Guide to Online Participation/3.1 Design/Full story

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


Contents

What's different about online participation?

Public participation is by no means new. For the most part, you will need to build on your experience of the offline environment when designing for online participation. At the same time, online participation poses new challenges and requires close attention to the basics of online project design.

Online participation offers some unique and novel characteristics which can help overcome the obstacles of time, disability and distance.

  • Time
    • turning up for public meetings -- participation is now not time-bound in the same way; you can participate at different times during the day
    • more attuned to today's lifestyles -- life used to be nine to five with shops closed at 5.30pm and on the weekends; Internet interaction can occur at any time including outside normal office hours
    • participants can discuss issues over a period of time, and at different times from one another, which allows time for reflective debate.
  • Location
    • transcending place -- participation can be open to all, regardless of geographical location, including expatriate New Zealanders
    • enabling access by people who can’t physically be present at offline participation, e.g. meetings
    • connecting with virtual communities beyond Wellington -- for example, you can connect with postgraduate students in other countries on your research topic or families can keep in touch, e.g. Pacific virtual communities.
  • Interaction
    • different media are available -- you can present ideas and policies using various media instead of just written material -- audio (podcasts), visual (written and video), touch (multi-input touch screens); but make sure the way you use these media doesn't exclude any groups, such as those with impaired vision
    • sharing knowledge and creating ideas -- you can build on other ideas and content (eg wiki).
  • Range of participants
    • tap into the 'silent majority' -- gives people the freedom to comment online whereas public debate in a meeting might only hear from, and be heard by, a few
    • digital communications media have the potential to handle contributions from large numbers of people whereas traditional methods have difficulty doing this
    • online debate overcomes the obstacles that may prevent some people from participating in an offline debate -- for example, the deaf, the blind or those with limited mobility who might not be able to go to a public meeting; armed with Internet access, a browser and assistive technologies, anyone can participate in public debate online.

At the same time, online participation requires strategic thought and careful risk assessment in several areas. These include the following.

If online and offline participation are not aligned, offline participants could be disenfranchised. Conversely, online users' needs could be neglected if online participation tools are not introduced.

  • Resource demands

Online participation methods need time, expertise and funding as well as supporting systems and infrastructure. These should be weighed against the risks associated with poor policy and service design and delivery that do not meet public needs. Also consider the longer-term costs to government from reduced trust, legitimacy and effectiveness.

  • Incomplete participation

Problems with participation are not adequately resolved -- for example, the circulation of information and timeliness of its delivery, the publicity it receives, central government’s relationship with other levels of government, insufficient differentiation of the audience involved, weak relations between government agencies and sectors, and scarce visibility on relevant websites

  • Lack of co-ordination across government

Initiatives to improve the opportunity for people to participate are created in an ad hoc manner, without collaboration or co-ordination across government; knowledge transfer is therefore limited and stakeholders may be bombarded with various invitations to participate from different parts of government.

  • Perceived challenges to representative democracy

Some stakeholders may see online participation as undermining New Zealand's system of representative democracy. On the contrary -- online participation extends Ministers' ability to hear from the public through public servants. And it improves the quality of agency policy and service proposals by ensuring they are 'roadtested' with the people concerned or affected before they are submitted for final decision.

Take feedback seriously

If you ask people about what makes participation satisfying, they often talk about the importance of feedback -- either in terms of hearing what other people think of their ideas, or their contribution to an overall result.

Online tools are powerful media for providing such feedback. This is because, unlike most face-to-face conversations, the record of online interaction persists in all its detail -- from counting page-views and following click-paths, to recording the full content of someone's contributions. Moreover, this information is easily shared. People's ideas, and their paths to these ideas, can be revealed and shared across the Web to help like-minded, or unlike-minded people, find one another, discuss and generate new knowledge.

Acknowledging this environment means thinking differently about generating and gathering feedback from the public through online participation initiatives. It presents an excellent opportunity to pass on participants' ideas in their own words and in their own way, instead of just through facilitator summaries or flip-chart notes. It means going beyond 'thank you for your contribution' automatic emails. It means looking for novel ways to connect contributors inside your Web community and out into the wider ecosystem of online discussion that is happening elsewhere.

In short, it means thinking differently about information and knowledge -- about how they move, and where and when they can be used to help people recognise that they are an important part of your process -- and to gather the evidence you need to improve the particular service or policy you're dealing with. (For more details, see: Great Feedback! Online Engagement in New Zealand.

Generating and gathering feedback online means doing a variety of things to motivate people to contribute, share and find one another. Social media technologies like blogging, social bookmarking sites (like del.ico.us), and video sharing sites (like YouTube) owe much of their success to showing and syndicating information about how people are participating on their sites. They use tagging, tag clouds, RSS feeds, email newsletters, links and mini-applications called application programming interfaces (APIs) that let people present content, not just on the main sites like YouTube, but anywhere across the Web.

All these high-tech terms distract from the following basic strategies for how social media and Web 2.0 sites treat and value user-generated information.

  • Make it findable. Search is good, but tangible evidence that the discussion is happening is better. 'Most viewed' or 'latest discussions' are simple ways of showing that evidence, and are based on how people click their way through your site.
  • Make it navigable. Create linkages between related contributions, so that one contribution leads to another, which leads to another, and so on. This breaks down isolation between participants, gives them a sense of discovery and encourages them to respond to new things they've found. Tagging and tag clouds are one great way of making user-generated content navigable, by helping people see connections between their ideas and the ideas of others.
  • Make it portable. Prompt people to bring the discussion into their own context -- at home, at work, or on other sites. This will draw in more people to the discussion and help everyone feel connected to what's happening on their own terms. APIs, widgets and gadgets are key tools for doing this.
  • Make it personable. It's important to know that there is a someone -- not a something -- behind the ideas. Social media, like blogs, are compelling because they have personality and a sense of authenticity behind them. Seek ways for people to add personality to their contributions.

These strategies are only important insofar as they help to create conversation. And the conversation is important because it helps to engage people in improving policies and services within your agency. Thus, gathering and generating feedback is about more than just a Web-platform. It is also about working with senior management, Ministers and other stakeholders to ensure the questions you ask the public are well-designed and the responses they generate are valued and listened to. This means thinking of your online systems and processes, including departmental websites, as services to improve decision-making by connecting more people into the policy development and service design process.

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 all the players -- including Ministers, senior management, stakeholders and participants.

Diagram 3: Feedback loop

Prepare the ground

Designing a successful online engagement process is a multi-stakeholder endeavour. You will want to involve Ministers and senior management in early discussions of your plans. You will also want to encourage content and technology experts, community organisations, businesses and other stakeholders to be involved in shaping the process. This input will be invaluable for determining what questions you need to ask, who you really need to engage, what their information needs are, the channels you can use and what sort of sensitivities and risk you will need to plan for. In particular, you will need to think about the following.

  • Focus on your own information needs. What is it that your agency needs to know? Who is the audience you need to speak with and can they respond effectively? Is your agency prepared to respond to what it hears in kind? There is no point asking questions that cannot be answered or have no value for making decisions about improvements or strategic direction. Moreover, if your information needs are best served by basic answers to relatively simple questions, then a survey may be more appropriate than an engagement process. But if the issue is complex and solicits competing and reasonable views, then engaging the public in working through that complexity may be the right move to make.
  • Ministers and senior management are important allies in making participation processes work well. Ministers and senior management oversee decision-making. They therefore need to be supportive, and even active, in involving the public in contributing to those decisions. Getting their sign-off on and/or engagement with the major components of the process will give them confidence that they are going to receive high quality evidence about the issues with which they are concerned. Establishing and growing this confidence will be one of your major objectives throughout the life of your project. Start early and keep at it.
  • Be honest and up-front about risk. Remember to analyse not only the risk and cost of online engagement but also the risk of not engaging -- particularly the risks associated with designing policy or services without the input of the people they will affect. Also focus on your own role, and be sure senior management and your minister are comfortable about what you plan to do when managing your process.
  • Be open. While you should be clear about your purposes, your agency should also be prepared to be led by people. Your aim is to facilitate, not control, the engagement process. Expect to be steered by people as they take on various issues -- they may want to change your starter questions, facilitate their own discussions or follow new directions. People will expect the discussion to be open-ended, so design your process to incorporate ongoing engagement, even if the main body of work on an issue needs to be completed within a specific timeframe. Go with the flow. Remember that the process of innovation is unpredictable and time consuming, but pays big dividends.
  • Plan for success. You could end up being the victim of your own success. What will you do if you get an overwhelming public response to your online participation initiative? Have you adopted technical systems that can handle high volume traffic and have sufficient capacity to ensure moderation/facilitation during periods of intense interaction? You must ensure that the systems you have in place are rapidly scaleable.
  • Remember that people don't need government to begin engaging. Remember to work hard to find online and offline places where people are already choosing to engage, organise and act to achieve goals you share. Find out if your agency is welcome to work alongside them. Present yourself in these online and offline spaces as one player among many equally, if not more important players, and be up front about what you are prepared to contribute. Good things to contribute include high quality information, personal skills, ideas, contacts, recognition, and funding, if it is feasible and appropriate. Above all, be a responsible and valuable member of the community you have been allowed to join.

Designing for participation

Online participation can be seen as either an agency-centred process or a participant-centred process. The two perspectives are equally valid, but rarely made explicit. This can lead to mismatches in perceptions and subsequent disappointment -- on the part of public servants as well as members of the public. Being transparent about the scope and purpose of a specific online participation initiative will go a long way in clarifying which perspective applies and will help shape realistic expectations.

Your design should seek to build on the strengths of each approach. For example, the 'agency-centred' approach offers many robust tools for ensuring the quality and efficiency of processes and ensuring tangible outcomes within the short term. The 'participant-centred' approach provides sound reasons for including equal attention to participants' needs, the quality of the relationships built and the longer term effects. User centred design (UCD) is a cornerstone of online participation.

Table 1 Two views of online participation compared: agency-centred and participant-centred

Agency-centred Participant-centred
Focus Consulter’s needs Participants’ needs
Citizens' role Sources of information Partners in problem solving
Values Efficiency, effectiveness, accountability Experience, relationships, authenticity
Purpose Aggregating preferences Shaping preferences
Timescale Short term Long term

Source: adapted from G. Honor Fagan et al (2006) pp. 37-47 See full article

However you draw on these approaches, remember your task is to create a social setting that prompts reflection, fosters constructive and creative discussion and leads to action. Below are suggestions for designing your project's process and content.


Process

  • Design your process together with those you seek to engage. What are their priorities? What will inspire their interest in your process? What support do they need to get involved? Build relationships with people, and test your ideas with your target audience. Build on their responses. Involving management, ministers, participants and others in an iterative approach to design will help improve the odds of a good process once you launch.
  • Include those who are most affected. Your process should at least include people affected by your issue. Consider, though, that those who are not directly affected may also hold valuable opinions and information on a given issue.
  • Decide how many is enough. Large numbers of participants are impressive and help build a more representative picture of public opinion. But, subject to any applicable common law or statutory consultation obligations, they are not a necessary condition for a successful engagement process. Small groups with a few good ideas are very valuable and do not demand as many resources to manage. Follow good practice with regard to quantitative and qualitative research parameters (e.g. sample size, balance between men and women, different ethnicities, etc.).
  • Design for transparency. It's important to be clear about what you're doing and why. Transparency will help manage people's expectations about what will happen in your process, should they invest their time and effort in getting involved. Being able to map their participation onto the overall decision-making process will give people a sense of what they can and can't affect. You should be able to provide that map.
  • Maximise value for participants. As well as knowing where they stand in relation to the decision-making process, people will be looking for inspiration, learning, discovery and action from your process. They will prefer the tangible over the intangible in terms of results. Try and give them as many of these things as you can. The design of your process should help participants sense that they have reached goals or overcome challenges. Create opportunities for people to master subject areas or tasks. For example, imagine engaging people not just with discussions but with games that put them in the role of an elected representative. Present them with the choices. What would they do if they were in the Minister's place? What do they have to know to make good choices? And once they do make a decision, what might be the consequences?
  • Do your homework. There are various models for engaging people in collective discussions to improve public policy development or service design. You can find a good overview at the Ministry of Social Development's Good Practice Participate website, in this pamphlet by the United Kingdom organisation, Involve, People and Participation, or the UK Power Inquiry Report Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations From Around the World, by Dr Graham Smith. The International Association for Public Participation has developed a toolbox that is likely to be helpful at all stages of your process. Also relevant is Dr Phil Driver's Open Strategy System, which addresses how to turn offline and online collaboration into results.
  • Integrate online and traditional channels. Online tools are well-positioned to support or extend discussion beyond time or geographically limited face-to-face meetings or hui. Mixing face-to-face and online techniques will help you connect with people on their terms and in a way that best suits them. A busy professional, a stay-at-home parent, or a person who just does not like speaking in public might happily engage online, but never come to a public meeting. You may also need to consider the possibility that participants may wish to make submissions or comments on a confidential basis.
  • Consider evaluation early on. Building evaluation into your process will help you understand how well you are doing and report effectively to senior management, Ministers, participants and other stakeholders as you progress.
  • Provide signposts. In designing your process, provide clear indications of how participants can express any complaints they may have about the participation process itself.

Content

  • Explore your options and exploit online opportunities. Conventional consultation usually sees the production of a discussion or options paper as a way of informing responses from the public. But most government discussion papers are not engaging. They are a product of a paper-based world. Electronic formats and the Internet now offer a vastly more interactive approach to informing people about issues and gathering their responses. So what are you going to do? Produce documentaries? Create video games? Start a wiki? All or some of the above, but only if the conversation and your target audience are best served by audio/visual, interactive or

[[Guide to Online Participation/4. Resources/4.3. Glossary# S |social media.]]

  • Harness interactivity. There are any number of ways to take advantage of the Web's interactivity. One step would be to take a regular discussion paper and allow comments to be appended to each section, similar to how a weblog allows comments to be appended at the end of each post (see here for a useful example). Alternatively, create a 'workbook' where people absorb concise and neatly chunked information and answer questions that apply specifically to that section (see the results of a workbook used by Health Canada). The workbook approach is also nice in that it works just as well offline in paper format as it does online in HTML. Or start from scratch and do primary research using an online questionnaire and generating a discussion paper based on participants' responses. Think also of possibilities for mobile phones and online gaming as interactive tools.
  • Know your medium. Your content needs to be closely tied to the communication platform you choose to support it. Different media (eg public meetings, print, websites, discussion boards, blogs, wikis, videos, podcasts, SMS) bring different expectations about tone, style and interactivity. When you are developing content to support and promote your project, keep these in mind and adjust your project's timing, resource requirements and personnel competencies as needed. If you are new to using a particular medium, such as video or mobile, give yourself plenty of time to experiment and trial different approaches to ensure you are comfortable with a particular medium and that it meets your audience's needs.
  • Quality not quantity. Be aware that producing good content demands a lot of effort to frame the issues in a way that will provoke thoughtful responses from people. At a minimum, content should be:
    • factual
    • focused on policy dilemmas and balanced in its treatment of competing views
    • provocative insofar as it raises key questions for discussion
    • educational
    • readable -- written in plain language, at appropriate reading levels and in multiple languages, if non-English speakers are part of your target audience
    • easily digested -- not long
    • entertaining -- make use of story-telling and narrative devices to engage readers
    • worth talking about.
  • Ensure quality control. A process for producing good material to support online participation is likely to include:
    • literature reviews and environmental scanning of academic and news sources
    • interviews with experts or stakeholders
    • roadtesting of draft content with a small sample of experts and non-experts
    • consistent revisions in light of feedback.

Generate discussion

People need something to talk about. You have prepared your ground by developing good questions that people care about and can understand. You've also provided information to help support and inform their responses. Consider the following when launching your online discussion.

  • Find people. Recruiting participants for your project will happen through a mix of network tapping, advertising, media presence, or through the help of a research company which may do random recruitment on your behalf. You may also make use of 'touchpoints' where the public encounters your agency. For example, freephone 0800 numbers, email signatures, voicemail and service offices can all be used to get the word out about your process.
  • Encourage multimedia expression. Don't just expect people to respond with essays. They are more likely to provide stories and anecdotes based on their experiences. Multimedia allows people to share these in different ways. So think about how to encourage people to tell stories in the medium of their choice -- video, SMS, text, print, photos, paintings, drawings -- while being careful to ensure information is accessible for people with disabilities or narrow bandwidth.
  • Make it easy. Make the barriers to contributing to the conversation as low as possible. Design your website with ease of use and accessibility in mind, so that each click can be of value.
  • Connect people. People will be interested in the content you have produced to introduce them to the subject matter if it's done well. But they will be even more interested in the ideas they produce or discover themselves as they respond. Find interesting and imaginative ways to connect people, unlock their creativity and share what they know, think or feel with others. Point out participants who are saying similar things, different things, outrageous things that might be of interest. Use the technology to produce information that will help lead people to discovery.
  • Remember the 1 percent rule. In most online environments, typically just 1 percent of users will contribute 90 percent of your content. About 10-20 percent will contribute occasionally. The rest will watch, and contribute if you make it easy for them. Bear in mind that:
    • 'lurkers' are the bulk of the iceberg and are not to be discounted or dismissed -- they can bring ideas they see online into the offline world. Work hard to engage them in ways that work best for them
    • the engaged 1 percent are your most passionate participants. Because of their passion, they are leaders and can help engage others. But be sure that they distinguish themselves with the merit of their ideas and the efforts they apply to building the strength of the community -- not their ability to generate noise. Your strategy as host, therefore, is to set a tone of radical meritocracy. Your participants are the frontline arbiters of merit. You are a second order arbiter as the person who summarises 'key points'. The third (and final) arbiters are decision-makers, who make the final judgement about what evidence impacts their choice.

Ross Mayfield has produced the following useful graph describing the spectrum of contributions that are possible online.

Diagram 3: Law of Participation

Image:lawofparticipation.jpg

  • Get decision makers online. Decision makers should also be encouraged to review and participate in online discussions themselves. There is nothing like firsthand experience of a discussion to create appreciation of its nuances and significance. This will also reinforce participants' sense that they are part of a significant discussion.

Present results

If you've chosen well, your discussion should have produced lots of ideas. You now need to do the following.

  • Summarise and share your findings. Participation processes tend to turn out a lot of data. You need to be accurate, fair and complete in presenting what people have told you. At the same time, navigating volumes of raw data can be very difficult. Your virtuous efforts to ensure transparency could actually obfuscate findings if your data is too hard to work through. Making sense of what you have heard will mean:
    • making your data more navigable and organised by employing data visualisation tools or by encouraging participants to organise their contributions with user-generated metadata (such as tags) from the outset
    • for unstructured data, there is nothing to do but sit down, start reading/listening/watching, and begin writing summaries. Try to capture the tone of the debate, as much as possible, and various points of contention. Reflect the trade-offs people faced, the arguments from various sides and what sort of consensus was reached, if any. Where possible, use actual quotations from people. This will help participants see their impact on the process and make for more compelling reading
    • showing summaries to participants for their approval. Encourage them to focus on actionable outputs from the process. Your summaries should faithfully reflect the discussion, but also meet the needs of senior management and ministers who will use them, as part of their wider evidence base, to help them make their decisions.
  • Present reviewed findings to senior management and Ministers for their decision. Make sure decision makers focus on the results of online participation:
    • the report reviewed by your participants should be identical to the one presented to senior management and Ministers when reporting on the results of consultation and preparing Cabinet and Cabinet committee papers.
    • you may also need to add some confidential analysis of proposals that come out of your process. Explain to participants the need for confidential ministerial advice in advance -- it should be part of the map you provide for participants about the decision making process. Inform them of the sort of considerations you will have in advising Ministers (in fact, these should be included in your basic questions to participants), and allow participants to work to or reject these considerations as they see fit.
  • Give participants timely feedback on decisions taken. Closing the feedback loop is one of the most important stages in online participation processes, but is often overlooked:
    • in reporting back, policy announcements are good, launching a new programme or service is better. People always appreciate the tangible over the intangible
    • allow people to voice disagreement with the decision if they feel it's deserved. But ministers should be confident in their role as elected decision-makers and their reasons for a decision, and be prepared to explain why -- given limited resources or in the light of other options -- they chose one route over another
    • experience with online participation to date shows that people accept not getting everything they want, provided no one has led them to expect that they will.
  • Look for opportunities to continue the conversation. In complex policy and service areas there is always room for more discussion. Consider forming an ongoing relationship with your community by:
    • making the online community a part of your regular processes -- float ideas, ask questions of each other in the normal course of business. The network that forms is likely to be an excellent source of grassroots expertise and will continue to be an asset to future policy advice or programmes
    • enlisting your passionate users. Some of your most active contributors may also be excellent supporters and implementors of the results. If they are willing, encourage them to spread the word about the results of your process. Or ask them to help the new policy or service to hit the ground running.

Links

Case studies

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

All of Government Portal Participation Page Case Study

Ministry of Economic Development's www.businessconsultation.govt.nz Case Study

The Beehive Website Case Study

Toi te Taiao: the Bioethics Council Case Study

SafeAs! Roadsafety Stakeholder Engagement Case Study

Relevant reading

  • Framing Issues for Public Deliberation: A curriculum guide for workshops. National Issues Forum Institute. http://www.nifi.org/
  • The wisdom of crowds : why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. James Surowiecki. New York: Doubleday. 2004.
  • The Design of Everyday Things. Donald Norman. New York: Basic Books. 2002. c1988.
  • Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Edward Tufte. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press. c1997.



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