Over the past few weeks, Melbourne, Australia-based Ron Lubensky has written an series of posts explaining the concept of a Citizens’ Assembly and defending it against unfounded criticism:

• July 23, 2010: Open letter to Julia Gillard, Prime Minister
• July 26, 2010: Assembled citizens make sense
• July 26, 2010: Another good op-ed supporting Citizens’ Assembly about climate policy
• July 26, 2010: What I think the Citizens’ Assembly should do…
• July 27, 2010: On collaborative learning and online deliberation…
• August 14, 2010: Labor MPs avoiding Citizens’ Assembly pitch
• August 27, 2010: The public appetite for public engagement

There’s a lot of advice in there! Take these recommendations to heart, and you should be ready to design your own citizens’ assembly in no time (well, almost).

For anyone interested in learning more, Participedia has an in-depth case study available about the 2004 British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform as well as one on the 2009 Australian Citizens’ Parliament, which Ron worked on at the time.

In preparation for the upcoming series of NCDD 2010 Regional Events (including the one right here in the Bay Area, October 29), Sandy Heierbacher (Director, NCDD) has asked for input on a question I know has been on the minds of many in the NCDD community for the past few years: “How can we best meld/combine face-to-face engagement with online engagement?”

NCDD is currently in the process of gathering “some of the best-of-the-best materials” to support the three topic areas the events will focus on (quality public engagement, online tools, collaborations that work). Here’s the forum thread regarding the question above if you’d like to check it out: Combining Online and Face-to-Face Engagement

Much to my disappointment, I wasn’t able to find any specific material about online/offline integration on our internal wiki (aside from a few very general tidbits which — unsurprisingly — seem to indicate we think favorably of the concept and would like to explore it further). That despite the fact that we’ve tossed this question around many times in the past and do have a few ideas as to what the app could do to make integration easier. Adding Web 2.0 insult to social software injury, my bookmark stream on Delicious came back empty as well, though I’m almost certain I’ve enjoyed reading about this topic elsewhere before.

I guess I’ll have to go back and try to dig up some of the sources I vaguely remember, but before I do that here is a list of ten things I’d probably look into first if I were in charge of online/offline integration for a standard public participation effort today. As an obvious disclaimer, any of these may have already been tried by someone during some project (please leave a comment if you are that person).

With that out of the way, here we go:

1. Start from the beginning: Make online/offline integration a core piece of your overall participation strategy (as with many things, success is probably much harder to achieve if the idea enters the project as an afterthought).
2. Use online to promote offline and vice versa: Think online event calendar or event notifications on your website or websites, and promotion of your various web properties at your face-to-face events, incl. hand-out materials.
3. Allow for each of the two channels to feed into each other: Post summaries/minutes of your face-to-face events online, make some time at the beginning or during an event or meeting to hear report-backs from online participants on how their part of the consultation is coming along. Live broadcasting (audio, video) of face-to-face events can be extremely valuable as well as a backchannel to allow for some level of remote participation.
4. Make your online content available offline: Many online consultations maintain a library for important documents and resources, some projects even allow the participants to add to this repository or express whether or not they find a particular resource helpful. In addition, participants are generally given the opportunity to create a lot of raw content (posts, comments, ideas etc.), and sometimes these are summarized and synthesized by a moderator or facilitator. To the extent it is reasonable, consider taking some of these materials to your face-to-face events. That obscure third-party impact study about the planned development in your neighborhood from two years ago that one online participant shared and that many others found highly valuable? Maybe a good candidate to share with your offline audience as well.
5. Identify the “bumble bees”: Ask participants to indicate if they plan to attend both online and in person and give them an opportunity to become ambassadors between the two channels. Their task can be quite simple: occasionally report back, generally help communicate between online and offline participants, help identify disconnects or gaps etc.
   (Note: for those unfamiliar with Open Space Technology, a Bumble Bee “moves from one group to another, cross-pollinating.”)
6. Get the media to attend both online and offline activities: As part of your regular media outreach, make sure the press is aware of your online activities and give them observer status. Furthermore, make sure they are comfortable using your online properties (e.g. discussion forum, idea generation tool etc.). Facilitate direct contact with online participants where appropriate (e.g. for interviews).
7. Bridge the digital divide: Ok, this is a tough one as digital divide issues can be hard to overcome. Don’t try to boil the ocean! Small things can have a positive impact and may be worth the extra effort. There are a number of things you can do to bring your online offerings closer to those people who don’t have access. Think partnering with public libraries or schools for computer access, installing kiosk systems at your face-to-face events etc.
   One particular idea we’re pursuing with Zilino is the ability for the facilitator to invite participants into the role of citizen reporter (if you will) and have them gather evidence (stories, ideas, concerns etc.) from people who lack online access or aren’t likely to participate at all (either online or offline).
8. Synchronize online and offline activities: Events done right — whether online or offline — can have huge drawing power. Orchestrate your overall activities in ways that link online and offline participation more tightly (e.g. an online discussion phase leading up to a face-to-face event, a face-to-face meeting designed as the kick-off for further dialogue online). In some instances, you might even consider running online and offline activities in parallel and allow for some level of exchange of content and ideas in real-time.
9. Encourage participants’ use of social media: Similar to item #3 above, social media can be a great way to enable participants help each other make sense of the process and share their findings. Luckily, there is a ton of material out there that explains how to do this kind of community building so I won’t go into detail here.
10. Encourage higher-bandwidth modes of communication: This all depends on the geographic realities one is dealing with, of course. Provided a large-enough group of online participants live in close proximity to each other, you could use your website to coordinate small groups to meet face-to-face (alternatively, a phone conference might do the trick). Just because someone can’t attend a public meeting at 5pm on a Thursday doesn’t mean they can’t meet their neighbors for coffee after church on Sunday. The web can be great at this kind of matchmaking and scheduling. You could take advantage of these ad-hoc gatherings by keeping a list of small group tasks handy or topics your participants ought to address. Or, leave it more open: simply provide them with a minimum amount of guidance (e.g. how to have a productive conversation) and let them focus purely on relationship building, something that may pay off immensely once they go back to engaging each other online.

Still reading? Here’s a bonus idea:

11. Ask your participants: Seriously, they are way smarter than you (often enough, at least). Let them help you figure out how to bridge online and offline in ways that work best for them.

And that’s it, ten pretty basic starting points to get going! Hopefully, this is enough of a collection to get the conversation started. Please leave a comment if you have feedback to share, more ideas to add or know of any interesting resources (confirming or contradicting anything I’ve said). Thanks!

This is the third part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation (part 1 dealt with Institutional Backing, part 2 with Advocacy and Leadership). Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis on e-participation.

Establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance, such as e-participation processes (or public participation processes in general) requires changes in how public administrations view themselves and how they cooperate with the constituents they are paid to serve (also known as customers or citizens).

Because of the consequences for routines, procedures and hierarchies, bureaucratic change is very hard. Involving the public means an increase in openness, which will shift power from the institution to any group of stakeholders in a transformative process, at the end of which there might be new modes of two-way governance, something entirely incompatible with elitist bureaucratic cultures of contemporary organizations. Making governance more participatory will not work without the willingness and capacity to include and process feedback constructively and openly. Especially because bureaucracies often view public participation in terms of increased workload, it is therefore important to establish efficient management processes around e-participation projects which will expedite and automate workflow, just as it is important to preemptively talk about wrong perceptions within the bureaucracy. E-participation will remain a facade unless institutions open themselves up. That means the release of relevant information to the public and the provision of easily understandable documents relevant to the projects. Institutions need to establish an atmosphere of collaboration, solving problems in conjunction with the public and establishing mechanisms for stakeholders to dock into public value creation processes.

Proper expectation management on the convener’s side can facilitate bureaucratic change by setting realistic goals, communicating them to all involved parties and planning carefully. Knowing exactly what policy makers are expecting from a process helps tailoring it toward meeting these expectations. This sort of clarity may prevent blame games and help avoid failure when it comes to implementation and expectation management toward the public. Because it is at that moment where success is threatened by a lack of political will or institutional contingency plans. Token participation and misuses for ex-post legitimization, or the illusion of public involvement are the worst case scenarios.

What we need to keep reminding ourselves of is that e-participation is not just another policy tool that can be used with the stroke of a pen. Participation changes governance, it makes it collaborative, and that sort of change causes friction. Underlying change of the bureaucracies and their self-understanding is therefore paramount. My question is how that can be achieved? Are these merely legal questions? Leadership issues? Do we need “new” new public management?

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) just put out a request for proposals to update their certificate program course materials and train-the-trainer program development.

The first of the two RFPs (Updating Course Materials, PDF) notes that the current training materials “are lacking in the area of social media techniques.”

Which brings up a few interesting questions:

• What should a comprehensive training course in public participation such as IAP2’s cover with regard to e-participation (including, but not limited to social media)?
• What could the curriculum look like?
• To what degree might this include elements of learning-by-doing using a variety of tools?
• And more importantly, what are the underlying patterns and success factors for quality ICT-based engagement, the building blocks, the guiding principles?

Would love to toss around a few ideas before I take the certification training myself week after next.

I was just playing around with Freenode IRC (trying to set up a permanent #edem channel), when I came across their channel guidelines. We’re still drafting our community ground rules for Zilino, and I found these very applicable:

Channel Guidelines

IRC is a low-bandwidth method of communication, in comparison with physical presence. Many of the cues of physical communication, tone of voice, facial expression, hand movements, etc., are missing in IRC, since only text is transmitted back and forth.

Speakers in physical proximity with each other communicate quite a bit of emotional context via this extra bandwidth. This context enables them to avoid misjudging the intent of their conversational partners. It also functions as an unconscious negative feedback mechanism to reduce the incidence of emotional “firestorms” which tend to disrupt the efficient flow of conversation. Human beings look for this feedback and indeed they may be designed to require it. In the low-bandwidth world of IRC, they must get emotional feedback via the text they receive.

This process is subject to exaggeration. Small amounts of emotion become magnified in the perception of the observer. So, it is very important to keep channels calm. An informal conceptual measurement of the emotional content of a channel is its “channel temperature.”

Think of a person’s emotional state as kinetic energy. Enthusiasm, happiness, anger, frustration, all add to the energy level. The more emotion is experienced, the “hotter” the participant. The average emotional state of a channel is its temperature. Emotions in IRC become exaggerated and conveying them directly increases channel temperature. Pent-up frustration, in particular, is often released as a series of inappropriate, “high energy” outbursts. An important objective of the freenode channel guidelines is to avoid “feedback loops” in channel interactions by reducing channel temperature.

The guidelines which follow are designed with the benefit of years of experience with IRC, beginning during the 1993-1994 period when the design limitations of IRC began to become clear due to the increasing scale of IRC networks. Adopting the guidelines will help improve the quality of your channel.

We intentionally avoid drawing a distinction between channel operators and users. Everyone is a user, regardless of their privilege level, and each user has the ability to influence the usability of the channel.

The site then goes on to list a few concrete recommendations. Here’s a selection:

• Polish your catalyst skills. The catalyst role is key to keeping channel interactions friendly and efficient.
• Look for the best in people. If you assume people have no self-control, they’ll confirm your belief. If you look for personal responsibility, and ask for personal responsibility, most people will respond well.
• Set a good example. Be what you want other people to be. If you want them to be calm, be calm. If you want them to be courteous and friendly, be courteous and friendy. The habitual behavior of people on a channel is the most powerful influence on newbies arriving on the channel.
• [...]
• Take critiques to private message. Criticizing someone’s behavior on channel holds them up to public scrutiny in a negative way. It’s usually overkill. In your messages, don’t address the subject of whether you have channel operator privileges; just be courteous. Request nicely that they change their behavior. In many cases you’ll discover that problem user you are dealing with is merely inexperienced. An aggressive tone makes for a longer and more involved discussion, and pent-up frustration which will raise the channel temperature sooner or later. You can always use channel operator privileges, or have someone else use them, as needed; but with a courteous tone, you’ll need to do that a lot less.

So, maybe not a complete blueprint but definitely good building blocks, for sure!

The concept of channel temperature or mood in online discussions is worth investigating further. Having a mechanism in place that indicates in real time when a conversation is in trouble could help improve the overall efficiency of allocating scarce facilitator resources.

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.

As promised, I’ve been tracking the numbers from the ongoing Open Government discussions on a daily basis (follow the thread on GovLoop for details). We’re now almost three weeks into this initiative. Here’s a chart that shows how the numbers have developed since February 9 (a few days after launch):

Ideas: 993
Comments: 2,314
Votes: 13,747
Users: 3,898

Growth is pretty linear, nothing too surprising happening (yet).  At the very least, it seems that some agencies are slowly making progress with their outreach efforts.

The total numbers include active and inactive agencies alike. For comparison, here’s the same chart for NASA, the agency with the most overall activity (by our measurements):

Ideas: 122
Comments: 428
Votes: 2,453
Users: 340

It’s a bit hard to see but the last two days have seen a significant increase in registered users and votes.

There are more than three weeks left. Plenty of time to double or triple these figures.

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.

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

Here’s my initial post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A set of screenshots will be available on Flickr.

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

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.

Following up on my recent post about Quora’s approach to anonymous postings, here’s an example of a related feature.

Peak Democracy is a “non-partisan company whose mission is to broaden civic engagement and build public trust in government.” Their Open City Hall™ service is a monitored online public comment process that promises “order and decorum of a government meeting” (see entry on ParticipateDB).

The City of Palo Alto uses the service to host discussions on various topics. Some comments are posted as “semi-anonymous”. Clicking the link opens a pop-up window with more information:

The pop-up reads:

Q: What are ’semi-anonymous’ statements and why do you allow them?

A: Statements whose authors are identified privately to Peak Democracy, but not publicly on the website are called ’semi-anonymous’. Per our privacy agreement, Peak Democracy does not identify the author of a semi-anonymous statement to anyone – not even to the government agency hosting the forum – unless we are required by law to do so.

We allow semi-anonymous statements because there are people with great ideas who will only share them anonymously. Some people cannot sign their statements because doing so will interfere with their job, business or other personal relationships.

At the same time, we have developed technology and procedures which safeguard against systematic abuse of this privacy feature.

As I mentioned before, allowing participants to “choose if and to what extent they want to share their real identity with the other participants or the general public” is a valuable feature for the exact reason given above.

Caroline Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and Francesca Polletta, Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at UC, Irvine, have just released the results of a survey they did in September/October 2009 and which garnered responses from more than 400 practitioners: The 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey: What is the State of the Field?

From the about page:

We conducted the survey as part of two separate research agendas, both of which focus on multi-method analysis of issues in the dialogue and deliberation field. Caroline Lee has completed four years of fieldwork at dialogue and deliberation conferences, trainings, and courses– and is interested in testing the extent to which the perspectives and themes she is surfacing inductively are shared across a broad group of practitioners. Francesca Polletta is interested in building on earlier findings on gender in a study of online deliberation. We plan on comparing our survey results to the insights emerging from other qualitative and quantitative methods. This triangulation of methodological strategies seeks to strengthen the validity of research findings by accounting for the limitations inherent in every research method.

A few tidbits I found interesting:

• According to “Q21: Methods Used Most Often in Current Practice”, 25% or respondents are reporting frequent use of “onine/digital media”. That’s pretty cool!
• According to “Q23: Term that best describes the people and organizations currently leading D&D efforts”, 57% of respondents prefer “Community of Practice”
• According to “Q23: Most important challenge facing the D&D community, based on challenges defined by NCDD conference attendees”, 20% of respondents mention “Demonstrating to powerholders that D&D works”

The full results are available on the website and are available for download (PDF).

As I suggested a few weeks ago, there might be a lot to gain if e-participation systems offered “more flexible ways of dealing with identity” than the one-size-fits-all approach that’s currently predominant:

2. User checks option “add question anonymously”

3. Anonymous question appears (user identity not shown)

4. User chooses to reveal identity

Technically, this applies to the comment section, not the original question. But you can see how the same would apply if the user were to reveal the authorship of her original question.

5. Posting appears with user identified

Again, in the case of Quora this applies to the comment section, not the original question.

It’s obvious how this could be useful. In brainstorming, it is crucial to suspend judgment during the ideation process. Allowing participants to post anonymously would invite participation from those who are otherwise too afraid to post half-baked ideas. Requiring all participants to post anonymously might serve as a nice equalizer in cases where a lot of strong voices are dominating the discussions.

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!

Earlier yesterday via Twitter, I came across this paper from the December 2006 issue of the Electronic Journal of e-Government (a bit less recent, yet still valid today): On the Road from Consultation Cynicism to Energising e-Consultation (PDF, 144KB) by authors Simon Stephens, Paul McCusker, David O’Donnell, David R. Newman and G. Honor Fagan.

Abstract: A major concern in recent political discourse is that government has become both isolated from and unresponsive to its citizens. Democracy, by definition, demands a two-way flow of communication between government and civil society. ICTs have the potential to facilitate such improved flows of communication — hence, e-democracy and e-consultation. This paper initially draws on focus group discussions on the theme of e-consultation conducted amongst activist citizens on the island of Ireland. High levels of frustration, scepticism and cynicism were expressed on the form, nature and process of extant consultation processes. In follow-up demonstrations, however, the preliminary findings are much more positive suggesting that the potential exists for using e-consultation technologies to enhance democratic processes.

The following set of recommendations caught my eye as they still very much seem to apply today, three years later (page 90):

The following recommendations on future e-consultations were generated from a preliminary analysis of the eight focus group discussions/transcripts:

1. Maximising inclusion must be central to future e-consultation.
2. Provide pre-consultation ICT training.
3. Create and widely circulate detailed time plans.
4. Provide a suitable contact person to deal with queries or difficulties.
5. Be flexible with methods and techniques.
6. Tailor time and settings to participants’ needs.
7. Provide structured and thoughtful feedback mechanisms.
8. Allow freedom of access to all information collected.
9. Provide low cost ICT.
10. Offer technical support.

The paper closes as follows:

6. Conclusions and Recommendations

What can we learn on the future potential of e-consultation from the two sets of findings presented here? The communicative rationality of local lifeworlds (EU Commission 2003; Habermas 1996; Macintosh, 2004; McCusker et al., 2005; Morison and Newman, 2001; O’Donnell and Henriksen, 2002) may, theoretically, be communicated by citizens via e-consultation processes and technologies—with the purpose of influencing decision-making processes and public policy that directly affects them. The rationale for a radical overhaul is the democratic ideal of ‘partnership and participation’. No single actor (public, private or voluntary) has the information or resources to tackle all problems either efficiently or effectively. To enhance democracy, however, it is imperative that effective consultation takes place enabling a worthwhile transfer of ideas and concerns from the bottom-up. Although not the solution to all the current difficulties, ICT does offer the ability to dramatically improve the process in terms of access and information flow. The findings presented here range from the initial scepticism and cynicism emanating from the face-to-face focus group discussions to the much more optimistic experiential experiences of participants once they interacted with a range of e-consultation technologies in a hands-on manner. One aspect of this transition is the need to incorporate technical advances into political life in such a way as to provide citizens with a more central role in both policy-making and decision-making processes. eGovernment is defined by the Commission of the European Communities (2003) as “the use of (ICT) in public administration combined with organisational change and new skills in order to improve public services and democratic processes while strengthening support for policies”. It follows that organisational change and upskilling must be addressed by both central and local government agencies if the aspirations of present programmes are to be achieved—otherwise they will remain precisely that—mere aspirations. The preliminary findings from the demonstrations suggest that the former aspects of this are possible – whatever about their future influence on policy.

Changing the methodology of consultation may also make available to local authorities and local councillors a framework and opportunity within which to fulfil their roles as policy makers. The development of opportunities for partnership with local interest groups may assist in the formation of a bottom up approach. A variation in techniques may provide better communication, co-operation and consensus between all parties involved. Maximising the potential of ICT may enhance democracy by pooling resources, and by spreading workloads and areas of responsibility. Focusing on partnership may remove the time delays associated with individuals working in isolation. It may also assist by more clearly defining the various roles between central and local government and citizens and other interest groups or stakeholders. The use of the qualifier ‘may’ in all of our concluding sentences here is intentional and signals that there is much yet to discover and do before present aspirations on e-consultation become future working realities. That said, moving from the rather negative findings on extant consulation processes there is much that is positive in the feedback from participants on the hands-on demonstration of e-consultation technologies. The next phase of this research agenda is now happening – some of these e-consulation technologies are now in use in real consultation processes on the island of Ireland.

These follow-up projects certainly deserve a follow-up.

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

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

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

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

Translatey is a lightweight Multilingual Translator Based on Google Translate.

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

Following their recent informal survey, Lucas Cioffi just shared a comprehensive list of arguments why requiring citizens to register on government websites with their real names may not always be such a good idea: Protect Anonymous Comments Online

Here’s the comment I just left:

Nice list of arguments.

I wonder what opportunities there are to design systems that offer more flexible ways of dealing with identity. For many of the participation scenarios I’m aware of, neither a strict real name requirement nor a complete laissez-faire approach seem to provide the right structure.

As an alternative, an online participation system might well require participants to sign up with their real name or even verify their identity (as part of their account information). Yet participants could choose if and to what extent they want to share their real identity with the other participants or the general public (via their profile and privacy settings). In case the system was hosted by a neutral third party provider, participants might even be able to shield their private information from the convener organization.

This approach would also allow us to differentiate between various activities participants are asked to engage in. Some processes would require real names, other might work better if participants stayed anonymous.

Finally, participants could be empowered to choose as a group which level of anonymity (or revealed identity) they prefer. For example, a group of participants engaging in small-group dialogue could choose to reveal their real names only if and when all of them have expressed that they are comfortable with it.

I think it’s worth exploring these dynamics.

Please leave a comment if you’ve come across any online tools that deal creatively with this tension between anonymous and identified participation.

Steven Clift points to this public notice by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Comment Sought On Moving Toward A Digital Democracy (PDF, 172 KB)

From the introduction (emphasis mine):

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), Congress directed the Commission, in its development of a National Broadband Plan, to include “a plan for the use of broadband infrastructure and services in advancing …civic participation.” While civic participation takes many forms, two processes provide the most direct and regular interaction opportunities between government and citizens: 1.  the election process, and 2.  public hearings and town hall meetings.  The election process and voting are essential to maintaining a functioning democracy and are also the civic processes in which the most Americans participate.  Public hearings and town hall meetings allow citizens to provide government representatives direct input on specific concerns and provide government representatives a direct means to gauge citizen sentiment.  Accordingly, we seek tailored comment on how broadband can help to bring democratic processes—including elections, public hearings and town hall meetings—into the digital age, thereby encouraging and facilitating citizen opportunities  to engage and participate in their democracy.

Item #4 is particularly interesting:

4. Online Government Hearings and Online Town Hall Meetings. The proliferation of Internet-based tools and high speed technologies that enable high quality video, have enabled new venues for civic participation.  Where Congressional committee hearings and city council meetings across America were limited by the size of a room and the citizen’s resources to travel to the meeting location, broadband-enabled technologies now hold the potential to eliminate these barriers for millions of Americans. We seek to better understand the power of these tools and technologies to increase civic engagement and empower citizens to engage their government.
   1. What are the technological models across cities, states, the nation and the globe for citizen participation in government meetings and online town halls?
   2. What are the barriers to the integration of these technologies?
   3. Do online town halls or online public hearings have a noticeable impact upon the quantity or quality of civic participation?
   4. Do online town halls or online public hearings bring new citizens into the process of government?
   5. Would Internet-based technologies make it easier for those who have to travel long distances (such as people in rural and Tribal areas) or people who have difficulty traveling (such as some elderly or disabled Americans) to engage in the process of self-government?
   6. What is the history and current state of play of the relevant technologies with respect to online town halls or online public hearings?

In addition to filing paper copies, comments may be submitted using the Commission’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) or the Federal Government’s eRulemaking Portal and must be in by December 10 (if I read the instructions correctly).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may well be one of the leading government agencies in the world when it comes to public participation. Their public engagement site offers a plethora of useful information including tools, definitions, case studies and much more. Their Public Involvement Network News electronic newsletter is another great resource.

A feature article in the Fall 2009 edition (PDF, 1.3 MB) provides a nice summary of a recent online dialogue with a group of ”twenty individuals with experience hosting, developing, facilitating, and/or researching web-based public engagement” that aimed to discover “what works, unanswered questions, and promising new strategies” with regard to web-based engagement: Web-Based Dialogue: What is The Next Frontier?

From the article:

What Are Best Practices for Online Dialogues?

There is enough experience with online dialogues that a body of “best practices” is beginning to emerge. This section describes key lessons identified by practitioners—starting with up-front planning, moving into dialogue facilitation, and finally describing how dialogue content affects policy.

It then goes on to list the following eight best practices in considerable detail:

• Establish a clear purpose––and design the dialogue to accomplish it
• Actively market the dialogue and recruit people to participate
• Develop a compelling and constructive agenda
• Use effective facilitation techniques to help people participate and keep the dialogue focused
• Make it easy for people to get started and stay focused on the topic
• Ensure worthy content with lasting value
• Ensure an active and constructive role for dialogue “hosts”
• Make sure participants are being heard—and that they know it

Note that these recommendations are, for the most part, completely independent of any underlying technology — something that’s at the core of our proposed session at SXSW next year.

Towards the end, the article lists a number of remaining challenges. If you’re working in e-participation today, this is pretty much the work that’s cut out for you, which is why I’m quoting this section in its entirety:

What Are Key Remaining Challenges and Questions About Online Dialogues?

Although much has been learned about how to make online dialogues effective, there are still remaining challenges to be addressed through refinements to dialogue design, facilitation, and other techniques. Key challenges include:

• Different levels of engagement—while some people are reluctant to post, some are “chomping at the bit” to get discussions going and can deluge other participants with overwhelming numbers of messages.
• Promoting effective interactions when dealing with participant populations having significantly different levels of expertise, experience, and expectation. When dialogues are open and inclusive, diversity can result in a much more interesting dialogue that produces a rich and varied knowledge product. However, in other instances, a great disparity in threshold knowledge, experience, and expectation can result in a dialogue that is less effective and also more frustrating to participants. Those with a greater threshold knowledge who hope to focus on tangible outcomes may become frustrated with those having a more casual interest (and the casual participants may feel intimated by those with more knowledge and experience).
• Involving people with limited Internet access or other cultural, social, or psychological constraints on participating. (In one dialogue the hosts heard that someone had no access to a computer, and they arranged to receive his faxes, post them, and get the related responses to him for several days.)
• Sorting and organizing the wealth of contributions in an efficient way so that participants and sponsors can find and participate in the parts of the dialogue that are most relevant to them. In some cases, the “noise” of irrelevant postings can eclipse the “signal” of on-topic content.
• Balancing the need to keep conversations focused while also not limiting insightful conversations or unique ideas that are “outside of the box.”
• Helping participants stay current with the evolving dialogue conversations that can run over hundreds of messages posted each day.
• Overcoming some well-intentioned, but limiting government rules, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act’s limits on asking questions of participants or asking them to take surveys as part of the dialogue process.

The web dialogue was hosted by WestEd and the archive can still be viewed online.

I finally got my invite to Google Wave a few days ago. It’s definitely one of the more interesting things I’ve seen in a while.

Over the past few months, I’ve talked to a number of people who had expressed interest in trying out Google Wave for the purpose of e-participation.

To provide a space where some of us can explore potential use cases, I started the following wave this morning: Google Wave for online dialogue and deliberation and other forms of e-participation

Just contact me with your Google Wave account information and I will add you.