In December, the White House issued a request for input regarding the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Their list of seven questions included one on e-participation. To jog your memory, here it is once again:
What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and academic communities, and provide the public with greater and more meaningful opportunities to influence agencies’ plans?
The following response was intended to be a group collaboration between various practitioners, researchers and other thought leaders in the field of e-participation and online engagement, mainly from the U.S. but welcoming contributions from abroad. Despite the very short notice, Intellitics was able to host an informal call on December 16 that drew 14 attendees and expressions of interest from several others. Thank you to everyone who showed up.
We enjoyed a refreshing conversation. Due to the holidays, however, there simply wasn’t enough time to draft and finalize a collective response, especially since some of the people involved were busy preparing statements from their respective organizations, namely the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) and the International Association for Public Participation–United States of America (IAP2 USA). All in all, the January 3, 2012 deadline was a bit unfortunate, to put it mildly.
Not knowing just how strictly the deadline will be enforced, I have decided to go ahead and submit something now rather than wait for our little group effort to run its course. Below, I provide a few initial thoughts as my personal response to the White House request. I seriously hope that the conversation doesn’t end here and that the White House Open Government team will still be open to receiving input in a few weeks from now when a coordinated group response is more likely.
First off, I think the question is a particularly important one. Why? Because if current trends continue, and there is little reason to doubt that they will, public participation will continue to move onto the web just like everything else: from the way we work, to banking, to commerce, to entertainment, to education, to the way we connect socially. Increasingly, we rely on the web to deliver and receive these important functions in our lives, and I expect the same to hold true for community problem solving and decision making and the many ways people participate in the political process. That’s why this question not only deserves a thorough one-time response now but warrants a continued dialogue and exchange between the administration and the experts and innovators in this emerging field.
One of the insights a continued dialogue might reveal early on is that the question ought to be reframed slightly. There is no one single “most effective” e-participation tool available yet and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. Rather, there are hundreds of tools — whether built specifically for particular e-participation scenarios or being used simply because they are available — which, by and large, all have their strengths and weaknesses and tend to be more or less appropriate depending on the purpose and the circumstances.
Given that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in support of public participation is still fairly new, this is hardly surprising.
The key thing to understand here is that the effectiveness and overall benefit of any particular tool depends a lot on the context: the objectives, the immediate project parameters and numerous other factors, many of which have nothing to do with technology. Hence, a better way to frame the question might be to ask for the known or likely success factors for applying technology rather than focusing prematurely on specific tools.
Whether involving the public in person, online or both, the most important thing to get right in public participation is the overall process. Without the basics properly in place, no tool will ever be adequate. Those basics include but obviously aren’t limited to the following items:
- What are the decisions to be made?
- To what extent can, should and will the public get to influence the decisions?
- Who is the public?
- What is the timeline?
- Etc.
As I pointed out in my brief talk at SXSW 2011: Even the best tools won’t save you if you get the process wrong! Luckily, we have a global community of practice to build on whose countless decades of experience have produced well-established good practice guides and ethics for designing public participation processes, most notably from IAP2 but also other organizations in the field.
Once an e-participation effort has been scoped, during the planning and design stages, it should become more clear which tools or category of tools are potential candidates. Factors to be considered when choosing a tool for, say, a generic ideation or policy deliberation project might include the following (in no particular order):
- Cost
- Optimal group size / scalability
- Multi-language support
- Facilitation and moderation capabilities
- Ease of use (participants)
- Ease of set-up (administrators)
- Training requirements
- Maintenance needs
- Reporting capabilities
- Proprietary vs. open source software
- Self-hosted vs. cloud solution
- Participant acquisition potential
- Integration with face-to-face processes
- Integration with other technology
- Bandwidth requirements
- Data retention / archiving options
- Support for (quasi-)anonymous participation
- Identity support
- Cross-platform and cross-browser support
- Support for mobile devices
- Branding options
- Customization options
- Fee structure
- Contractual aspects
- Legal aspects
- Accessibility aspects
- Etc.
It’s easy to see how any odd combination of the trade-offs inherent in this short list might have a seemingly weaker tool win out over a more robust one under certain conditions.
Another interesting question that should certainly inform the tool selection process is to what extent any of the perceived shortcomings of any given tool might be remedied by applying a certain structure or manual/human interventions, e.g. framing, scheduling, or facilitation. For example:
- Scalability issues might be overcome by dividing the participants into smaller groups or by breaking up the topic into a series of shorter cycles, each focusing on one sub-topic at a time.
- Lack of moderation capabilities might be overcome by providing participants with more thorough training upfront and by applying higher levels of hands-on facilitation.
- Lack of certain critical features might be overcome by using a combination of tools.
In closing, I’d like to point out that despite these caveats I believe a set of tangible guidelines could be produced to inform the administrations e-participation efforts, and we wouldn’t even have to start from scratch. A lot of research is available to inform this discussion. It will be a matter of pulling together the right resources and sufficiently engaging the experts. This will require significantly more time than was given in the original request. However, based on what I’ve been hearing, there seems to be a great deal of interest among this community of e-participation practitioners, researchers and other interested parties to continue the conversation. Let’s see if the White House will take us up on this offer.
