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Networking Democracy - Building Participation

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Opening Statements

Discussion threads

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Building Participation

This is the archive for the "Building Participation" thread.

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This thread is for exploring the theme of participation. We would like
to consider how participation could be built in a way that is:

o Large scale
o Diverse
o Representative
o Open and accessible to all
o Sustained


From: "Helen.Marge...@googlemail.com"
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 15:28:51 -0800 (PST)
Local: Mon, Mar 3 2008 11:28 pm
Subject: Re: Building participation


Thank you for inviting me to this group and my apologies for not
having contributed earlier.

The internet is a very good forum for making people feel part of small
close groups of like minded people (eg through search,
personalisation, recommender systems etc.) and very large groups (eg
by linking groups together and providing information on overall
participation) at the same time. I think the best way to secure
diverse, representative and large scale participation is to take
advantage of this characteristic. That is, any 'national conversation'
should be based on an application which provides the links between a
wide variety of much smaller conversations within specific groups and
acts as the equivalent of a blog aggregator, possibly with several
intermediary levels. There could be any number of groups at the
smallest level, representing any number of different constituencies
and there is no reason why someone could not participate in more than
one group at the same time. Surely this is the only way a national
conversation could work?

Helen Margetts



From: Ella
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 01:23:34 -0800 (PST)
Local: Tues, Mar 4 2008 9:23 am
Subject: Re: Building participation


Hi,
I'd like to bring forward the suggestion from our earlier threads that
any initiative should be distributed and largely based in existing
initiatives. It seems that we weren't clear on this matter.

By existing initiatives I mean the great variety of multi media and
Web 2 tools and environments where people meet up to socialise, discus
topics and share information (yes also in non-text form). For example:
blogs, including those attached to newspapers, facebook/ myspace,
local discussion forums (independent and owned by local government)
plus places where people with a shared age-group or interest gather
(Net-Mums). The Instigators of the "conversation" should create a
central information repository for these to link to, plus some info to
distribute and aim to get as many on board as possible. The BBC could
play a strong role here. This would give a diverse range of
environments and encourage a large number of people to take part.

I think 2 further issues come up:
1 - How would the government "stamp" these conversations to show that
they were aware of them and that they would take them seriously as
parts of the consultation?
2 - How would the content of these be harvested? This sounds like a
massive job, but, if the process was well-defined at the beginning, it
should be quite manageable. This process should be described as part
of the supporting information. Ideally this description would use
diagrams and, as the process was undertaken, its progress would be
traceable via these diagrams.

- Ella




From: Fergusao
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 05:57:27 -0800 (PST)
Local: Tues, Mar 4 2008 1:57 pm
Subject: Re: Building participation

I agree with Ella and Helen's push for a distributed or 'long tail'
approach to any national conversation, and particularly Ella's point
about using an exisiting 'digital commons'.

Ella raises two further issues. In response, I'd suggest that there
could be a central 'corporate' portal owned by the Ministry containing
a contract or pledge detailing exactly how the Government agrees to
use the responses they receive to their consultation. the portal would
also act as a 'signpost' to and aggregator (through pre-defined tags)
of these distributed national conversations. In some ways the
foundations of such a portal are provided by http://governance.justice.gov.uk.

There would be an impetus on the 'owners' of the digital commons sites
to promote their availability, facilitate them, link them up to the
portal and provide the consultation team with as much detail about the
participants and process as possible. This could be an aspect of the
'contract' they enter into with the Ministry over the course of the
exercise.

We should keep in mind that this would be the first time that such a
large scale partnership would have been attempted. I wrote some pieces
for the NCVO on the practicalities at:

- http://www.ncvo-networks.org.uk/blogs/ictforesight/2006/10/18/first-i...

and

- http://www.ncvo-networks.org.uk/blogs/ictforesight/2006/12/18/commons....

That's how I'd envisage it (broadly). Technology would be the least of
the worries here; the big challenegs lie in content creation,
relationship building and availability of skills.

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From: "Suw Charman-Anderson"
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 22:52:28 +0000
Local: Tues, Mar 4 2008 10:52 pm
Subject: Re: [Networking Democracy] Building participation

> This thread is for exploring the theme of participation. We would like
> to consider how participation could be built in a way that is:

> o Large scale

What does "large scale" mean? How many people, realistically, will
engage with such a discussion. I rather suspect that the number will
be smaller than anticipated.

Scale is also fractal - a large scale group can be made up of lot of
smaller communities, which are made up of much smaller sub-groups or
cliques. This is really about seedings lots of small conversations and
then pulling them all together in a meaningful manner.

> o Diverse

Depends on outreach. If you don't make the effort to engage with a
diverse audience, they won't engage with you.

> o Representative

What does this mean? How would we tell if the conversation was
representative, and what would we expect it to be representative of?
The problem is, on the internet, no one knows if you have a
disability, are part of an ethnic minority, or are
gay/lesbian/bisexual, etc. Unless you ask people to fill in BME forms,
(which they probably wouldn't fill in) you may never know who you're
talking to. And then there's the aspect of geographical
representation... IP addresses are not good indicators of location,
e.g. I often show up as being on the Isle of Man, because that's where
my ISP has some servers.

> o Open and accessible to all

Accessibility is down to website/webapp design, and should be a given.

> o Sustained

That's all down to the people running the project, and how much time
and effort they want to both put in and pay for.

I feel a bit frustrated that we seem to be going round in circles a
bit, and that the questions are getting just too fuzzy to answer.
Before we focus on the answers to the questions, we need to be sure
that we're asking the right questions in the first place. I'm not sure
the framing is right, yet.

Suw

--



From: "Steven Clift"
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 11:12:40 -0500
Local: Tues, Mar 4 2008 4:12 pm
Subject: Re: [Networking Democracy] Re: Building participation


I am on the road w/o handy web access, but the distributed approach is what I laid our in my submission under #2. Perhaps it might be worth sharing again.

Key IMHO would be some sort of centrally defined "now that you held your group exchange" what are your conclusions. This could be done via a survey form.

Earlier I noticed some disparaging remarks about organized interests. I have found that the biggest compliment to an e-democracy initiative is when interest groups actually think it worth their time to participate. If they don't, the exercise is clearly not designed to interface with real power. While I am supportive of the "unaffiliated" or some how more innocent citizen participating in a disintermediated, independent way ... if that is all we have, the exercise is essentially a sideshow.

In Estonia, one of the most experienced government e-consulters, the government (a year or so ago) was working on a new consultation portal that would specifically recognize and interface with civil society groups.

The strength of a distributed approach would be to encourage interests to host ther own group deliberation online (or in-person) that they can list in the central directory.

I found huge value in reading submissions to the central government e-democracy consultation a number of years ago (why isn't that archived online ... I had to copy the site tlo my computer). Almost all of the submission were from organisations (I don't recall a survey). I think empowering thoughtful and detailed submission for all to read would be highly useful in whatever format(s) are chosen.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

 

From: "David R. Newman"
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:26:35 +0000
Local: Wed, Mar 5 2008 6:26 pm
Subject: Re: [Networking Democracy] Re: Building participation

One way to organise a national conversation, is to invite every local
community and voluntary sector group to take part. This indirect
consultation route has often proved fruitful in Scotland and Northern
Ireland (e.g. when NICVA arranged meetings and surveys on the links
between health and housing on behalf of both Ministries).

Imagine a complete information and software tool pack which could be
downloaded and used by any local group wanting to organise a
deliberation on an issue. Get the associations like SCVO and NICVA to
promote it, arrange launch and training events, and collect outcomes.

Each local group could have discuss local questions (e.g. what is good
about living where you do? What are the best and worst things about the
people in your area.

Then the tools upload the results, and a few people from each local
group join in a regional discussion on what are the common features and
values for people living in that region.

Then we bring regions together, and discover if there are any common
British values.

It is analagous to the participation building structure that AdviceNI
uses in its e-consultations (see my post under the previous theme).

--
Dr. David R. Newman, Queen's University Management
School, Belfast 



From: "Helen.Margetts"
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 13:14:27 -0800 (PST)
Local: Wed, Mar 5 2008 9:14 pm
Subject: Re: Building participation


I agree with both these previous two comments regarding groups/
organized interests. The Internet goes some way to overcome the
problems that gave organized interests a bad name (e.g. that they
exclude 'latent groups' of low income geographically dispersed people
who will find it difficult to organize.) So I don't see the problem
with basing a national conversation around networks of groups. It will
be to some extent self selecting rather than strictly representative -
but to get strict representation it may be better to use supplementary
methods such as opinion surveys to canvas initial views before the
conversation (in order to structure the debate perhaps) or afterwards
to verify conclusions - one method need not exclude the other, they
perform different functions.

Helen Margetts
Oxford Internet Institute

 


From: "Andy Williamson"
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008
Local: Wed, Mar 5 2008

Subject: Re: Building participation


I've read lots of good arguments on this thread about what will and won't
work. I think there's one issue that we've not properly dealt with yet which
is whatever happens taking this forward there is still a significant
disconnect between government and citizens and the government's use of the
internet - generally speaking - is widening that gap. Local, viral, emergent
and grassroots - networked individualism - doesn't align particularly well
with top-down, monolithic and one-size-fits-all.

That's not to say this is an non-starter as a process but it begs the
question about how consultation and engagement is managed and the need to
have multiple, flexible and emergent channels.

I like Steve's Estonian example and hadn't come across it before - would
love to know more!

Andy

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