All of Government Portal Participation Page Case Study
From ParticipatioNZ
<Guide to Online Participation/4. Resources/4.2. Case studies
This is the case study of the New Zealand Government Portal's participation page, http://newzealand.govt.nz/participate/.
Contents |
Background
A high profile portion of NewZealand.govt.nz, the all of government portal, is devoted to inviting people to participate in government. The site's participation page presents information on standing for local and central government elections, voting, contacting Members of Parliament and finding out about government consultations and making submissions, as well as other ways of having a say in government activities.
Earlier versions of the portal, such as NZGO (nz government on line) contained listings of open consultations. This functionality was transferred to the version of the portal that existed as of 31 May 2007.
The site is positioned as the key starting point for finding government services and information. Moreover, www.newzealand.govt.nz has recently been adopted as the all of government brand. This means the portal will be prominently displayed on all government advertising and other information sources. It is a key 'face' of New Zealand government and is, by some rankings, one of the top five most visited sites in New Zealand.
About the portal
Originally, the portal was a Web-directory of the .govt.nz domain name space. It was a kind of Yahoo for government websites. Here's the more technical explanation from the site itself.
- Government departments and local councils have added descriptions of the information and services they offer -- technically called 'metadata' -- to an electronic catalogue called Metalogue. The standard format for their metadata is called the New Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) Metadata Standard. After the metadata has been checked it is fed into databases which you can search on using this site.
- For more information about NZGLS, and the metadata creation and collection processes, see http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/nzgls.
The portal has undergone a redevelopment that expands its search capacity to capture information from all over the Web, using Microsoft's Live Search public index, and not just its own databases. It includes all domains that government agencies use, including .govt, .org, .cri and others. As a result, it should be able to return more relevant search results.
Entering 'consultation' into the search engine leads directly to agency consultation links. During this transitional stage, not all consultations are able to be picked up.
The 'Participate in Government' part of the site still relies on links through to its directory, and eventually onwards to government sites themselves. So, for example, the link saying, 'Make a submission to a Select Committee', leads to a link saying, 'Get information about the Select Committee process', which leads to two links to Parliament's website -- one about research having to do with Parliament, the other leading to Parliament's select committee page.
Similarly, clicking on 'Have your say on a government consultation document', leads to agency consultations, but only after following several other links structured in an unintuitive fashion.
To update this information, particularly new consultations and calls for submissions to parliamentary select commitees, agencies have had to submit these calls to the portal website administrators. Accessing this information has also meant navigating through the site, or searching directly on the site's search engine.
Unfortunately, because agencies do not always notify the portal administrators of new consultations, and because of the non-intuitive navigation, the consultation and select committee portions of the site are not necessarily comprehensive and are difficult to find.
Participation by the numbers
The following list shows the number of visits per content section of the portal between January and the end of May 2007.
- "Government services" -- 387,347
- "Search" -- 339,324
- "A to Z" -- 292,383
- "About New Zealand" -- 55,551
- "Things to know when" -- 53,957
- "News" -- 23,031
- "Participate in Government"-- 13,894
- "Maori" -- 6
The search key terms used by visitors to the portal are incredibly varied. Even the top search, 'jobs', accounts for only 8 percent of all searches. 'Legislation' is the fifth most frequent search, accounting for 1 percent of all searches. The 'long tail' of terms extends to at least 3000 other searches. Many of these relate to 'participation' in that they seem to refer to finding information about politicians (eg Helen Clark), specific legislation (e.g. section 59) and issues of concern (e.g. fair trading, climate change).
Feedback design learning
The portal is a guide to finding your way to opportunities to engage government. It is therefore well positioned at the 'front end' to help agencies attract people to become involved in policy development and service design.
However, in practice, agencies do not use the portal well to engage people. Agencies' reluctance to syndicate content across the Web through RSS or Atom means it is not easy to simply 'pull' content onto the participation portal. Metadata formats, such as microformats, could also make it simple for search engines to 'pull' this information to the portal. However, for the most part, these are not used.
It is difficult to work out incentives for agencies to take up these tools. But their absence emphasises their status as baseline technologies for improving the experience and effectiveness of online participation. The new search engine development provides an incentive for agencies to optimise their own Web pages to benefit from the enhanced searching.
Feedback design opportunities
Good feedback design means lowering the barriers to engaging people in government. There are four barriers that the portal could help to solve.
- Awareness
Many people are unaware that the government is trying to engage them in consultations or select committee hearings. The portal is in a good position to promote opportunities to participate in government, and does so already. However, its information is incomplete and hard to find. Better information architecture, as noted above, could remedy this.
- Relevance
Many people don't see how issues that governments want to engage on are relevant or of interest to them. The portal could structure participation information to make it more relevant to people. The new search tool could list participation opportunities in people's geographic location, by areas of interest or competencies (e.g. parenting, engineering), or by the affected sector (e.g. health, education).
- Time
Many people feel they don't have time to participate. Neither the portal, nor any other government website, says how much time would be involved in creating a submission or contributing to some other government process.
- Trust
Many people do not trust that engaging with government will make any difference to its decisions. In sharing information about consultations, the portal could show how public input will be weighed against others sources of evidence. It could also make final copies of consultation documents searchable so people could learn how their contributions have made a difference.
Feedback design prototype
The following fields generate the opportunities mentioned above for consultation notifications.
Main page template
Plain English should be used in all fields
- Headline style name of consultation
- Date submissions close
- Background and relevance of consultation
- Key issues under discussion
- Ideal public knowledge sought for the consultation
- Tags for everyday and expert knowledge areas (e.g. business, education, science, babysitting)
- Tags for everyday and professional roles of people (e.g. parents, managers, bartenders, students, patients)
- Is the discussion technical (i.e. mainly appealing to experts and stakeholders) or is it accessible for the general public with general knowledge?
- How to contribute (include links to online submission forms, specific questions asked, online discussion forums, dates and locations of public meetings)
- How long it will take to contribute
- Background information on the consultation (e.g. a link to a discussion paper)
- Background information on the consultation process (e.g. a link to terms of reference or a project plan)
- Agency contact details
‘Teaser’ template
- Headline title
- One sentence on what the consultation is about (if there is space)
- Knowledge sought
- Links to how to contribute (e.g. a questionnaire, schedule of public meetings)
- How long it will take to contribute (if there is space)
