This past weekend’s UK GovWeb BarCamp was a huge success, and it was an honour to be one of the supporters. While I could wax lyrical about the diversity of conversations and the general sense of empowerment conveyed through the day, I’d like to focus on the one topic which has been consuming my mind both prior to, and since, the big event:
Evolving from “consultation” to “engagement”
As luck would have it, it was the first session of the day to which I was most excited, proved to be the most meaningful for me. Roughly titled “Online Engagement and Consultation”, it was ostensibly chaired by Steph Gray of DIUS and Paul Johnston of Cisco/Connected Republic.
Steph gave an excellent, brief overview of the challenges of online consultation, and provided a few examples of how DIUS has experimented in this space of late. This approach echoed Paul’s blog post prior to the event, in which he suggested what I might call a “scenario” approach — i.e. looking at the different phases or scenarios of consultation/engagement, and considering these individually.
It occurred to me following the discussion, that there are essentially two dimensions by which we might consider online engagement: the stage of engagement, and the type of engagement.
The stages of engagement
There are a number of ways to describe or outline the policy lifecycle. The Home Office has their own “Policy Wheel” with five key stages, if I recall. A popular model in the US is the “Eight-Fold Path“, created by Prof. Gene Bardach. In general, though, the policy process can be abstracted out to the following (Prof. Bardach, please forgive me):
- Define issue and outcomes
- Understand system
- Identify alternatives
- Analyse alternatives
- Deliver
- Evaluate
I’ve long argued that although “consultation” tends to take place at only point of this process (usually 4. Analyse), true engagement can and should occur throughout the policy lifecycle. However, doing this is not only difficult in and of itself, but frequently forces the stakeholder to think in terms of the language of the policy-maker. If we instead think of this in plain english, we can envision the following ‘phases’ of public engagement (which may or may not happen in a linear manner):
- Identifying the issues - identifying problems or potential areas for policy intervention
- Identifying the outcomes - describing the vision or objective, or rather, what is trying to be achieved
- Providing context - contributing detailed information on the current issue, environment, stakeholders, and forces
- Identifying policy ideas for addressing issues - suggesting potential policy interventions, perhaps based upon examples seen elsewhere
- Generating evidence or feedback - contributing specific perspectives, observations, or data related to proposed or existing policies
- Participating in the delivery of a policy - Contributing resources to the actual delivery of a policy intervention
A range of ways to participate
For each of the above, one can envision different degrees of input, ranging from low-effort to high-effort. Consider this my twist on classic “ladder of citizen participation“:
- Vote - Providing a yes/no or Likert-scale response to a posed statement.
- Multi-dimensional vote - A more nuanced version of a vote. This could include allocating some set of units or £s across a set of alternatives, to embed some notion of resource constraints. It could also include evaluating options against different criteria (impact, resources required, time limitations, etc.)
- Comment - Providing a short item of input, usually in response to something posed. This could be a perspective, a rebuttal, or a piece of evidence.
- Idea - Providing a unique or standalone item of input. This could be a suggestion for an issue, a policy proposal, or an independent observation which might be used as context for other deliberation.
- Deliberation - Providing detailed input or content to an item or discussion (e.g. fleshing out a wiki outline).
- Execution - Participating in the actual delivery of a policy intervention.
In subsequent posts, I will try to analyse the challenges to online engagement, and to aggregate and evaluate some of the tools being applied along these two dimensions (stage of engagement, and type of engagement). Finally, I will try to marry all of this up describing polyWonk’s own development of a platform for online policy collaboration/consultation/engagement/involvement/participation.
Tags: eDemocracy · Engagement · eParticipation5 Comments
5 responses so far ↓
It’s *great* to be reading this! Wow! I may be misunderstanding you but it feels as if you are restricting consideration to the process of asking the public what they think about something. Be great from the outset to start with a view that banishes the word “engagement” and replaces it with the word “involvement”. (i.e. that puts rung 6 on the ladder first, then rolls out rungs 1 - 5). This is not semantics but there is the usual danger that if the process starts with polling opinion, the generous intent of “engagement” can easily become a process of public relations, co-option or engineering of opinion. I am no expert but it would seem to me that online platforms allow the ladder to be, er, re-rung-ed.!?
David,
Thanks much for the comment. Actually, I’m very much in agreement with you. My vision is for people to be involved (or at least *enabled* to be involved) across the policy process, and in a much more deliberative manner. While many people prefer simply to respond to ideas put before them, I would like people to have the opportunity to meaningful contribute in other ways, as well. So perhaps you are right: “engagement” may be too passive a word, or imply primarily one-way activity. Similarly, maybe even the notion of a ‘ladder’ is itself out-dated.
Aha - thanks for this write-up. It’s one of the sessions I was gutted to have missed. Will link to you from my own UKGCO9 post for anyone else who missed it too.
This is good stuff. Best of all, your analysis doesn’t really mention technology. As I suggested in my previous comment, here technology is a useful enabler but on its own it won’t overcome the real barriers to engagement and participation. (My analogy was with teleworking: I suggested the reason that this hasn’t taken off has nothing to do with technology.)
I think that a key issue here is control. The current UK government - our PM in particular - has a reputation of being seriously into control. HMG really doesn’t like the idea that the ordinary public might come up with policy options that don’t feature on its agenda. For example, if a large number of people were engaged in effective deliberation about Heathrow’s third runway, and they examined the various options and their consequences very carefully, it’s entirely possible that they would decide that it shouldn’t be built. Gordon Brown and some (although, apparently, not all) of his colleagues couldn’t possibly contemplate this outcome.
The critical issue here is how we are governed: social media are a fantastic enabler if it’s decided that the public should be more closely involved in policy, but technology on its own won’t change the system.
If we really are going to involve Joe citizen in deliberation and execution, democratically elected politicians will have some serious thinking to do.
[...] by Andrew Cooper on February 10, 2009 Here’s a comment I posted in response to the blog post here. As regular readers will know, this is a topic that interests me [...]