SafeAs! Roadsafety Stakeholder Engagement Case Study
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<Guide to Online Participation/4. Resources/4.2. Case studies
This is a case study of the SafeAs! Roadsafety Stakeholder Engagement process.
Contents |
About Safe As
From the Safe As website:
- On July 17 2006 the National Road Safety Committee (NRSC) launched a nationwide series of “pre-policy” engagement workshops with stakeholders and the community. These workshops along with the follow up discussion that has taken place on the road safety forum were used to provide Government with policy proposals to complete implementation of the Government’s Road Safety to 2010 strategy.
- The NRSC comprises The Secretary for Transport (convenor), The Commissioner of Police, The Secretary for Education, and the Chief Executives of: Land Transport New Zealand, Transit New Zealand, The Accident Compensation Corporation, and Local Government New Zealand. The Secretary of Labour, the Secretary for Justice and the Director-General of Health are associate members of the Committee.
The engagement involved 15 workshops held around New Zealand with community stakeholders. The sessions were supported with materials, including a DVD 'scene-setter' and a background information booklet. Summaries of each session were posted online for comment by workshop participants. In addition, a discussion board called the 'Road Safety Forum' was set up to allow for online discussion of issues, such as speed management, alcohol and drugs, and penalties. More than 1000 people participated in the workshops, and as of June 2007, some 270 registered users have contributed more than 3000 posts to the online discussion forum.
The workshops asked participants two main questions.
- What are the specific problems related to speed, alcohol and young drivers that you believe are negatively affecting road safety? If you believe other issues are equally or more important what are they and what are the specific problems associated with those issues?
- What ideas do you have to resolve the problems identified in question one and how could these be implemented in ways that would achieve broad community support?
Facilitators summarised answers to these questions to ensure all ideas were captured. In a couple of workshops they chose to allocate participants with 'voting' stickers. These stickers allowed participants to indicate if they would support a given idea wholeheartedly, tolerate the idea or not support it.
There were two main outcomes of the process:
- A Road Safety Policy Statement launched by the Minister of Transport, Hon Annette King, and Transport Safety Minister Hon Harry Duynhoven, which reflected and incorporated many of the suggestions provided in the workshop and online (eg a new approach to the demerits point system).
- A Road Safety Education Strategic Framework in response to the 'stand out issue' of the engagement process -- the desire for more information and education about road safety issues. The framework "explains the current road safety education context and provides a model for an aligned, co-ordinated and collaborative effort in addressing road safety education and promotion, and deciding with and through whom, to achieve better road safety outcomes".
Review of the stakeholder engagement programme
The Ministry of Transport commissioned a review of the Safe As programme. The reviewer surveyed a sample of the participants in the programme as well as road safety co-ordinators responsible for the workshops. In addition, a review of the webisite and supporting material was conducted.
The review concluded that the programme was well run, that significant stakeholder engagement occcured, and that the materials provided were appreciated. It also suggested the following improvements for future processes:
- encouraging involvement from the broader community or general public through increased publicity and promotion of the programme
- the use of general public surveys to gauge public support for key ideas
- managing stakeholder expectations and increasing buy-in through increased clarity about the process
- using workshop facilitation to strike more of a balance between local needs and national priorities
- improving methods of participant follow-up and feedback
- continued engagement, building on the existing community.
During the interview with the Ministry of Transport for this case study, it was noted that the review took place before the Government's Road Safety Policy Statement was issued. The statement clearly acknowledged the contributions of the stakeholder engagement process.
Feedback design learning
Conditions
- Transparency through the whole process of engagement is critical. Being transparent about how information from engagement sessions will be used, how it has been summarised, and fidelity to the contributions of participants is critical. As the process moves from engagement to decision making, everyone (citizen, public servant, Minister) as much as possible should be working from the same basis of information.
- Technology is secondary to the principles of engagement. The Safe As community is supported by free software, which is working fine for their purposes. What matters most is the interaction between people, not between people and their machines.
- Creating the right questions is a very difficult but critical process. Questions need to be tested in the context where they are going to be asked, and also may be fluid as process managers learn to ask them more effectively.
- Trust takes time to build. Because of bad experiences in the past, people are likely to be cynical at first. However, once they are able to air their concerns, and they begin to see behaviour that reassures them, they become constructive.
- One strategy Safe As used to build trust was to allow comments to go up without being viewed by a moderator first. This improved the immediacy of contributing and suggested that posts would not be censored by public servants.
Role of public servants
- Public servants were visible and active in the discussions. They intervened as sources of information and/or facts, and took care not to challenge people directly. Other guidelines for public servants working on the site included:
- within their workstream area, summarise user contributions on a weekly basis
- summarise reports for those without the time to read them in full
- discuss and analyse comments in a positive and non-defensive manner, being as open as possible -- there will be times when issues cannot be disclosed because they constitute advice to ministers
- the site is monitored for inappropriate language and personal attacks on Ministers/public servants, and all community members are asked to forward instances of poor conduct.
Role of Ministers
- Ministers were supportive and involved, commenting on the design of the sessions, signing off on questions and even reading the discussion boards. They seemed to think that public servants hearing directly from the public about a policy issue would provide a 'reality check' on their sometimes abstract proposals.
Sustainability/impact
- The community and the tools from the engagement project have been used for other purposes and evolved.
- The pamphlet has been used to inform people beyond the participants in the project about road safety in New Zealand.
- The online community is evolving as a road safety watchdog, even using the Safe As message board to organise road safety demonstrations.
- Engagement has been integrated with the road safety work programme:
- Individual Ministry of Transport programme managers on issues of road safety are responsible for managing their area on the comments board.
- Ministerial letters refer people asking questions about road safety to the online community.
Feedback design opportunities
If transparency is critical to a solid feedback loop, then we have an interesting information design problem on our hands. There are a couple of choices available.
- Present ALL the information, as the Safe As project did, with a summary. This has the advantage of ultimate transparency. It also resulted in more than 100 pages of notes.
- Work out some way of visualising the information available so that people's contributions are more accessible.
- A road safety mashup? -- combine road network data with local knowledge, as well as photos and causes for concern?
- A video message board?
- Better means to organise discussions on the comments board. New users have a hard time getting started and finding the most important conversations. Possibly a tag cloud?
- A redesign of the summary report, using different information design techniques to make stakeholder contributions more accessible?
