From ParticipatioNZ

Good design puts principles into practice. This section describes how to design successful online participation.

Contents 1 Snapshot 1.1 Voices 1.2 Quote 1.3 Key messages 1.4 Highlights 2 Full story 3 Case studies

Snapshot

Voices

"The public is often asked to participate at the wrong stage, and on the wrong things. There is a lot of poor design of opportunities to participate." -- Workshop participant

Quote

"Others approach a problem from the point of view that says, 'We have the smartest people in the world; therefore, we can think this through'. We approach it from the point of view that the answer is out there, hidden in plain sight, so let's go observe human behaviour and see where the opportunities are." -- David Kelley, IDEO.com

Key messages

• Design your entire online participation initiative so that it provides meaningful and timely information for participants, stakeholders and government decision-makers.
• Ensure that content is engaging, relevant and appropriate for the chosen platform and intended audience.
• Provide participants with a sense of achievement. This may mean that they have reached goals, overcome challenges, deepened their understanding or learned new skills.
• Embed evaluation into your design of online participation.

Highlights

• What's different about online participation? Public participation is not new. But online participation can offer some unique and novel tools which can help overcome longstanding obstacles of time, disability and distance. Online participation also presents new challenges.

• Take feedback seriously Taking feedback seriously means thinking about the whole process of engagement, and finding creative ways to use and present information and evidence to make it work for everyone involved.

• Prepare the ground Designing a successful online engagement process is a multi-stakeholder endeavour. Involve Ministers and senior management in early discussions of your plans as well as content and technology experts, community organisations, businesses, potential participants and other stakeholders when shaping the process.

• Designing for participation Your task is to create a social setting that prompts reflection, fosters constructive and creative discussion and leads to action. You will need to focus simultaneously on process and content design.

• Generate discussion Make it easy to participate, encourage multimedia expression and connect people with one another. Remember the 1 percent rule and use passionate users to reach out to, rather than exclude, others.

• Present results Make the results of online participation easy to understand by using data visualisation tools and clear, concise summaries. Close the feedback loop by ensuring all participants are informed about the results of decision makers' deliberations and next steps.

Full story

This section reviews strategic design issues to consider when you are preparing for online participation. They are set out as a series of propositions which you can and should mix, match and set aside depending on the needs of your particular process.

For the full story on how to design for successful online participation read more here.

Case studies

For concrete examples of the design issues discussed here see the set of case studies in the Resources section