Open Gov West

The greater Northwest and Cascadia region is buzzing with innovative technology and civic engagement organizations, and a number of governments throughout the area have already launched open government directives. Hosted by the City of Seattle and Knowledge as Power, Open Gov West is bringing these leaders together to facilitate regional collaboration and share best practices across open government initiatives. Join us March 26 & 27 at Seattle City Hall!

The two-day event follows a hybrid format: day 1 will be a traditional conference, day 2 an unconference “with a spine of pre-determined topics”.

It’ll be my first time in Seattle, and there are plans under way for an NCDD dinner (watch their listserv for updates) as well as a get-together of local IAP2 members.

If you’re involved with NCDD or IAP2, please consider attending the conference. The thing about most of these Gov 2.0/OpenGov/Transparency etc. conferences and unconferences lately is that the public participation community is usually not very well represented.  So this is a great (and inexpensive) opportunity to increase mindshare for this field.  It would be great to see a few participation veterans turn out so we can maybe do a session together.

In other exciting news, I’ll be accompanied by our newly hired student intern from Germany. We’ll properly introduce him once he arrives in the Bay Area later this week.

Should be a fun trip!

That’s the idea behind This Week in Participation (TWiP), a new program we just launched. Here’s what it’s about:

This Week in Participation (TWiP) is kind of like an internet radio show. Except it doesn’t follow a fixed schedule, isn’t always live and may include video.

We’re still in the middle of setting up all the pieces but you can check out the newly-launched blog here. The first episode went live last night: TWiP 1: Urgent Evoke

We’ll start out with a series of short, pre-recorded interviews but plan to add longer, more interactive live shows down the road (and probably video as well). The goal for now is to produce at least one episode per week.

30 June – 2 July, 2010
Leeds University Business School, UK

The widespread diffusion of the Internet and a growing trend towards democratisation worldwide have encouraged new modes, projects and visions of citizen participation in decision making and governance.

OD2010 aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners from a wide range of academic and applied backgrounds to provide a unique opportunity to better understand the notion of deliberation in a virtual environment and to discuss specific advances in online deliberation from a number of different disciplinary perspectives.

The conference is aimed at those who wish to update themselves on recent developments in online deliberation, understand how other groups are applying the tools and techniques and exchange ideas with leading international experts.

OD2010 follows the traditions of previous high-level scientific conferences. It is organized by key experts in the field and is supported by a multidisciplinary programme committee. This is the first time the conference has been held outside the USA.

The fourth OD conference focuses on, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• current research on online deliberation;
• research challenges which deliberation, and in particular online deliberation, pose for researchers, governments, communities and citizens;
• socio-technical design of online deliberative spaces;
• links between theories of deliberative democracy with experience with online deliberation;
• descriptions of tools and techniques that are already being tested or fielded;
• deliberative platforms using novel or unusual settings, technology or approaches;
• experiences and findings related to relevant technological theories (such as Web 2.0) and/or relevant social theories of deliberation and governance (such as public sphere, government 2.0 and civic intelligence); and
• case studies in applying and evaluating online deliberation in various formal and informal engagement domains.

Lots of deliberation heavyweights are involved.  The final conference program is still forthcoming at this point.

I was able to spend a few hours at Tools for Participation, the 2008 conference, and enjoyed it greatly. Definitely check out this one!

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.

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.

• May 2009: Open Government Dialogue: “Create an Open Government Project Directory and Knowledge Base”
• January 2010: Open Government Needs Public Participation Calendars

Based on this post on NextGov, it looks like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving in that direction: EPA Web site paving the way to transparency

As more agencies deploy online score cards that publicly chart the progress of specific missions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Web site for tracking rulemaking could be a model, some government transparency activists say.

EPA launched its site, the Rulemaking Gateway, on Thursday to inform the public of the status of high-priority regulatory actions, such as proposals to control greenhouse gas emissions in heavy-duty vehicles and revise vehicle fuel economy labels.

[...]

EPA has committed to releasing rulemaking plans earlier than in the past. As soon as an agency regulatory policy officer determines it is appropriate to start developing a rule, information will be posted on the gateway, officials said. A regulation could appear on the site months or even years before a file is created on the governmentwide rule-tracking site Regulations.gov.

[...]

The gateway is tightly tied to Regulations.gov to increase public participation in the rulemaking process, said Madia, a federal regulatory policy analyst at the group.

[...]

The EPA Web site will show updated proposals monthly, as decisions are made. Time-sensitive information, such as announcements about public meetings, will be refreshed daily.

You can check out EPA’s new Rulemaking Gateway here.

Things are starting to look really interesting…

See the conference program (PDF) for details.

The conference is presented by PublicDecisions, a provider of online, “live” training, professional development events and conferences on stakeholder engagement.

Should be interesting both because of the topics and speakers as well as the virtual nature of the conference format.

NCDD members qualify for a discount. Use discount code “NCDDSpecial” when you sign up.

This webpage makes use of the IdeaScale API to aggregate data for all agencies which are making use of that platform. USDA and Health and Human Services also have public feedback sites; however they are not using IdeaScale and so unfortunately, are not included here. We encourage you to visit their sites, too!

Totals reflect all ideas including those submitted to the “Site Feedback” category. The “Top Ideas Across Government” section only highlights ideas in the categories of Transparency, Participation, Collaboration, and Innovation– eg., those related to the Open Government Plans themselves.

The site was created by Robbie Schingler and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, who both work at NASA.

This is a most excellent example of how participation tools can expose some of the quantitative information about an ongoing consultation (IdeaScale itself does some of the basics, though does not offer a convenient view across all 23 projects).

It’s especially nice to see how metrics are being made actionable. The section “Needs Some Love” lists those agencies that haven’t received a lot of input yet along with the call to action: “They need some love. Please help!”

This metrics dashboard is a nice addition to my tracking thread on GovLoop where we also try to keep an eye on qualitative data.

There is of course a lot more that the perfect dashboard could include but this is definitely a refreshing step forward.

Please leave a comment below if you know of any tools that offer this kind of eye candy out of the box.

Hi,

I came across your e-consultation “Los Angeles Budget Challenge” via Twitter today:

http://labudgetchallenge.lacity.org/budgetchallenge/sim/budget_master.html

I have a couple of research questions:

1.  Is the site supported by any tools?

Does the site use any off-the-shelf tools (e.g. a service or software) to run the survey?  It looks like it’s custom-built using Adobe Flash but maybe you could confirm.

We recently launched ParticipateDB, a directory of online tools for participation.  I’ve added your project here: http://participatedb.com/projects/106

2.  Project duration and results

When did this consultation launch?  What is its scheduled end date?  And do you plan to share the results?

3.  Pre-defined outcome one question #12

WIth regard to the last item of the survey (Public Private Partnerships for Parking Structures/Meters), I noticed that it is impossible to balance the budget unless a participant chooses option 2 (”Yes. The City should pursue a P3 agreement for City parking structures only.”) or option 3 (”Yes. The City should pursue a P3 agreement for CIty parking structures and City parking meters.”).  Yet option 1 (“No. The City should not pursue any P3 initiatives.”) is still on the table.

Was this a deliberate design decision?  Or an oversight?  ;-)

Thanks,

Tim

Hi Tim,

We apologize that we didn’t get back to you more quickly.

To answer your questions:

1) The Mayor’s Office licensed the survey tool from the non-partisan non-profit organization Next 10, who in 2005 released the California Budget Challenge.  A handful of other municipalities and agencies have used the Challenge software to create budget survey type tools similar to ours.

http://www.nextten.org/

2) The Mayor’s Office launched the LA Budget Challenge on December 28th.  We will be analyzing all the results that come in by February 28th (2 month survey duration) but will most likely keep a version of the LA Budget Challenge up and running with modifications.  The results generated during the two month duration will be compiled, simplified, separated by planning region, and presented at a community meeting in early March.

3) We do understand that a respondent isn’t able to solve the entire $400 million deficit without choosing one of the P3 options that generates revenue.  The goal of the Challenge is to balance the budget, but a respondent isn’t required to solve the entire deficit in order to provide our office with feedback.

Moreover, this on-line exercise attempts to provide the public with information regarding a handful of real life budget decisions that the Mayor and City Council are faced with in the development of next year’s budget.  This tool obviously does not include all possible ways to balance the City’s budget.

That said, the Mayor does believe that a long-term concession agreement for the operation of 10 City parking structures is a viable means of generated significant one-time revenue for the City’s General Fund.  Similarly, the Mayor believes that a P3 agreement for parking meters needs to be thoroughly evaluated and may prove to be a feasible revenue generating strategy as well.

The Mayor’s Office simply wants input from the public on these P3 initiatives.  We understand that some respondents will not agree that these initiatives should be pursued and we welcome any feedback we receive.  Many respondents did not eliminate the entire deficit but have shared valuable feedback on the issues presented and on other budget related topics.

To date, we have received about 14,000 hits with about 3,600 full responses.

We appreciate your interest and questions.  Your comments will help shape the next iteration of this on-line survey tool.  We view the Challenge as a flexible input vehicle that will change and improve over time.

Please let us know if you have additional question.

Office of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa

Finance and Performance Management Unit

LABudget@lacity.org

Fair enough. In general, I think it’s great to see municipalities embrace these kinds of online feedback gathering mechanisms. And yes, there is still a lot of room for improvement both in terms of the technology used and the processes that are being applied.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

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.

Executive summary

In July 2009, more than 250 campus and community leaders came together at the University of New Hampshire to talk about the “deliberative democracy” field, the tide of civic change on campuses and in communities, and what those changes mean for the practice and teaching of democracy. No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners (NBT) was hosted by the Democracy Imperative (TDI) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), two organizations that work to promote best practices, research, and teaching for a strong democracy.

A number of factors made this conference timely: an historic election, increasing use of dialogue and deliberation in communities across the country, record-setting youth political engagement, a presidential administration that is experimenting with e-democracy to increase transparency and public participation, and a growing interest on campuses (without distinct ownership in any one academic department or administrative office) in teaching democratic principles and practices.

All of these developments seemed to highlight the need for more just, comprehensive, democratic systems and the need to educate and prepare citizens to be more effective participants in those systems. People working in these areas were asking questions about how to “embed” democratic principles and practices in the daily routine of campuses and communities.

The conference gave people a chance to make progress on these challenges as a field. The discussions seemed to coalesce around eight priorities for “embedding” democracy, and conference participants generated a number of plans, proposals, and new activities for moving forward in each area. For each of these priorities, we will give the context preceding No Better Time, summarize the conversation at the conference, and describe what has happened since.

Priority #1 – Rethinking what we call this work (see p. 7)

Priority #2 – Connecting deliberative democracy, advocacy and organizing, and social justice (p.

Priority #3 – Preparing students more comprehensively for citizenship and leadership in a democracy (p. 9)

Priority #4 – Restoring higher education’s role as an agent for democracy and social change (p. 10)

Priority #5 – Fostering international exchanges and initiatives to advance global democracy (p. 12)

Priority #6 – Routinizing and democratizing evaluation and measurement (p. 12)

Priority #7 – Understanding and incorporating online tools for democracy and participation (p. 13)

Priority #8 – Working with the Obama Administration (p. 14)

From the email the conference organizers sent out this morning:

In response to the survey, many people expressed an interest in hosting a local conference like NBT.  So we created a “Step-by-Step Guide” that describes how No Better Time was organized. All of our work product is included, like those witty FAQs and clear instructions on leading a learning exchange.  This is available on line, at http://www.unh.edu/democracy/guidebook.html.

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.

The Open Government Directive, issued on December 8, 2009 stated:

1. Publish Government Information Online

[...]

e.  Within 60 days, each agency shall create an Open Government Webpage located at http://www.[agency].gov/open to serve as the gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive and shall maintain and update that webpage in a timely fashion.

f.  Each Open Government Webpage shall incorporate a mechanism for the public to:

i. Give feedback on and assessment of the quality of published information;
ii. Provide input about which information to prioritize for publication; and
iii. Provide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan (see 3.a.).

That day is today!

Here are three sites that track which of the agency.gov/open pages are already live or have feedback options in place:

• http://projects.propublica.org/transparency/
• http://www.sunlightlabs.com/open/
• http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/open/tool_agency_poc.shtml

As was expected, most of these sites are using IdeaScale for input gathering and discussion. Some of you may remember this tool from phase 1 of the Open Government Dialogue (see here, here).

Below is a list of RSS feeds available from the various idea gathering and discussion forums (scroll down for link to the ultimate combo firehose feed):

1. Federal Communications Commission

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.

I have a feeling that game design will play a key role in developing the next generation of e-participation solutions so it’s worth paying attention.