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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

This post is part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation. Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis research.

In deciding if and what kind of e-participation processes to initiate, it is important to consider not only the capacity available on the side of the host or convening institution (mostly in terms of budget, time, people and technology), but the full backing on the side of the institution as well.

There is a difference between such processes initiated by someone within an institution acting in the name of the institution (but maybe only in the form of a pilot project) and processes where the institution is standing for it from top to bottom. It makes an enormous difference whether participants do not know to what degree their city/government actually backs their e-participation initiative, or knowing that from the mayor down to the city hall desk clerk everyone is informed about it and instructed to recognize it as actual city/government policy. And with that, the capacity question is logically directly connected.

However, even given proper backing, not all types of processes can be realized with the same degree of capacity. The question is what effect does institutional backing have on an e-participation process in terms of legitimacy, expectation management, and most importantly: proper feedback into the policy cycle. Token participation can be a result of just plain bad e-participation processes, but they can also come from insufficient institutional backing. Examples might include outstandingly well organized participatory budgeting processes with a high degree of activity, but they go nowhere because the city in which they were exercised insufficiently coordinated the time frame so the proposals came too late to be considered for the current budget cycle. Or even worse, the legislature had no idea there was a participatory budgeting project going on!

What are your experiences with institutional backing? Do you know of any strategies, success stories or high-profile failures we can learn from? How can institutional backing be enforced where it is lacking? I welcome your comments!

It took us a while, but we’re finally in the process of launching the first alpha release of Zilino, our new web application for online consultations. Zilino allows organizations (private, non-profit, government etc.) to engage their people (members, citizens, residents, other constituents etc.) in problem solving and decision making.

The prototype went live earlier in April and is functional, if still a bit rough around the edges. A first test project is currently getting under way in Seattle, WA (a three-phased budget allocation consultation that will involve 50+ people for one week).

The current feature set includes the following:

Items #1-3 can be considered basic infrastructure.  Item #4 has lots of potential with regard to collaborative learning but in this iteration is still kept to the bare minimum. Finally, items #5 & #6 are where we start to play with some of the ideas we have in the area of online dialogue and deliberation.

Despite the many obvious limitations, you should already be able to run basic online consultations with this setup.

Over the coming weeks and months, we plan run a number of test and pilot projects to help us further validate the concepts and fine-tune our implementation based on user and customer feedback. As we expand on the modules listed above and add maybe a couple of new ones, we will focus on two main challenges:

• How to bring good process to the web?
• How to deliver great participation experiences to end users?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed we have quite a few ideas we can’t wait to try out.

Here’s how you can learn more about and follow Zilino:

• Read the blog: http://blog.zilino.com
• Read the FAQ
• Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zilino
• Or, if you prefer, follow us on Identi.ca (an open source Twitter alternative): http://identi.ca/zilino
• Like us on Facebook
• Talk to us about our pilot program
• Subscribe to our email newsletter (from the Zilino.com homepage)

A huge “Thank you!” goes out to all the super smart people in this field we’ve had the pleasure to talk to over the past couple of years and who were so generous in their encouragement and their advice.  Needless to say, we are excited to get this thing rolling and can’t wait to show you in more detail.

In August 2009, our team from the Brandt School advised the City of Erfurt on their participatory budgeting project. The city had asked their citizens earlier in a survey which areas they find important, and the administration wanted to use the results of the survey as the basis for an internet-based consultation. The next step (and our task) was then to set up an on-line platform to gather ideas, within the areas from the survey. We went ahead and proposed a three-step process (ideation, deliberation and collaboration), set up a message board and accompanied the city’s first e-participation effort. That was my first experience in the area. Participation on the web was not new to me, but introducing modern technology and ideas of openness into public administration is an exciting, new and daunting task.

But let me introduce myself. I am a graduate student at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt (Germany) and Intellitics’ first intern. Even though my educational background is in international affairs, economics and politics, I have participated in a number of projects in the German “Government 2.0″ sphere, mostly assisting Dr. Philipp Mueller, visiting professor for public policy and public management at the Brandt School, who is currently writing a book called “Shaping Network Society”. The most noteworthy project was to document the first German Government 2.0 Camp in Berlin in August 2009. What started out as a blogging and tweeting mission there ended up as a full-blown documentation website (gov20.cpmg.eu) and an internal expert opinion for the German Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Over the next few weeks, I will support a number of projects such as adding more content to ParticipateDB, producing new episodes of This Week in Participation as well as a trip to the OpenGovWest conference in Seattle later this month. I am writing my master’s thesis on e-participation, and will post a few texts here on this blog about topics from research as well as internship-related findings.

Today at noon Eastern Time, WhiteHouse.gov, the official website of the President of the United States of America, underwent its long-expected relaunch. Those who have been following candidate and president-elect Barack Obama’s web efforts over the last year will surely recognize it.

This announcement sounds exciting:

Participation – President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Given the various e-participation efforts the transition team has already engaged in on Change.gov since November, my bet is we will see a lot of innovation in this area in the months ahead.

Last Tuesday on Change.gov (the official website of President-elect Barack Obama), the transition team launched a public online discussion on the topic of healthcare. From the announcement on their blog:

Join the Discussion

Today we’re trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues — with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top.

The question they are asking:

What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?

The site uses IntenseDebate, which — at a very basic level — is a threaded discussion forum (with a few added features, such as reputation points, comment ratings, OpenID support).

More than 3,500 comments have been posted so far.

One of the reasons this is interesting is because it may hint at a more participatory approach to government by the new administration, something for which a lot of people have expressed high hopes during the recent US presidential campaign. Accordingly, the initial feedback — from some in the web community, at least — has been very positive: Over on techPresident, Micah Sifry calls it “the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system,” and Eric Eldon of VentureBeat thinks of it as “a great early step in making government more open.”

I wanted to share a few initial observations, mainly with regard to process quality. How to best address some of these issues will be left for future posts but feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. For those interested in this discussion, there are a couple of threads going on on the NCDD main mailing list as well as on one of the groups at Democracies Online.

First off, though, kudos to the people behind Change.gov for experimenting with large-scale e-participation so early in the process (remember this is still just the transition, not the presidency). Despite the many challenges that have yet to be mastered in order to make it work at scale, I believe the opportunities for online dialogue and deliberation to help boost civic engagement and to improve public decision making at all levels of government are tremendous.

That said, a few things that immediately caught my eye:

• No clear process model: Judging from the information available on the website, it is not entirely clear how exactly the comments will be processed, what impact realistically they may or may not have on any policy decisions, or what kind of follow-up and follow-through either the transition team or the new administration are willing to commit to. This can become a problem since it risks disappointing participants (e.g. when assumed impact doesn’t match actual impact and participants are left frustrated over the time and energy they spent in vain).
• Lack of focus in the comments: Instead of simply answering the question (“What worries you…?”), many participants choose to share rich combinations of personal stories, experiences, concerns, assumptions, questions, ideas, solutions, values, priorities, resources, data etc.  While this shows just how much energy the participants bring to the table, it also tends to leave the discussion somewhat directionless. There is no process in place to further organize this input, nor does the forum software support participants in being more disciplined or structured.
• Lack of organizer participation: I was able to spot one instance of comment deletion by the forum administrators, presumably according to their comment policy (screenshot). I may be wrong, but other than that the transition team does not seem to actively engage in the discussions (e.g. ask or answer questions, express agreement or disagreement, or otherwise facilitate the process or provide general community management etc.). I only looked at a few sample pages, though, so I may be wrong.
• Overwhelming amounts of unstructured data: The discussion on Change.gov was off to a fast start, reaching 2,000 comments in the first 24 hours. As with many online discussion forums that reach a certain activity level, the amounts of content produced by the participants can be quite staggering. For example, total word count on this forum may well be approaching 500,000 words already (for details how I got this number, see my rough calculations). That means it becomes extremely time-consuming to keep up with even a small fraction of overall input (poor navigation adds to the problem). Moreover, the fact that this data is largely unstructured makes further processing very difficult if not impossible.

Again, this is an early assessment of a work in progress, and it wouldn’t at all surprise me if these issues will be addressed over time. The combination of a more demanding public (with regard to opportunities for meaningful e-participation) and a more interested and supportive administration (from what we’ve heard of the past year from some of the people involved) looks quite promising.

PEP-NET, another promising e-participation initiative at the European level, launched earlier this month.

From the about page:

PEP-NET will be a European network of all stakeholders active in the field of eParticipation. PEP-NET therefore already includes public bodies, solution providers and citizen organizations as well as researchers and scientists. The network is open to all organizations willing and actively trying to advance the idea and use of eParticipation in Europe.

The project aims to help overcome fragmentation and promote best practice by connecting established and experienced eParticipation players and networks throughout Europe as a critical first step. The objective of this project is to achieve critical mass for the establishment of a Pan European eParticipation Network (PEP-NET). Such a network will act as a repository and disseminator of good practice and exchange of experience, and be a visible resource for all interested parties across the European Union.

PEP-NET will ensure wider access to European eParticipation projects and permit more effective dialogue between eParticipation experts, researchers, practitioners, public administrations, civil society organisations and the interested public with the ultimate goal of facilitating knowledge transfer, encouraging further eParticipation trials and establishing European leadership in this field.

[...]

Already, a number of organizations in the field have signed on as the initial PEP-NET members.

The project is coordinated by Hamburg, Germany-based TuTech Innovation GmbH, who for over a year now have been sharing a steady flow of insights on their blog (mostly in German).

These are the slightly modified slides from a quick presentation I gave last night at Web Monday Silicon Valley in San Francisco. It’s a first high-level introduction to our first product, a web application for problem solving and decision making in large groups.

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We hope to have the initial pieces of an alpha version in place some time over the coming weeks.