independent edits and contributions. However, editing a policy document without at least some level of understanding of the whole usually does more harm than good.

Here is the comment I left back in December, when someone on ExpertNet raised questions about the wiki process (mainly what kind of edits are appropriate where, when, by whom etc.):

In order to engage a large group of participants in the review or co-creation of a policy document such as this one, I suggest the following iterative process:

1. Participants discuss draft language in the discussion forums (for example, they can ask clarifying questions, raise issues or suggest improved language)
2. A small team of dedicated editors (usually on the convener side, but might include a few volunteer participants) revises draft based on participants’ input AND communicates which changes were made and why
3. Rinse, lather, repeat.

To date, this is the most efficient process I’ve seen to do this kind of co-creation of policy. Making meaningful edits to a complex policy document requires a lot of mental overhead, which most participants have neither the bandwidth nor subject matter expertise to commit to.

Trying to wordsmith while the document basics (general scope, outline, key points etc.) are still in flux is usually a terrible waste of energy for everyone involved.

And as I’ve argued before, quality participation doesn’t waste participants’ time.

A great example of the process outlined above was the highly collaborative effort across multiple organizations in 2009 to create the Core Principles for Public Engagement (see earlier posts here, here) led by NCDD and others (strictly speaking, the online collaboration relied on a discussion forum, not a wiki, but the same lessons apply).

A key success factor was the fact that the team of core editors was made up of highly qualified people who dedicated a lot of time working on the document. They were trusted members of the community, and they communicated very well with the larger group of several dozen participants. The total number of comments in the forum wasn’t particularly high, but still it took a handful of iterations to arrive at the final document.

The LexPop project will follow a simple three-phased process (research, deliberation, drafting). I’m not sure that’s enough structure to make it work, though it’s already a lot better than most other examples I’ve seen. Worth watching!

As reported by Federal Computer Week last week, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently published a report for Congress that evaluates the first year of the Open Government Directive: The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress (PDF)

From the summary:

The 112th Congress may have interest in accessing information and documents from the executive branch. This report examines and analyzes the Obama Administration’s initiative to make the executive branch more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. [...]

[...]

The 112th Congress may oversee the Administration’s open government efforts and has the authority to codify any parts of the initiative. This report reviews and discusses the centerpieces of President Obama’s transparency initiatives, the Open Government Initiative and the Open Government Directive. The report analyzes agency response to the OGI and the OGD and examines whether the OGD’s requirements can meet the stated goals of the Administration. The report discusses the three central tenets of the Administration’s OGD—transparency, public participation, and collaboration—and analyzes each one individually to determine whether agencies are meeting these requirements and whether the requirements may improve the effectiveness of the federal government.

Several people have already weighed in (Joe Goldman, Nancy Scola, Andrea di Maio and others).

The report puts a strong focus on objective-driven Open Government and the need for measurable results. And while I generally agree with that (a lot), I found the report’s analysis regarding public participation (page 30-31) somewhat lacking. Here’s why:

1. Fails to mention the need for good process design

In the analysis section, the report mentions a number of high-level concerns and challenges, paraphrased here:

• The public may not be well-informed enough.
• There may not be enough citizens who are motivated to engage in public policy deliberations and who are capable of doing so.
• Public comments may not be useful to the federal government.
• Responding to public comments may cause delays in government action.
• The resource requirements (dedicated employees, work hours) needed to respond to these comments are unclear.
• Most public participation may come from special interest groups.
• Web-based public participation may give certain participants unfairly greater access to policy makers.

These are all valid and important points. However, what the report doesn’t mention is that good process design will almost always help address these challenges. For example, good process design takes into account the resources the convener has available to process participant input and will only make commitments that are feasible. Good process design creates ways for participants to learn about the issue (remember, inside every public participation program is a good public information — or, as I would phrase it today — public learning program). Good process design helps bring all voices to the table, not just special interests.

2. Generalizes based on one bad example

The report looks back on the Open Government Dialogue in 2009 and observes how the suggestions were “of varied relevance and utility.” It also quotes one editorial that concluded that the quality of public comments during the Open Government Dialogue “was not consistently encouraging.” While both statements are true, undoubtedly, they do not generally apply to all public participation, online or offline. What is not mentioned is that the Open Government Dialogue was, despite all its good intentions, poorly designed and poorly managed. In all likelihood, better process design and a more hands-on management would have yielded much better results.

* * *

On a final note, while it’s true that “[t]he OGD presumably was created, in part, using suggestions from the public”, there was never a proper follow-up that informed participants about if and how their input had influenced the final document. Again, something which a good public participation design would have taken care of in a timely manner.

Despite these minor shortcomings in a report that I found generally on target, one take-away for me is that the public participation field still has a lot of work to do in better documenting their successes, developing a consistent framework for measuring return on investment, and to much better share this information with any organization in the public, private or non-profit sector that is involved in engaging their constituents in public participation.

It’s not enough to know better, it’s essential that this knowledge becomes readily available to a much broader audience than it is today. As I mentioned on Twitter, this is something I would like to make a focus area of IAP2 USA over the next year or two.