E-consultation for Dgov students 2010

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Place
Peter Froggatt Centre, 3/030
Time
1100-1230 on 4 Dec. 2010

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 we will be bringing you up-to-date on the HUWY project, which is getting 80 groups of young people to discuss Internet governance.

In the mean time get prepared.

Contents

Preparation

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

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.

Electronic brainstorming

We will start with a quick bit of electronic brainstorming, before we go into different technologies. It also gives you a chance to see how meetings can be run so quickly you can get home in the snow.

  1. Log in to a computer, using your QUB student number and password and start a web browser.
  2. Click on the WebIQ Group Support System to go to the site we use for electronic brainstorming.
    • If your browser objects to popups, accept them.
  3. Log in using the user name and password you are given in the class.
  4. Click on Join a Session.
  5. Select the session Dgov 2010.

Once everyone is logged in, we will explain the next steps.

Twitter exercise

Now turn to a popular social networking technology. We will do a hands-on exercise.

  1. In another web browser, or a new window, 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

Types of knowledge

Do you want to collect explicit knowledge using quantitative techniques,

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

Or do you want to map stories to places?

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.

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 policy-makers can efficiently process the knowledge produced and make sense of it.
  3. 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: without overburdening them with lots of extra work?

Further reading

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

Transparency and open data


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