Hearing Voices

The Experience of Online Public Consultations and Discussions in UK Governance

By Dr Stephen Coleman

 with Nicola Hall and Milica Howell

 

November 2002

 

Summary

 

 

 

New media, new messages

 

Government is now in the business of listening to people – and being seen to hear what they say. The OECD report on Citizens As Partners observed that, ‘Highly educated, well-informed citizens expect governments to take their views and knowledge into account when making decisions’, and outlines five reasons for governments strengthening their relationships with citizens:

·        Improve the quality of policy, by allowing governments to tap wider sources of information, perspectives, and potential solutions in order to meet the challenges of policy-making under conditions of increasing complexity, policy interdependence and time pressures.

·        Meet the challenges of the emerging information society, to prepare for greater and faster interactions with citizens and ensure better knowledge management.

·        Integrate public input into the policy-making process, in order to meet citizens’ expectations that their voices be heard and their views be considered in decision-making by government.

·        Respond to calls for greater government transparency and accountability, as public and media scrutiny of government actions increases and standards in public life are codified and raised.

·        Strengthen public trust in government and reverse the steady erosion of voter turnout in elections, falling membership in political parties and surveys showing declining confidence in key public institutions.[i]

These are worthy aims, but how can they be achieved? It is one thing for governments to say that they are listening, but another for them to actually listen, hear and learn. It is relatively easy to call for a public debate in which all arguments and all voices are heard, but quite another to stimulate the kind of public deliberation that can invigorate democratic decision-making.  For many, the rise of interactive, digital media such as e-mail and the internet heralded a new age of democracy where the people’s voice would be dominant. From the mid-1990s onwards a number of experimental exercises were established using the internet to connect the public voice to democratic policy-making. Blumler and Coleman identified seven benefits of online civic engagement:

1. Transcending time. Participants can discuss over a period of hours, days, weeks or months in an asynchronous fashion. This allows time for reflective debate.
2. Transcending place. Participation can be open to all, regardless of geographical spread.
3. Making connections. Connections can be made between groups online that would probably not have happened otherwise; politicians, who might not interact directly with citizens very often, find themselves in a position of unusual political intimacy with people who had traditionally formed part of their passive audience.
4. Language of the people.  As in the case of many phone-ins, online discussion tends to be closer to the language of ordinary people.
5. Community building.  Online civic engagement might begin by being narrowly focused on a local issue, but tends often to develop into a broader network, involving both online and offline connections between a range of people who would not have otherwise met and discovered what they shared.
6. Recruitment of experience and expertise. It is possible to recruit people to online discussions whose specific experiences and expertise can inform policy discussions. In the case of disadvantaged or marginalised groups, this can help to make policy formation more inclusive and reflective of real problems.
7. Learning to deliberate.  Participants in online discussion can encounter new ideas and sources of information and new ways of thinking about issues.[ii]

 

 

          

E-democracy presents opportunities to strengthen and add value to representative democracy, but not to replace it. Opportunities, but not guarantees. E-democracy initiatives must be carefully designed and managed if they are to be of genuine use to the democratic process, rather than simple novelty value. Specific dangers to be avoided in such initiatives are social exclusivity, tokenism and technocracy.

 

 

1)      The internet is at the moment a socially exclusive medium. Projects should not be built around the assumption that people own their own computers and can access the internet in their homes. The internet is also a largely monolingual medium. In a multilingual society such as the UK, efforts need to be made to provide content that can be understood by everyone.

 

2)      A second pitfall of some e-democracy efforts has been a tendency to invite the public to participate online and then to ignore them.

 

3)      A third danger of any new technology is that it becomes technocratically dominated. The agenda for e-democracy must be set by people who want a more effective democracy, not by those who want to create bigger text files or snazzier online graphics.

 

Where are we now?

 

Five years ago e-democracy was regarded as a largely speculative experiment. Today governments are taking e-democracy seriously. The UK Government has published a policy for the promotion of e-participation. The UK Parliament’s Information Committee has reported that online consultation fora ‘can significantly enhance the work of the House, if conducted with care’.[iii] The Scottish Parliament has run many online consultations (some of which are examined in this report) and is committed in principle to using the internet to make it an open and accessible legislature.

 

Policy is one thing, practice is another. The declarations of policy intent generally exceed the practical experience in e-participation gained so far by governments and legislatures. Nonetheless, there is a need for rigorous evaluation of what has been done so far, both at a governmental and parliamentary level. The aim of this report is to evaluate e-consultations run by UK Government Departments, the Hansard Society on behalf of the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Executive. The evaluation was conducted under the following headings:

 

i) Targeting and recruitment

ii) Who participated?

iii) The nature of online talk

a)      Message Relevance

b)      Message Quality

c)      Participant Interaction and Community-Building

d)      Aim of messages

iv) Moderation policies

v) Government Responsiveness

 

(Full evaluation of nine online consultations and discussions is contained in the publication available from hansard@hansard.lse.ac.uk)

 

Citizenspace – an experiment in e-democracy

 

UK Online is the Government’s central information portal. The Citizenspace section of UK Online was designed to enable citizens to enter into an interactive relationship with Government. Within Citizenspace, users can access a register of current government consultations. In order to evaluate Citizenspace as a forum for public deliberation, 50 messages were selected as a sample from eight of the discussion topics. A series of threads were selected at random. The seed message of each selected thread and all its corresponding replies were selected for content analysis.

 

We began by testing the flow of the messages: Were people listening and talking to each other or ignoring and talking across each other?  The results demonstrated a reasonable level of interaction between the participants and logical progression of the threads. The number of words in each message was measured. This provided some indication of the depth of the discussions and the extent to which people were developing longer arguments. The results suggested a low level of argument development, more typical of an online chat room than a forum for policy deliberation.  The quality of messages was coded, using variables similar to those in the previous section.. One factor that seems overwhelmingly to be the case in UK Online is the negativity of many of the comments. Was this negativity a reflection of a broad public mood or of a few people who dominated the forum? A sample of 300 messages from three of the discussion threads was analysed. The results demonstrated that the forum was overwhelmingly dominated by regular, frequent posters.

 

A fundamental weakness of Citizenspace concerned the lack of responsiveness. As this is a Government site there is an assumption – once explicit, now implicit – that the Government is listening to what is being said. There are three ways that Government could appear to be listening to what is going on:  1) there could be periodic responses from Government Departments to comments raised on the site;  2) there could be regular summaries of comments made on the site, presented to Departments and published online; 3) the moderators, acting on behalf of the Government, could respond to some messages, especially when specific questions are raised.

 

None of the above happened in the case of the Citizenspace fora.

The disastrous policy of ‘silent’ moderation prevented the moderators from either responding to direct questions or explaining why they were not responding. The moderators, an independent company appointed by the Cabinet Office, were seen by users as arrogant and unlistening. Furthermore, in deciding a policy of never responding to any comments, the moderators are unable to explain their operational management of the site, so there is no proactive attempt to steer the discussion, appeal for better behaviour by participants or explain deletions of messages.

 

Ultimately, the Citizenspace experiment lacked a clear purpose or connection to Government policy-making. For a handful of enthusiasts it provided an outlet for ill-informed opinion, prejudice and abuse. For most users, it held out the promise of interaction with Government, but proved to be a one-way street leading nowhere.

 

(Full evaluation of the Citizenspace experiment is contained in the publication available from hansard@hansard.lse.ac.uk)

 

 

Commbill.net – an experiment in law-making online

 

In May 2002 a Joint Committee was established by orders of both Houses of Parliament to consider and report on the draft Communications Bill. The Committee was required to agree its final Report by August 7. The Committee introduced two important innovations:

 

• The public was able to see and hear all of its evidence sessions which were web cast live on Parliament’s own site http://www.parliamentlive.tv and broadcast on BBC Parliament the following weekend.
• In order to gather a wider range of views on the draft Bill, the Committee commissioned an online forum, under the auspices of the Hansard Society and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, to accompany its formal evidence-taking.

 

(Full details of this innovative online consultation, including the views of Committee members and forum participants, are contained in the publication available from hansard@hansard.lse.ac.uk)  

 

 

Practical criteria for future online consultations and discussions

 

·        Purpose – create a purpose for the deliberations (a role within government or parliamentary consultation procedure), which adds value for both citizens and policy- making.

·        Responsiveness – provide a feedback mechanism to the users.

·        Provide a list of key questions or starting points to trigger debate in specific areas – these should be set by parliamentary committees or Government departments during consultation periods on specific issues.

·        Transparent moderation – always forewarn users when a comment is removed, and offer a chance to re-submit the amended message. Make the rules of engagement and all moderator decisions transparent.

·        Active moderation – consultations and discussions benefit from proactive moderation: ‘the moderator as participant’. Moderators should post messages asking questions, probing, taking on a role as ‘seminar leader’ rather than invigilator or referee. Positive interruptions (such as giving additional information, newspaper articles, links to relevant web sites) should be encouraged and welcomed. The moderator should aim to build a rapport with all users, so that no single participant or group of participants dominates the discussion and new entrants feel secure and confident to enter the discussion. Promoting an inclusive atmosphere is vital.

·        Guest moderation – invite representatives from Parliament or Government departments to moderate relevant discussions. The presence of a moderator as a ‘real person’ enhances the quality of the discussions, encourages more ‘civilised’ deliberation and allows greater control over the direction of the discussion.

·        Detailed registration and recruitment – use of a more detailed registration procedure will allow targeting of specific groups of users who may have relevant experience or knowledge in specific consultation areas or subjects. Not all participants will be able to participate in all topics, but instead target specific people for specific issues. Registration procedures should include an ‘areas of personal interest’ field; targeted e-mails can then be sent to groups of people with similar interests (e.g. people interested in consultations on health issues).

·        Thread sequence – the discussion topic order should change according to which topic was used most recently. This would direct people to participate in current discussions and build a dialogue flow.

·        Summaries – weekly discussion summaries should be posted on the site, so that new users do not need to read all messages to find out what has been said. These summaries will help prevent old ground being re-visited, fertilise the debate, keep lapsed users up-to-date and trigger re-entry. An archive of all previous summaries should be kept on the site.

·        E-mail summaries – e-mail weekly updates and summaries to those who request them or who have demonstrated interest in an area.

·        Partnerships - Work with nationally networked partners and smaller local groups to gain ideas for discussion topics and request evidence for the consultations.

·        Local government - Take a targeted approach to working with local government. Link the online consultation into local projects. Inform all local government as soon as the details of the consultation are fixed and try to link into local scale projects in various areas.

·        MPs’ and civil service role – Clearly define role of Parliament, MPs and Government departments. Agreement needs to be reached about the level of involvement each player will contribute. Suggest that different players with different interests take on a particular section of the site (a specific thread) and monitor it, place comments etc.

·        Web links – Create links to as many relevant web sites as possible: governmental, parliamentary, community, e-democracy, educational and media web sites;  relevant information sites such as helplines, charities and citizens’ advice bureaux. This provides a value-added service to users and will facilitate a more informed debate. Offer ‘click- throughs’ to specially created information (such as ‘How does policy-making work?’ ‘How can my participation help me and help the government?’) and links to other sites.

·        Research versus questionnaires - Balance the need to collect data about participants with the chance of putting them off with a lengthy form. Develop a compromise between these two poles based on extended conversations and advice from various community workers on how best to word any participant survey.

·        Reminder e-mails and SMS - Use reminder e-mails and SMS messages with a “click- through” to the web site at regular intervals during the consultation (weekly and when important events occur.

·        Disabilities – Adopt as far as possible the RNIB guidelines on how to make web sites more usable for people with sight deficits (for example specific font sizes and background colours). Take advice from various groups working with disability issues to make the site as user-friendly as possible.

·        Help section – provide a thorough, user-friendly ‘help’ section, which gives ideas about participating as well as how to physically use the site (e.g. Q&A on ‘what should I write?’ ‘how much should I write?’[iv]:

 

REFERENCES