Before deciding to ‘go digital’….
/Before deciding to ‘go digital’….
Whether you work for a government or another type of institution, there are some important things to consider when evaluating digital participation platforms. Many of these issues come up when hosting any participatory decision-making process. But they may need extra attention if you’re considering a digital platform.
Think through your process
It's important to sufficiently plan your program before selecting a digital platform to implement it. Creating a meaningful and accessible participatory process deserves careful consideration. After all, asking people to join a digital platform and share ideas or vote for proposals is not an insignificant request (especially if individuals are hesitant based on past experiences that have been less than satisfactory). The People Powered online resource center includes a selection of guides, manuals, case studies, and other tools that can help you design a participatory process. You can filter them based on language, country, and type of institution, among other factors.
At the same time, you may feel pressure to demonstrate immediate results. To assure you have enough time to design an effective participatory process, consider starting small with a pilot program. Beginning with a limited pilot can make it less likely you'll be accused of mis-allocating resources, while giving you space to learn what works for your context and participants. It can also help you manage high expectations while you learn what works and what doesn't.
With pilot projects, or prototypes of digital platforms, your goal is to demonstrate and further develop the efficacy of the participatory experience. Put the participant experience first, and build out the platform based on that. Participants' experiences when engaging in the process are paramount.
Another tip is to win the support of key decision-makers early in their term (if they're elected) or role. This may offer the opportunity to be more bold versus later in their term, when they're considering re-election or future career moves. Ciudadanía Inteligente even requires mayoral endorsement to join the Abre Alcaldías project, as it demonstrates that there's sufficient political support to get started.
By researching your context and designing an appropriate process first, you can determine if or how digital platforms can support your program. This way you can choose your tools based on what you want to accomplish.
Before launching a participation platform, remember that how you run the process will communicate volumes to the people you’re engaging.
Commit to inviting participation for the right reasons
Bad reasons to run an open process include:
Trying to demonstrate support for decisions that have already been made (called “open washing”). Digital participation platforms are an expensive and labor-intensive way of doing this.
Showing that you’re listening, but without any adjustments to plans or follow-up actions based on participant input. People feel burned when this happens. It makes them less likely to participate in the future.
Expecting digital tools to result in accountability and oversight when dealing with corrupt governments or other bad-faith actors. If this describes your situation, you're better off partnering with existing accountability organizations to identify an alternative strategy.
Collecting data from a community, and nothing else. There are easier ways to do this, such as a simple survey.
Good reasons for running an open process include:
Wanting to achieve real constituent buy-in for a potential decision.
Seeking to learn something from the public, with a commitment to adjusting plans as a result.
Getting a more diverse mix of ideas and comments than meetings usually gather.
Reaching more people, in absolute terms.
Taking advantage of digital features, like automatic updates sent to participants who express interest in particular projects.
Generating a large volume of actionable knowledge about the needs of your community.
Building a publicly accessible home for the documents, decisions, and conversations that went into a decision.
Commit to inclusion from the very start
"Half of the population isn't online," says Margo Loor of CitizenOS, "and of those that are, 'online' means Facebook, because everything else is too expensive." (Facebook is less expensive because in many countries, its parent company, Meta, subsidizes internet and mobile providers to discount the data people use on its products.)
Even for people with internet access, the digital divide isn't solved with the mere availability of a broadband connection. There are many factors, including civic efficacy (people's sense of whether and how their involvement makes a difference), comfort and confidence using digital tools, past experience interacting with institutions, and even how top-of-mind a participatory process is (or is not).
Evidence is still emerging on the effect of COVID-19 forcing many participatory processes onto digital platforms. Some of the members of our Digital Participation Platforms Guide work team found that digital-only engagement led to a drop in involvement. This was attributed in part to lack of technical training and support, as well as loss of the visibility and urgency of in-person components. Kelly McBride, at FutureGov, found that supporting participants in the transition to online engagement, through assistive hardware and software, digital induction sessions, and live digital support, is crucial to retention. Research in the United Kingdom found that citizens engaging in digital deliberation during the pandemic maintained a good quality of engagement despite the challenging times.
Participants' perception of their options appears to be an important factor. In San Pedro Garza García, Mexico, people who were used to participating in person worried that their feedback wouldn't count as much on a digital platform. Likewise, in China, where people have visited local government offices to solve problems in person for centuries, relying on digital platforms doesn't always feel natural. China's “Mayor's Mailbox,” the name for its municipal digital platform, has begun to shift this attitude over the past couple of decades.
The Liuyan website invites Chinese citizens to directly message political leaders.
Not everyone feels comfortable telling the government what to do (even if they are invited to). There are many reasons for this, including historical and current oppression and various forms of inequality, such as unevenly distributed privilege. When traditionally excluded communities are given the opportunity to publicly voice their needs and desires, it may challenge the existing social hierarchy and many years of enforced norms.
When online platforms are introduced, one of the major barriers is the digital divide. This is manifested not just in disparity of internet access, but also speed of connections, cost of data plans, ownership of up-to-date personal devices, and/or degree of familiarity with the necessary technology. Digital platforms that aren't compatible with assistive technology, like screen readers, further hinder participation. In addition, platforms that require people to complete additional registration steps, such as email activation or identity verification, can quickly lose a significant number of participants.
Combined, all of these factors add up to a reality in which some people feel more comfortable expressing their views than others. Unfortunately, research suggests that digital participation platforms can empower the very people who already enjoy disproportionate power in society. Emilia Saiz, the secretary general of United Cities and Local Government, has found the same: "Underrepresentation of vulnerable groups in decision-making spaces has been critical, and we need to face this."
You will not realize the benefits of participatory decision-making if your process isn’t designed for the community you’re trying to empower. It is therefore very important that digital-participation hosts consider equity and inclusion at the beginning of the process. Achieving an equitable participatory process will probably take extra effort. This might mean spending more on outreach, or allocating more time to talking to people who use the platform. It will be worth it.
One way to promote equity early in the process is to dedicate more resources to both traditional and online outreach. We explore outreach methods later in this guide. Education about participatory programs can play an important role in citizens' readiness to participate in even the most inviting decision-making processes. Brazil's e-Democracia parliamentary engagement platform, for example, integrates explanatory videos to help bridge gaps in knowledge.
The Brazilian Parliament's e-Democracia platform includes a variety of helpful videos like this one that explain how its formal political processes work, and how the digital platforms tie in.
Consider:
Who is likely to feel less comfortable using a digital platform to voice their opinions, and what can you do to ease that challenge?
Who is less likely to know that the engagement process is happening in the first place, and how might you adapt your outreach methods to reach them?
Social justice is advanced through the inclusion of traditionally excluded groups and citizens in vital decision-making processes. After all, the resulting decisions directly impact their communities.
An effective method to intensify inclusion is called sortition (also known as a citizen assembly). Hosts start with a universe of people, like the national registry of citizens, and randomly select a sample from which to recruit. This method invites diversity, although it is not necessarily representative of the population. Hosts also should work to equalize sign-up rates among the randomly invited participants, such as by providing a stipend to cover time away from work.
Commit to accountability
Participants will quickly tire of voicing their opinions if there isn't a clear link between their participation and resulting action. Meaningful public participation requires more than asking for public input and setting up an engagement platform. If anything, doing these things without connecting voice to action can further decrease trust between people and their government.
Before launching a participation process, consider:
Is the government prepared to delegate authority to participants?
Will open participation subvert traditional decision-making? Will the government allow this?
Does the government or institution have enough political flexibility to try engaging participants in a new way?
Does the government have the capacity to follow the rules of the open process? Can the process survive the existing bureaucracy?
If you get participant feedback that doesn't apply to your project or department, how will you make sure it reaches the appropriate recipient?
How long will your process run? Can it be an ongoing program? Is there a clear point person or office who people can contact if they want to keep engaging after the process is complete?
If you’re hosting an open participation process, it will be your responsibility to connect participant feedback to government (or institutional) action. (To citizens, the government often feels like one entity, even if the internal reality is far more complicated).
If the sheer volume of responses is a challenge, you can set a threshold goal in which any proposal with a specified degree of public support is guaranteed a reply. Some program managers go further and strive to respond to a set percentage of incoming messages, such as 90%.
An example of the administrator’s view of a digital participation platform. Hosts can categorize proposals and designate the appropriate department responsible for following up.
Accountability also means taking participant feedback seriously. In the vTaiwan participatory decision-making process, a government agency invites stakeholders to come together to deliberate a controversial issue and make a recommendation. For example, to determine whether Uber should be legal in the country, vTaiwan brought together taxi drivers, Uber drivers, and riders. The hosting government agency is required to respond to the feedback received: All opinions are incorporated into the related decision-making discussions. The host also must provide a timely reply to questions that arise, specify which recommendations are being adopted, and report back in detail on why the others are not.
Even though you may not be able to implement every idea your constituents suggest, doing your best to respect their input by replying will build trust in the overall process.
Consider it a long-term relationship
Creating a smoothly operating participation process can take years. Likewise, developing a healthy dynamic between citizens and government (or institution and constituency) can take decades. This is a long-term process. So, treat this project as an engagement “habit.”
You can do this by planning for long-term participation from the start. Budgets shift, administrations end, and staff come and go. A digital participation platform preferred by one political party may lose favor and be discontinued when a rival party wins power.If the budget for the platform and outreach program may not be renewed, which design decisions can you make now that will make the process a meaningful contribution either way?
One important way to achieve long-term results is to help participants connect with each other, not just with your office. By using the resources you have now to connect residents with each other, you can foster relationships that will fuel long-term involvement. Discussions between participants may produce other ongoing benefits long after your participation process has ended.
Choose a digital platform that allows people passionate about the same issue to connect. Can you make proposals available for all to see, so that even if you don't have the capacity to act on each idea, others can?
Offering features such as the ability to form working groups, exchange private messages, and schedule offline meetings or events can strengthen social bonds between users.
Another way to ensure your work endures is to embed participatory processes into the institution itself. While executive leadership support is critical to initiating a new process, enshrining it in the day-to-day functioning of the bureaucracy is equally important.
The Parti Co-op team refers to the process as a "journey," and recommends that you treat digital participation as a multi-year project. If you are working within government or a similar institution, you will likely face pressure to run one-off engagement campaigns. Fight the instinct to think in one-year timelines. A successful digital participation process and platform requires several levels of institutional action, including policy and operations, with a longer horizon. The Parti team has found in its work in Seoul and elsewhere that a substantial portion of the platform development process is project planning, with the involvement of internal teams required at many steps along the way. Work to convince your institution that this is a long-term project, and therefore deserves long-term planning and operational experience over time to be successful.
Next: Selecting a Platform
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