Yesterday, Gov2u pointed to a 2010 white paper by London, UK-based The Democratic Society, a “non-partisan membership organisation for democracy, participation and new ways of doing government”: Democracy Pays — How democratic engagement can cut the cost of government (PDF)

While I bookmarked the document then (not least because it references ParticipateDB), I didn’t blog about it for some reason. Since I’m in the process of compiling a list of resources that document the return on investment (ROI) of public participation, it’s a good time for some belated coverage.

Abstract:

Local authorities faced with difficult budget rounds should create deeper and more meaningful democratic conversations at local level. Evidence from the UK and elsewhere shows that strong democratic voices in decision making could reduce costs, increase public readiness for service redesign, and make government spending more efficient. The increasing availability of online solutions reduces the cost of engagement, while increasing reach.

The paper mentions a broad array of direct and indirect impact areas where fiscal benefits of a stronger local democracy have been explored and documented in the past:

• Better policy choices due to more complete, more usable information and understanding of public preferences (leading to improved targeting of both spending and cuts and the ability to provide better services at lower cost)
• Increased public buy-in/acceptance
• Cost savings from openness and good governance, e.g. better democratic oversight of government programs and expenditures
• Gains in reputation/popularity (by government leadership vis-à-vis participants and the public)
• Increased social capital and community cohesiveness
• Increased levels of trust (both between government and the public as well as between different groups of citizens)
• Increased tax morale
• Increased economic activity
• Greater civic productivity (explained as “the extent to which networks of citizens support themselves without public service involvement”), which may help make government services more efficient and reduce overall demand for them.

In addition, there may be cost benefits from streamlining existing consultation efforts. Obviously, this applies more in places like the UK where public participation at the local is already well-established and occurs regularly in various forms.

This just in via the IAP2 Canada newsletter:

IAP2 North America Conference 2012 – Call for Proposals

Welcome to the 2012 North American IAP2 Conference! We are extremely excited to be working with our partner organization IAP2 USA to bring you this event and hope you can join us September 30 – October 2, 2012 in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

You’re Invited
This call for proposals is for interested individuals, groups or organizations to present and share their insights and expertise in the P2 field. Our team was inspired by the idea of P2 equally involving the head, heart and hands and through our conference themes hope to explore how each of these play an integral role in expansion and growth of public participation. We aim to involve researchers, stakeholders, academics, community members, decision-makers, practitioners and others to build together a diverse audience thereby truly getting a 360 perspective.

The conference sub-themes are “Stimulate, Motivate, Participate”.

Proposals are due March 23, 2012. You can download the full call for proposals on their website: IAP2 North America Conference 2012 – The Power of Participation: A 360 Perspective (PDF)

For comments, please head over to their blog.

I recently joined IAP2 Canada as a member and hope very much that Intellitics can make it out to Halifax this Fall.

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

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

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

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

Table 1: Considerations for the Design of Online Deliberation Systems

Below the list of considerations:

Design to Attract Contributions

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

Design for Navigability

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

Design for Usability

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

Design for Quality Content

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

Design for Adoption

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

The authors conclude (page 112):

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

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

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

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

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

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

These were our three most popular posts in January:

• Response to White House Request for Input: What Are the Most Effective Web Tools for Public Participation?
• 2012 Event and Conference Radar
• What Is Public Participation?

Thanks for following along, everyone!

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 case you’ve been following We the People (see our coverage), this upcoming conference call might be for you.

From the IAP2 USA blog: We the People Follow-Up: February 1, 2012

Last October, we asked you to help us improve We the People, the new White House e-petition site. Collaborating with our partners, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), AmericaSpeaks and the Open Forum Foundation, we have since collected comments over on our idea site: http://wethepeople.uservoice.com

We are currently preparing a draft summary of all the input we have received and would like to invite you to join us for a conference call to discuss what we’ve heard:

Wednesday, February 1, 2012
2pm Eastern Time (11am Pacific Time)

To RSVP, simply email us at info@iap2usa.org. We will share the dial-in information in time for next week’s call.

If you have additional comments or feedback, make sure to add them. Thanks!

It’s that time of year, and SXSW Interactive (that week-long mass pilgrimage of web, film, music and — for the first time this year with a conference track of their own — education innovators to beautiful Austin, TX) is almost around the corner.

Since there’s a good chance I’ll make the trip out there yet once again, I thought I’d take a quick look at the schedule. Here are some of this year’s sessions in the areas of politics, open government, crowdsourcing and the like that look particularly promising:

Friday, March 9, 2012

• Rethinking Civilization for the Social Age

Saturday, March 10, 2012

• Crowdsourcing a Revolution: Can We Fix Healthcare?

Sunday, March 11, 2012

• How Is Internet Helping People Make Their Own Laws
• We the People: Creating a Consumer’s Bill of Rights
• Fixing Broke(n) Governments Through Serious Games
• Public Lab: Mapping, DIY Activism & Civic Science
• But Hasn’t Politics Always Been Social?
• What Civil Society Can Learn from Social Web
• A New Culture of Learning: Gaming, Tech, Design

Monday, March 12, 2012

• Sunspots: The Promise and Pitfalls of Gov 2.0
• Utah.gov: Breaking the Mold for eGovernment
• Future of Cities: Technology in Public Service
• Play Time?: Kids and Game-Based Learning
• The Next Frontier of Public Services
• Artists in Labs: Participatory Design at Eyebeam
• Democracy 2.0 in the German Parliament
• How Social Media Imperils Political Parties
• Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

• Do People Really Want Participatory Government?
• 2012: Social Media’s New Role in Politics

Obviously, there’s lots more to look forward to (and I’m not just talking about the sessions). Hope to see everyone there!

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.

Tom Atlee will be presenting at this week’s NCDD Confab Call. From his blog:

I’ll be doing an online dialogue in the 2-hour National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Confab Call on Tuesday, January 17th at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Ben Roberts, a principal in both weDialogue and Occupy Café, will be facilitating the call on the Maestro conference call platform (which enables questions, voting, breakout groups, etc.).

Tom will cover various themes from his new book “Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics” (to be published in August 2012), including this question related to e-participation:

• What is gained and lost in the choice between online and face-to-face citizen engagements? Do conference calls and video conferencing have a potential role to play in formal citizen deliberations? Is it actually possible to have quality online deliberation among ordinary citizens – especially if they are randomly selected? What do we need to know and do in order to achieve high quality online deliberation?

Great question, and I look forward to the conversation. Our short answer is that a combination of good process, skilled facilitation and the appropriate technology can make high-quality online deliberation possible, whether stand-alone or in combination with face-to-face.

Head over to Maestro to RSVP for this event.

Like last year, we’re taking a quick moment to look back at the topics that stood out over the past twelve months. Here are our top 10 most popular posts of 2011:

• February 14: Calgary Budget Consultation: 13 Design Principles
• February 21: CRS Report on Open Government Initiative
• March 7: How To Create Policy on a Wiki
• March 12: SXSW Future 15: Designing Successful Online Consultations
• March 28: New Guide from NAPA: Tools for Online Idea Generation
• April 21: Micro-Participation In Online Consultations
• May 7: What Is Civic Engagement?
• October 13: Tree Bressen: The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes in Consensus Process
• October 19: Occupy Research Wiki
• November 28: 2012 Event and Conference Radar

Thanks for all the smart, timely comments we’ve received here and elsewhere. Always much appreciated!

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.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) have put out a joint response to the recent White House call for input.

It’s very solid, so please make sure to read it in full: Strengthening the Public Participation Elements of the Open Government Plan (PDF). Especially noteworthy is a list of resources that show in detail the benefits of “planned, structured participation”, namely:

• Raising the level of civility and trust in public discourse
• Reducing government costs through closer public oversight and better understanding of citizen needs and attitudes
• Creating more realistic budgets, either by raising “tax morale,” building support for spending cuts, or both
• Generating new policy ideas and tapping the problem-solving capacity of citizens
• Breaking through legislative gridlock on high-profile policy questions

You are invited to sign the document in support. From the blog post:

Though we didn’t have the time to put a draft out to the whole field before the deadline as we would have preferred, we welcome you to add your feedback here via the comments field. And if you or your organization support what we submitted in the joint statement, please add a comment signing on with your support! We’d love to show the White House that groups in our field are indeed “seconding” the statement.

Sign here.

In light of the recent call for input regarding public participation best practices, it’s always interesting to compare how that question is being answered abroad.

Here’s a 2010 document by Planning Aid England, which is part of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the UK’s “leading planning body for spatial, sustainable, integrative and inclusive planning”: Good Practice Guide to Public Engagement in Development Schemes (PDF)

For developers, communities and decision makers, one of the biggest challenges in taking forward a development scheme is to ensure that public engagement is undertaken in a way which is meaningful, inclusive and brings benefits for all involved.

This guide is intended to provide practical advice for all those involved in public engagement in development schemes which require planning consent. It is illustrated by real examples of good practice and provides information and assistance to those planning, engaging in, or assessing community consultation.

The guide lists the following eight principles:

• Research and analysis – explore the context, history, different communities and groups in the area who may affected. Identify what will motivate people, what else is happening in the area, establish if it is connected and if so consider the potential to share events. Establish the goals – what are the benefits of engaging with communities and how will these be realised?
• Learn from the process – identify what people think of the way the consultation has worked. What could be done better, what else needs to be done, was it a balanced and inclusive process. Identify the lessons learned and take these forward into other projects.
• Continuing to engage – Has feedback been given and how will the relationships developed be continued into the construction and operational phases of a development project?
• Monitor and evaluate – monitor engagement and use the results to identify gaps and inform actions to widen the process and ensure a balanced community response is achieved. Consider the comments received and how they can be taken into account in the design – is further engagement required?
• Relationship building, knowledge and skills – develop links with key groups and individuals who can assist and advise on what matters in the area. Consider how existing community groups, networks and representatives might be involved, what barriers might exist and what help might be needed to build the capacity to engage.
• Communications – ensure that the information provided is clear, accessible and sufficient to tell people what they want to know, and to allow them to decide whether to engage. Be clear about what is fixed and why, and what is ‘up for debate’. Check that mechanisms are in place to allow information to flow in all directions and that response dates are clear.
• Timing – be realistic, allow sufficient time to achieve the goals set at the start. Provide a clear timetable for the project identifying consultation opportunities. Ensure engagement takes place when things can be changed and when it is cost effective to do so. Allow sufficient time for considered and informed response. How and when will feedback be provided?
• Inclusive – ensure under represented individuals and groups are included and that they have an equal opportunity to be heard. Be clear when making changes that these do not respond to a vociferous minority but are a response to a wider community view.

The “Delivering Good Practice” FAQ at the end seems quite useful, too, to help market public participation to planners, developers and the public.

The guide has been endorsed by IAP2 UK/Ireland.

Hat tip: IAP2 via Twitter.

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!

For the past three years (ever since attending “The Underlying Dynamics of Conversations that Matter”, a most excellent pre-conference workshop with Tom Atlee and Peggy Holman at NCDD 2008 in Austin, TX), I’ve been following the Group Pattern Language Project, a very exciting endeavor led by Tree Bressen, Sue Woehrlin and Dave Pollard and involving dozens of contributors from a variety of backgrounds, that aims to build — you guessed it — a pattern language of group processes.

Here’s how they describe the concept:

A Pattern Language is an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of what brings aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor, through a set of interconnected expressions arising from that wisdom. Aliveness is one placeholder term for “the quality that has no name”: a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace, that while of varying form, is precise and empirically verifiable.

The term was originally coined by architect Christopher Alexander, who, together with five colleagues, published A Pattern Language for building in 1977. Others have since applied the term to economics, software design, liberatory communication, wikis and more.

The intention behind this ambitious project is to share knowledge that goes to the “deeper core of what brings a group conversation alive”. Their goals include:

1. To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function. The most important part of any meeting planning is to get clear on why you are having the meeting. That choice drives all subsequent choices for that event.
2. To deepen the skills of those who serve as group process guides, leaders, hosts, and facilitators. To assist with their learning in how to do design. To help them choose among many possible processes to create something that will be the best possible fit for their situation at a given time. [...]
3. To serve as a resource for those who are teaching others to design, lead, facilitate group process.
4. To increase process literacy among people who are users of process(es)–which is all of us. Our world needs us to wake up and get more savvy about this.

Throughout the three-year period, progress was documented on a public wiki, as new patterns were identified and went from seed stage to full maturity.

Yesterday, the group launched the Group Works Card Deck, a collection of 91 cards to help facilitators and participants make their group process work more effective:

The Group Works card deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The people who developed this deck spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we had ever witnessed. We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.

More from the about page:

About the Group Pattern Language Project and the Card Deck

Why are we doing this? Our world is, to a very real extent, based on dialogue. Every action taken that involves more than one person arises from conversation that generates, coordinates, and reflects those actions. Those actions have impact. If our human world is based on conversations, then the work of creating and supporting those conversations is central to shaping a world that works. Designing and conducting meetings and other group sessions well is vital to determining our common future. This project grew around a shared understanding that in an urgent way, our survival depends on our ability to work and play well together, and on discovering and creating group processes which are at the same time effective and life-affirming. Because this is easier said than done, we wanted to deepen and spread the insights, skills, and capacity to make that promise real.

The following core beliefs guide our work:

• Seeing a world in flux and deep need, we believe the work of facilitators, both formal and informal, can make a significant difference to the quality and outcomes of essential conversations. Thus we accept a responsibility, as facilitators and participants in group process, to act for the common good.
• We expect convenors of group process to act with full transparency regarding the motives and expected results of the sessions we organize and run. With honesty and humility, we strive to continuously improve the calibre of our work.
• We choose to assume the best of people. We believe people flourish when entrusted with the opportunity to authentically self-manage, collaborate, and make decisions collectively, as true respected equals. Because the most critical issues facing us in the world and in our organizations are complex and interconnected, we need each other to do this—the challenges we face are beyond solving by leaders or experts in isolation. We believe in sharing power, that we are wiser when we work together.
• We believe that effective group processes are clearly driven by the purpose for which they are called. We respect participants’ life energy by invoking processes that productively use their time, resulting in cooperative sessions that meet a high standard in engagement, achievement and connection. We draw on experience and knowledge to create elegant designs with great care, yet remain flexible and open to change as the circumstances, will of participants and flow of events may dictate.
• Good process builds strong communities. Our work is an act of love in service to the world.

The  print version of the deck can be purchased for $25. A PDF is available for download free of charge.

While this marks a major milestone in the project’s history, the work is not done yet:

Because of space limitations, each card aims only to name the essential What and Why of that particular element. In order to actually use the patterns, you’ll need to come up with the How. A lot of Hows are supplied on our website, where you will find a growing pool of information about the patterns represented in this deck. Some cards have plenty of resources already on the website, while others remain to be fleshed out. Over fifty people were involved in the creation of this card deck, and we’d be delighted for you to join the circle by helping explain how to apply the patterns—see more on this below.

It will be fun to watch how this work evolves next.

And to everyone who played a role in this: Congratulations!

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”