E-consultation for Dgov students 2009

From E-Consultation Guide

Place

Peter Froggatt Centre 311 (computer lab)

Time

1100-1230 on 4 Dec. 2009

There are a lot of new things happening this year, as more people start to use Web 2.0 and the European Union is expanding its e-participation programmes. On Saturday I will be bringing you up-to-date on the launch of the HUWY project, which is taking place in Edinburgh on Thursday 3rd December.

In the mean time get prepared.

Contents 1 Preparation 2 Twitter exercise 3 Contrasts 4 Types of knowledge 5 Types of participant: Facebook exercise 6 Consultation stages 7 Engaging policy-makers in e-participation: a GSS exercise 8 Further reading

Preparation

To save time during the session, please register on the following sites in advance.

• Twitter.
• Facebook (you can practise in the Dgov group).
• Google Reader, Groups, Docs, Calendar, News, Sidewiki and Wave can all be used once you set up a Google account.^[1]

Then take a look at our guide to e-consultation, in particular the pages on Technology classification, and read the Morison and Newman article to learn the theoretical background.

NB. Make sure you bring to the session your QUB login details (student number and password). Otherwise you will not even be able to use the computers in the lab.

Twitter exercise

Let's start the session with a hands-on exercise.

1. Log in to a computer, start a web browser, and go to Twitter.
2. Log in to your Twitter account.
3. Find the Twitter pages of your fellow students, and follow them. My Twitter account is davidrnewman (referenced at @davidrnewman in Twitter messages).
4. Go back to your home page, and type in short observation: something that intrigued you over the last two days in this Doctorate of Governance course.

This is the essence of Twitter: short observations, questions, ideas and experiences you want to share with others right now.

By now you may have seen an interesting tweet from a fellow student or someone else you are following.

1. Write a reply comment, quoting part of the original, with @theirnickname before the quoted bit so that people can follow back to the source.

Most follow-ups to tweets occur shortly after the tweet (within say 30 min. or an hour). They can engender spontaneous engagement, that spreads from follower to follower, thanks to retweets.

Throughout this session, write short twitter messages with any questions you have, or ideas that occur to you.

Contrasts

• Try to find current public consultations in Northern Ireland from NI Direct, and see how citizens are expected to engage.

versus

• America Speaks runs large-scale 21st Century Town Meetings. See the America Speaks videos.

Types of knowledge

Do you want to collect explicit knowledge using quantitative techniques,

• a Web survey on your consultation and technology experience, run using Lime Survey

or tacit knowledge (e.g. feelings, experiences, stories) using qualitative techniques?

• Patient Opinion has stories about their experiences of NHS services.
• A story-collecting site for The Wheel's input to the Taoiseach's task force on active citizenship, set up by the E-Consultation Research Project.

Or do you want to map stories to places?

• Fix My Street lets people report local problem on a map, and when they are fixed.
• Community Walk map of NI probation office locations

Thanks to Web 2.0, there are many ways of electronically supporting citizen participation in policy. We can select them based on

1. The type of knowledge you want to produce, and
2. the communication modes favoured by the intended participants.

Types of participant: Facebook exercise

1. Go to Facebook and log in.
2. Search for the Dgov group.
3. Join the group.
4. Click on the Discussion tab.
5. Click on Technologies to engage participants

Now think about the different kinds of participants you might want to engage in one of your consultations. What technologies or procedures would you use to attract them to your consultation, and make it easy for them to take part?

1. Post a reply to the topic, in the form suggested.
2. Then comment on some of the ideas of your classmates.

Consultation stages

We have designed a flow chart that you can use to select technologies to support different stages of a consultation process. This is based on Technology matching for E-consultation from the Morison and Newman paper, where we consider public consultation as a mediation process.

There is not time in this session to go through all of our technology classification, we will merely highlight some points.

Engaging policy-makers in e-participation: a GSS exercise

The final point to consider is how to most effectively and efficiently engage policy-makers in e-participation processes, in ways that:

1. Ensure that the participants/consultees are taken seriously, and get good enough feedback that they do not become cynical and disengaged.
2. The knowledge produced can be used in policy-shaping processes.

Take the example of the HUWY project. See also HUWY: engaging students in distributed discussions on Internet policy.

It is a mass scale European e-participation project. 80 groups of young people will discuss Internet governance, and write up their experiences, views and ideas to be read by policy-makers. As they have grown up with the Internet, there are lots of things Ministers and Permanent Secretaries can learn from them. But how can we get policy makers to read the ideas of the young people, leave comments, and take this material on-board in their own policy work?

• Use the WebIQ Group Support System for electronic brainstorming.

Further reading

In addition to the references in the course handout, I would like to point you to some recent e-participation examples:

• The Oireachtas's e-consultation on the Broadcasting Bill.
• ICT and Parliaments and the World e-Parliament conference.
• EDEM 2009 conference in Vienna.

1. ↑ You don't need to sign up for Google Mail if you don't need it.