The ten golden rules of online participation and engagement

I'm sitting at the Bang the Table display at the IAP2 Conference in Glasgow. A fantastic gathering of specialists in community participation and a great place to share ideas about emerging best practice in online engagement and participation. I thought (given that this is a quiet moment) that I would attempt to set out 10 golden rules of online participation.

Of course we are learning as we go so I will probably revisit these in a few months to add to or edit the list. Perhaps others would like to join in too?

Here goes:

1. The most important lesson so far is that if you engage on line you must back your consultation with robust statistics relating to visitor numbers and behaviour otherwise you will never know what sort of response you have really had. Not everybody comments at a public meeting and they dont in an on line forum either.

2. Think about the questions you ask. 'What are your comments on the overall community welfare budget' is likely to elicit little more than a yawn but 'budget costraints mean we have to close the childcare centre' brings people's attention to an issue they can instantly relate to.

3. Publicity, Publicity Publicity! If you dont tell the community its there they cannot be expected to find it. Use the traditional media, mailouts and local networks as well as links, social network sites, and any other means to ensure that your community find the consultation

4. Provide relevant information in a format that is easy to read. A 10 page PDF is a good way to communicate to people in an office as they can print it out and read it. It is a hopeless way to communicate with a mechanic accessing the consultation on his iphone during a tea break. 1 page summaries are much better, photos are great, videos ae fantastic

5. Set out the parameters of the discussion upfront. This includes moderation rules, closing dates, how this sits with the decision process and what feedback people should expect.

6. Don't get sucked in to debate. Set facts straight, answer basic questions but dont get drawn in. While you're at it make sure your colleagues have clear internal protocols for interacting in the consultation.

7. Track the traffic that the consultation is attracting and consider follow up publicity if you are not satisfied that sufficient numbers have viewed the consultation. Remember, in most cases, visitors not comments is the truest reflection of success.

8. Consider initiatives to target certain sections of the population. Bass Council used Bang the Table to target non resident property owners and wrote to them directly. Lylea McMahon MP targetted young people and worked with schools to get feedback on youth unemployment issues.

9. Use social networking sites like Facebook groups and community forums to get the message out to specialist groups in the community.

10. Be consistent in your use of online consultation so that over time your community grow used to participating in this way. Like most things in life, online participation will be treated with caution by some people until they get used to it.

Well that's the list so far. I must admit I could have combined 8 and 9 but having 10 golden rules seems so much neater than 9!

How does online consultation marry with the IAP2 Core Values?

As an international leader in public participation, the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) has developed the "IAP2 Core Values for Public Participation" for use in the development and implementation of public participation processes. The core values were developed over a two year period with broad international input to identify those aspects of public participation which cross national, cultural, and religious boundaries. The purpose of the core values is to help make better decisions which reflect the interests and concerns of potentially affected people and entities.

The purpose of this piece is to consider, as the title suggests, how or even whether, online consultation marries with those values.

#1 Public participation is based on the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process.

Online engagement strategies are clearly consistent with, and facilitate the involvement of, all those who are affected by a decision. The key objective of online engagement strategies is to give people who would otherwise not be in a position to participate in more time/travel/capacity intensive processes to participate at their will and whim. The starting point is a belief that people should be able to get involved in the decision making process to a great or lesser degree entirely at their convenience. No technology or technique meets this goal with the breadth and depth permitted by online engagement processes.

#2 Public participation includes the promise that the public's contribution will influence the decision.

Online engagement strategies, as with more traditional techniques, meet this goal at the whim of the decision maker. The level of influence that the general public are permitted to have on a decision is more a matter of the culture of the decision making authority and the nature of the issue at hand. The consultation technology used to bring community opinion into the decision making process reflects these two matters. And so, at one end of the spectrum we see the use of age old "submissions" for consideration by the decision making authority, and at the other we see the formation of citizens juries and the like to determine the way forward. Web 2.0 is very similar in that there are a range of tools and those tools can be applied in a variety of ways depending on the level of decision making flexibility that the particular issue and organisation is willing to countenance. You might use a simple feedback form to collect accurate information for distribution to the appropriate section of the organisation, or you might use an open wiki to allow anybody and everybody to upload content and "own" the consultation space. The former might be useful, for example, for development applications, the later for community development projects or community strategic planning.

#3 Public participation promotes sustainable decisions by recognizing and communicating the needs and interests of all participants, including decision makers.

Online consultation technologies provide a unique opportunity to use a range of media to communicate the needs and interests of both the community participants and the decision makers. The opportunity to share text comments or submissions, reports, maps, video, photographs, and to "mash" these to produce a much richer learning experience for all participants cannot be achieved using any other technology. It is possible for example, to use a mixture of mapping, photo, video and text to provide compelling information about a particular location based issue. This can be done either by the decision maker, or, where appropriate, by all participants in the process.

#4 Public participation seeks out and facilitates the involvement of those potentially affected by or interested in a decision.

Online consultation is a methodology for reaching many "hard to reach" groups who would not otherwise have the opportunity to get involved in a consultation process - commuters, young parents, people who don't particularly enjoy public meetings, people who might be mobility impaired, and a whole range of other groups. Clearly, online consultation doesn't reach some groups particularly well, I would not recommend online consultation if a particular consultation was targeting older, poorer, migrants with no access to or interest in the Internet. A question remains for all consultation methodologies about the best way to target "hard to get at" groups. Online consultation is the best way to at the very least make the consultation process as accessible as possible to as a proportion of the community as possible.

#5 Public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate.

There is nothing to preclude the community from being involved in the design of the online consultation technologies. However, I would content that this particular "core value" is rarely met by the vast majority of consultation programs.

#6 Public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.

This is a particular strength of online technologies as detailed above. Traditional face-to-face technologies generally rely on people reading lots and lots of information if they want to get a good handle on the issues. This is discriminatory and unfair. Online tools provide an opportunity to use short videos, maps, photo's, drawings et cetera to communicate complex information in a manner that is far most digestible for the average punter than a technical report by a professional engineer/ecologist/sociologist et cetera.

#7 Public participation communicates to participants how their input affected the decision.

The web generally provides an accessible space for organisations to communicate back to the community the nature of the decision and ways that community input has influenced the either the gross decision or the details embedded within the decision.

They keep asking questions - what should I do?

Over the past 8 months we have learned (sometimes the hard way) what constitutes best practice in terms of project team participation in online consultations. I thought it might be worth running through our current view of best practice. I will revisit this again when we have learned more, as we invariably will.

Participation vs moderation
It is important to note that this is distinct from moderation. In terms of the consultations we do on Bang the Table moderation is a simple matter of removing irrelevant, obscene or defamatory remarks. It is a content free process.

Use a generic name
So, first things first, identifying yourself as a project member. In all Bang the Table sites (whether bangthetable.com or one of our tailored sites) the client can enter members of a 'project team' and these people are identified distinctly from the rest of the users. This enables you to stand out from the crowd and to speak with authority. We advise that you choose a generic title, 'Project Coordinator' for example. This ensures that even if the debate gets heated, it cannot get personal.

Nominate who should respond and control responses
We think that only one or two people in your organisation should be able to access and use that login so that responses from other areas of the organsation get entered on to the site by those people only. This prevents inconsistent levels of response and the possibility of staff members getting drawn into debate with the community.

Don't get sucked in
I guess this is the first rule - never ever enter into the debate. There will always be people trying to draw you in. Dont fall for it. You are engaging the community you need to hear their views and respond but there is nothing to be gained by arguing. In fact it is contrary to the point of the process.

So, if people spread myths about your project calmly and dispasionately state the facts. Only do this once. If they continue with their myth or misconception just let them. The structure of Bang the table means that your response will appear just near their myth and other readers can and will judge for themselves. Usually they will side with you because the truth is more believable anyway.

Persistent questioners
Another thing we come across is the persistent questioner. Not simple questions of clarification but people who are trying to demonstrate their own wisdom by tripping you up. How can you tell the difference - you often can't at first so we recommend that you answer only simple and directly relevant questions in a web forum.

We advise strongly against getting drawn in to answering complex questions. Instead provide people with a phone number to call or post a document in to the library and refer them to it. This means the questioner gets access to the information but does not get to derail the whole consultation and take it down another road. this is really the same as in a public meeting. You are unlikely to have all the information there but can contact people to provide it later.

Dont be afraid not to respond
This may not sound too helpful but, if in doubt, dont be afraid not to respond. We have had a number of clients who choose to not participate in forums and adopt a purely listening role. This works just fine but it is best to outline your intentions from the outset to manage expectations.

Often you will see people in these forums demanding responses but there is no evidence that the value of the feedback from the community is reduced by not answering. Indeed most people seem happy to make their views known. However, we do recommend some limited participation to reassure the community that you are listening.

I hope that helps. I would love to see some comment, experiences and other views so please post replies to this post if you disagree.

Article from Live Wire in SMH on Web 2.0 and social change

August 1, 2008 - 10:05AM
LiveWire


The freedom of collaborative sites like Wikipedia is also their biggest flaw, reports Leon Gettler.

WHEN US satirist Stephen Colbert introduced the term "wikiality" - the notion that something exists if it's on Wikipedia and enough people believe it is true - he was going to the heart of the problem, the power of the world's most successful online encyclopedia.

The satirist caused chaos on the site, and got himself blocked from it, when he urged viewers to change items on elephants and claim their population had tripled in six months.

Of course the elephant population had not tripled, but as Colbert said, if enough people changed the page on Wikipedia, it would become a fact.

The satirist was alluding to the dilemma confronting the hero of George Orwell's novel 1984. If the state declared that "two plus two makes five", Orwell wrote, and if everyone believed in it, did that make it true?

To be fair, Wikipedia does have some built-in safety mechanisms. As soon as the false information encouraged by Colbert was put up, it was changed back to normal. The site also locked down the page on elephants along with Colbert's Wikipedia biography.

But that hasn't stopped Colbert. After US senator Hillary Clinton bowed out of the presidential nomination race, Colbert came out with the news that her rival for the Democrat ticket, Senator Barack Obama, might not become the first US black president after all. He announced that Warren G. Harding, US president from 1921 to 1923, was actually black, and that his middle name was "gangsta". "Thank you, Wikipedia," Colbert said.

There is no doubting the power of Wikipedia. The site attracts more visitors than Amazon or eBay. That's partly because it's often the first hit in a Google search and partly because it's a mine of information, even if it's not that well written. But even Wikipedia's typos and clumsy passages have a certain quality about them; they remind you that this enormous encyclopedia is not a commercial venture.

Wikipedia was constructed almost eight years ago by a group of people who were drawn to the idea of a shared non-profit enterprise.

Wiki comes under the umbrella of Web 2.0, a jargon term that has tried to capture the new internet era of participation, information sharing and collaboration. Other Web 2.0 tools include eBay, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and blogs - all part of the new generation of online applications and services offering user-generated content, customised webpages and social networking - or a combination of all three.

All these applications offer new ways for people to engage with each other. And it's not just the geeks and early adaptors who are using them. This technology is so widespread and ubiquitous that just about everyone now uses it in one form or another.

Even Google is getting into the act with its answer to Wikipedia, a service known as "Knol". Anyone with a Google login can submit an article but they must identify themselves. It's all about establishing the service's credibility.

Wikis and applications like them are changing how information flows by allowing people to communicate directly with one another. Society creates and maintains itself through the tools of communication. Change those tools and you change society in ways not seen since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the late 15th century.

For the first time in our history, there is instant mass feedback and input, which has the potential to challenge all the rules.

Wikipedia came into its own on July 7, 2005, at 8.50am, when four synchronised bombs exploded in London's transportation system.

Eighteen minutes later, while media outlets around the world were scrambling to cover the story, a Wiki contributor named Morwen, from Leicester, broke the news. Within minutes, others were adding to the story, including corrections to Morwen's spelling.

The Wikipedia experience during the London bombings was a taste of the internet's challenge to traditional news gathering organisations by amateurs armed with mobile phones. Just as Wikipedia scooped news outlets around the world, the photo-sharing site Flickr provided the first images, including pictures taken with mobile phone cameras by evacuees fleeing the London Underground. Few photojournalists were in the affected part of the transport network; not so the travelling public. They didn't just snap pictures of the fallout from the attacks, they also posted pictures of official notices ("All Underground services are suspended") and notes posted in schools ("Please do not inform children of the explosions"). While the world's media outlets were struggling to get the story, these images were immediately posted on blog sites, generating commentary and discussion.

The challenge posed by the internet's open-access nature and immediacy isn't only to news - it's providing a kind of grassroots democratisation that could reshape business, communities and even relationships between government and the masses.

One of the strengths of collaborative online sites is how they allow people to contribute from remote locations. It's not hard to see that as more people use this online asset to work from home, the potential to transform workplaces and even cities will grow as places that are less about coming to work and more about shopping and entertainment. Just as importantly, this will also change where people choose to live.

Large-scale online collaboration will also have an impact in areas such as biology and environmental and life sciences. Work is now under way on the world's largest encyclopedia to collate information on the 1.8million plants and animals, fungi and bacteria that constitute life on this planet at the embryonic Encyclopedia of Life at http://www.eol.org. Backed by research institutions such as Harvard University, and with technical help from Microsoft, amateurs and enthusiasts are joining scientists in adding to the massive database.

Collaborative sites are also changing grassroots activism. In 2006, for example, the military coup in Thailand placed restrictions on reporting by the media. It had not counted on the local population, which started posting on Flickr the earliest photos of tanks in front of Government House and the parliament building. One user, Alisara Chirapongse, also posted links to Wikipedia. These applications are also being used to make money. In Chicago, for example, a business called Threadless (threadless.com), which makes T-shirts, lets people submit design ideas and vote for weekly winners, who receive $2000 in cash and $500 in gift certificates. This wiki allows the company to outsource the design and market testing of its products to volunteers and create a built-in market of people who like the T-shirts.

Collaborative online sites are also being used by governments. Even the CIA has an Intellipedia wiki based on the same underlying software as Wikipedia.

The Melbourne City Council invited comments and ideas on how Melbourne will look 12 years from now on its Future Melbourne wiki (futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan/WebHome). During the period of consultation, which finished last month, there were about 9300 visits to the site from 6500 people. About 200 individual edits were made to the plan for Melbourne's future.

Land and Water Australia, the Government agency that looks into sustainable management and our natural resources and farming, has a wiki (rkrk.net.au/index.php/RegionalKnowledgeResourceKit%28RKRK%29) that helps communities develop strategies for looking after the land and linking up with other communities.

But do such collaborative sites really have the potential to make democracies stronger?

Bob Hayward, a director of accountancy firm KPMG's IT advisory services, believes they can. He says they will allow more people to participate in government and have a say in decisions.

"It's going to be a positive rather than a negative," he says. "With council meetings, for example, people will be able to clarify how decisions are made and they might even be able to contribute and take part in the debate from a remote location."

But there is a darker side. The strengths of the Wikipedia model of mass collaboration and open-source technology where anyone can change anything is also its weakness.

One year after it was revealed that staff working for the Howard and Iemma governments had been removing embarrassing information from Wikipedia entries, senior public servants are in the news again sanitising information. And it's happening on both sides of the political fence.

Last week the page for Innovation Minister Kim Carr was modified to remove personal details and a reference to him being criticised for branch stacking.

In June, Wikipedia was forced to lock down its page on Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty after a contributor portrayed him as a deranged conspiracy theorist. In May references to former foreign minister Alexander Downer's privileged family background were removed. Last year, in the lead-up to the federal election, the website WikiScanner embarrassed the Howard government when it revealed that people using Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Defence Department computers had made thousands of changes to Wikipedia articles, included the deletion of a claim that the then treasurer Peter Costello was known by the nickname "Captain Smirk". Changes had also been made to an article on the children overboard affair. At the time, prime minister John Howard denied ordering staff to edit the entries.

In his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations (Penguin, 2008), US commentator Clay Shirky says the result of this online revolution will be even more seismic than those brought about by the invention of other communication technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, telephone, recorded content and radio and television.

"We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race," he writes. "More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under 1million participants to over 1billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions in communications tools."

But its critics fear the technology could allow companies and governments to harvest data in order to monitor and impose more controls over our behaviour.

Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and contributor to The New York Times, described it as the "cult of the amateur" in his seminal 2005 essay The Amorality of Web 2.0.

Wikipedia, he said, had a "slipshod quality" that venerated the amateur and distrusted the professional. "In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the web is leading us to a higher consciousness," Carr writes. "In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable and the writing is often appalling."

Carr believes Web 2.0 and Wikipedia are "scary" because they are transforming the economics of our culture and could put the media establishment and other companies out of business.

Think of the way that digitisation has changed the economics of publishing, film and music production, drug companies and fashion design - businesses that make their living out of creating and selling intellectual property.

Carr writes: "Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines ... Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I, for one, can't imagine anything more frightening."

The other big criticism of Wikipedia is the problem identified by satirist Stephen Colbert when he coined the term "Wikiality". With its millions of amateur editors, critics say the content can be unreliable, full of half-truths and misunderstandings and easy to manipulate to suit agendas.

Connecting people and bringing positive social change or full of half-truths and manipulated by spin doctors? Regardless of where you sit on the debate, it is clear that social online collaboration is changing the society around us in ways never before seen.

Whether this is for better or worse remains to be seen.