Edward Andersson, Deputy Director of Involve, reflected on where engagement is heading in a time of Localism and Austerity, looked at creative methods of engagement and gave advice on when and how they should be used.

If you missed it – or liked it so much you want to see it again – here is a recording of the full webinar.

The next webinar, to be held on 2nd March, will be on a problem solving approach within communities called Positive Deviance. Jane Lewis, from Woodward-Lewis and Susan Ritchie, an Involve associate and director of Mutual Gain, will give an introduction to the method – which is based on the observation that through their uncommon (or deviant) behaviour some individuals and groups within communities develop better solutions to problems than others – explain how it works and when to use the approach.

Check out our events page for more information on the webinar series. If you would like to join the mailing list to receive invitations to future webinars, email me at tim@involve.org.uk.

Where’s the citizen in all this churn and change? After all, they are the primary stakeholders in local governance: as the users of services, as the payers of local taxes, and as the citizens (and voters) of that community. I’ve been somewhat surprised, in my recent conversations with councils, at the level of interest in public engagement and participation. I had expected the focus to be on making savings and transforming services – and it is – but councils are also sensitive to how difficult decisions might play with the public. And, taking a less cynical view, I think councils (some at least) are genuinely interested in the opportunities brought about by change: reinvigorating their public engagement, tapping into citizen energy and capacity, and greater personalisation in the design and evaluation of services. The Commission on the Future of Local Government is one example of the sector leading this re-examination of the role of local government.

In this post I’d like to argue about one important avenue for re-connecting councils with citizens: the role of the councillor.

Councillors are at the heart of any council. They are the elected representatives of local communities, and they represent the essential democratic connection between resident and the (potentially faceless) council. But this representative role alone is not sufficient. In the ordinary course of affairs councillors have to make difficult decisions that balance  conflicting demands, and in these challenging times those decisions are going to get harder. They will be better decisions if informed by broad citizen participation, something that has long been argued for by respected local government commentators: “Participative democracy, far from weakening representative democracy, can strengthen it. ….People speak with many voices, expressing differing values and interests. The task of the elected representative is to seek to reconcile, to balance and in the end to judge” (Professor John Stewart, in The Nature of British Local Government, 2000).

More than that, if councils are genuinely seeking deeper public engagement, then councillors are very well placed to make that active connection. After all, here is an ordinary person, who lives locally, and represents local people on the council. One of the main conclusions of the 2007 Councillors Commission was: “key to effective local representation is the relationship and connections between councillors and their constituents”. In these challenging and changing times, the role that councillors play in actively connecting with their communities is more important than ever, something that emerged from discussions at the Local Society seminar in 2011.

But whilst many councillors work hard to advocate for and represent their constituents, there remains a general disconnect between residents and their councillors. Many people do not know who their local councillor is, let alone engage with them. A MORI survey in 2002 found that just a third of the public knew the name of one of their local councillors, and two thirds said they have never met their local councillor in person. This data may be dated, but I’d bet a small sum that it’s still valid.

How can councils work with their councillors to remake this connection with the public at large? Here are a few practical suggestions:

• Involve all councillors in an open discussion about the objectives and benefits of wider community engagement and public participation.
• Use councillor training to address softer issues, such as confidence, and to develop practical solutions to the challenges involved in engaging the public. Consider peer mentoring as part of this, and facilitate the sharing of good practice.
• Think about how councillors can engage with all of their constituents, not just with those who ask for help. Good old-fashioned door knocking, and good new-fashioned social media, might be two ways.
• Help councillors to manage public expectations, and make sure they have access to the information they need to support public participation. For example, do councillors have a good handle on the diversity of different communities in their wards?

Tweets posted during a recent event on crowdsourcing has made me think more deeply about whether the process can be used to promote deliberation by citizens. In this post I explore this idea and answer, yes and no. 

In the second of a series of posts inspired by the talk that I gave last week at the Institute for Government, I highlighted four possible uses for crowdsourcing:

• Tapping into the wisdom of the crowd;
• Accessing information that is highly distributed;
• Understanding the preferences of the crowd;
• Uncovering ideas hidden in the crowd/ Policy innovation.

The #ifgcrowds stream on Twitter was active and interesting. It made me think again about whether there are more uses for crowdsourcing or not.

First @owenbarder chimed in with:

Much of the discussion at #ifgcrowds is about online discussion between individuals and government; but not about creating communities.

January 23, 2012 6:35 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@owenbarder

Owen Barder

@_garrilla (Garry Haywood), following from outside the room, picked-up a similar point in a series of tweets during and after the event:

@sburall #ifgcrowds I could only watch , via hashtag but seemed #crowdsourcing discussion focused on the individual not on group work

January 23, 2012 8:40 pm via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@_garrilla

Garry Haywood

@sburall #ifgcrowds #crowdsourcing *not* the same as mass-consultation - seems was confused

January 23, 2012 8:47 pm via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@_garrilla

Garry Haywood

@sburall I know I'm being pedantic here but is the bean example crowdsourcing (collective) or an information market (collected)? #subtle

January 24, 2012 7:32 pm via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@_garrilla

Garry Haywood

All of which rather goes against a central a central theme of my talk:

Crowdsourcing is NOT a way to build consensus says @sburall at #ifgcrowds.

January 23, 2012 6:56 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@owenbarder

Owen Barder

Garry and I exchanged a few tweets as he constructed a helpful post expanding on this theme – although he trumped my jelly bean analogy with a biblical one, which gives him an unfair level of gravitas I feel.

He makes the point that the original meaning of the word crowdsourcing involved users of a tech product discussing new product features, building a consensus and balancing trade-offs. He highlights another example, the marvellous gaming platform foldit, where users build on each others’ work to develop more effective proteins and enzymes.

The issue that both he and Owen raise is whether, in the policy world, government should be more ambitious and use crowdsourcing to build consensus, help the crowd to work collectively to identify new solutions and in the process build communities?

Or is this, as Garry asks, pedantry?

My answer to the first question is ‘no’, and to the second, ‘yes definitely’, at least if we are going to get hung-up on ‘doing crowdsourcing’ in a pure form. But it’s been a helpful form of pedantry that has helped me to clarify my thoughts.

It’s interesting that both of Garry’s examples aren’t from the world of policy. In fact, examples of crowdsourced, collective consensus developed policy are very thin on the ground. The main example that is quoted is the recent decision by Iceland to crowdsource its new constitution. The general feeling is that this has been a good thing. It hasn’t all been plain sailing though and I am struck by the fact that the main deliberative element in Iceland is a Constitutional Council made up of 25 people.

I think there’s a reason that examples of the use of deliberative crowdsourcing for policy development are so thin on the ground. It’s because the crowd that is likely to answer is much more diverse than the crowd answering an open call to help develop some cool new product features. This in turn makes it much harder to find the common-ground needed to build consensus and identify trade-offs.

I don’t actually think that the foldit example is relevant here, because no-one loses anything (in a real-world, immediate sense) if the protein doesn’t fold properly, or their ideas aren’t taken on board.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to find ways to build common ground and identify the trade-offs in policy, I just don’t think that a pure, online crowdsourcing exercise can to do this, worse I think it risks polarising the debate.

What I think crowdsourcing can do is to help to identify potential new ideas, generate a level of excitement and interest around an issue, that can then be used to develop an off-line process that is deliberative and consensus building. Which is why I think our discussion might have a significant element of pedantry to it.

I think that Owen, Garry and I agree that we need much more space for community and consensus building within the policy making process. Whether or not we call the process we use to achieve this ‘crowdsourcing’ or ‘crowdsourcing plus’ is somewhat beside the point, as long as we are clear about what we are trying to do, and how the process that is developed is going to help us to do it.

Photo credit: alexkess

I’ve since written a series of three posts based on my talk:

• ‘Crowdsourcing from first principles’
• ‘Using the crowd effectively’
• ‘Crowdsourcing: back to basics’

IfG have now posted a video of the event on YouTube:

This is the final post in a series of three based on a talk I gave at the Institute for Government at their Crowdsourcing Policy event, 23^rd January 2012.

The second post explored four ways that government could crowdsource policy.  I’m going to take that as a leaping-off point to highlight a number of principles which government should take into account as it considers whether or not to open policy to the crowd. I didn’t have time to highlight these issues during my talk, and so this post is an extension of my presentation.

I’ll continue to use the jelly bean analogy I began in the second post.

Principle one

My first use for crowdsourcing was tapping into the wisdom of the crowd which I illustrated by inviting 90 people at the event to guess how many beans there were in the bag of beans pictured at the top of the previous post. Intuitively one might expect that if the crowd is larger, then the answer will be more accurate. Opening up my call for guesses to my twitter followers would be one way to increase the size of my crowd. However, my followers can’t see the size of the bean in relation to the size of the bag, their information is less reliable and my larger sample will find it harder to give the right answer.

This is a trivial example, well known to many people. However, I don’t think the lessons it offers have been fully learnt by government. For example, the government’s Spending Challenge invited first civil servants and then the public to identify wasted public spending. I would contend that the vast majority of the public don’t interact enough with public services to be able to identify waste effectively. The sheer weight of comments which didn’t identify waste in the way I understand the government to have meant confirms this.

This leads me to my first principle.

Principle 1: have a clear understanding of which crowd it is you need to engage with.

It is worth noting that Jeff Howe’s definition is an open call. I just think that when considering crowdsourcing policy his definition needs adapting, because in policy terms, not all crowds are equal.

Principle two

My second use for crowdsourcing was for collecting information that is highly distributed within a population. I used the example of the the flood prediction map for the Philippine capital Manila which used crowdsourcing to identify flood water heights after a devastating typhoon in 2009.

A flood predication map can be used for many different things, to warn citizens as waters begin to rise, to develop better flood defences and invest in improving infrastructure. And it is in this spending of money that government has power of course. The more important the policy area, the more likely it is that there will be stakeholders with competing interests. The more money there is at stake, the worse the problem will be. Any system can be gamed to try to put one group at an advantage over another – whether it be for infrastructure upgrades, or investments in education, for example. Where government does decide to embark on this kind of crowdsourcing exercise, it will be important that the platform used allows for error checking and does all it can to spot and prevent gaming.

Principle 2: Ensure that you reach out to excluded groups and that you minimise gaming of the process.

Principles three, four and five

The third use I highlighted for crowdsourcing was to help identify the preferences of the crowd. I illustrated this using my trusty jelly bean and noting that the crowd could be asked to identify their favourite colour. This same kind of process could be used to identify the preferences of a local community for the opening hours for a doctors’ surgery.

However, there’s a methodological challenge, which leads me to my third principle.

Asking the simple question, ‘which colour is your favourite’ gives you the clear result that red and blue are neck-and-neck in popularity way above the rest. So you increase the proportion of red and blue beans in the sample and sit back, ready to rake-in the cash. But sales plummet. What you didn’t know was that people who like red beans, hate blue ones and visa versa, because you didn’t ask that question.

Principle 3: Understand the way you have framed the question and the implications of the questions you are asking

I think there’s a second methodological challenge relating to this which highlights two more principles.

Continuing my increasingly tenuous jelly bean analogy into the realms of fantasy, it turns out that the people who hated the red beans were parents who think that the dye used turns their kids hyperactive and aggressive. Parents with money are the most important market and getting rid of the red beans would see sales sky rocket. Who cares about the red lovers? They’ve got no money and rarely buy jelly beans.

In the world of commerce this sort of decision is unremarkable. However, in the policy world it’s different. Take the case of the doctors’ surgery opening hours. Further research discovers that the minority of people who want the surgery open at an awkward hour are the same people who also cost the health service the most money when their long term conditions get worse if not picked-up by the GP.

Principle 4: be clear about what other data you need in order to understand the information you are collecting.

But this highlights a challenge for government: the most efficient use of public money would be to go against the crowdsourced timings and cater for the minority who cost the public purse most. However, these are unlikely to be the voices which will be loudest if it becomes more difficult to get the yellow fever jab for the beach holiday in that exotic resort.

Crowdsourcing might help you to identify preferences and issues you hadn’t been aware of before, but it can’t be used to develop a political consensus – other techniques must be used, from simple political leadership through to large deliberative assemblies. *

This leaves the politician in a position where the crowdsourcing hasn’t answered the question they thought they set out to answer, but has instead raised a significant political problem.

This is a political problem which will be compounded if the crowdsourcing exercise was framed wrongly, or without sufficient thought. Voting is a common way to identify and surface people’s preferences, for example.

However, it is reasonable to assume that the people taking part will expect to see the option with the most votes winning, being one of the times that the surgery was opened. While simple changes such as changing the choice of words, using ranking rather than voting, would make a difference.

This leads me to my fifth principle.

Principle 5: Don’t raise expectations beyond what you can deliver on

In practice what this means is be very clear with yourself, and then the crowd, what other factors you will be taking into account – cost of different user groups to health service, for example – and the weight you will give the results of the crowdsourcing in relation to the other evidence. Ensure you only go ahead if you are confident that citizens’ views will have a significant enough impact on the final decision.

Principles six and seven

My jelly bean crowdsourcing was developed by a marketing wizzkid, who sold it internally as a way of raising sales. He found out that while parents don’t like red beans, but kids really love green beans. He spent millions on a funky marketing campaign with dancing beans and a catchy slogan. He then went back to the factory and said make me three times as many green beans. However, the head of bean manufacture said that for various technical reasons this wasn’t possible. The marketing wizz was left with customers who had bought into the green bean strategy, had had their hopes raised and now hated the brand that couldn’t deliver.

This increasingly tenuous analogy has a real world counterpart though. The public gave comments in their tens of thousands to the Spending Challenge, but government departments took very few ideas from the public on board. I’d argue that this is because the exercise was framed in such a way that Whitehall departments couldn’t use the results and because they weren’t bought into the process in the first place – the Spending Challenge was something cooked up between the Treasury and Number 10, with little engagement with the rest of Whitehall.

As I pointed out a fortnight ago on this blog, our Pathways through Participation research shows that bad consultation puts people off engaging with government again, it reduces trust in government, and worse it undermines wider community activity too.

Which leads me to my next two principles which government should abide by as it engages citizens, whether in a crowdsourcing exercise or in other ways.

Principle 6: Involve those who are critical to implementing the decision

My final, meta-principle is one that I spend a lot of my time saying to government, it’s a hard message for government to hear in this relentless 24 hour media cycle. It’s this: SLOW DOWN!

Principle 7: spend time and money up front, framing the problem, understanding how and when you are going to take the decision and the realistic impact that the public’s view will have, and in getting all of the key players within government bought into the exercise.

In the end, engaging the public in a crowdsourcing exercise is no different to any other form of public engagement, abide by some simple principles  and government can’t go far wrong…. can it?

* a comment from @_garrilla during the IfG event has got me thinking about this and might spawn a fourth post in this series of three.

Photo credit: Involve

See also:

Using the Crowd Effectively

Crowdsourcing from First Principles

While the notion of the wisdom of the crowd has popular resonance, government should take care to think about what it wants to achieve when engaging the crowd. 

This is the second in a series of three posts based on a talk I gave at the Institute for Government (IfG) at their Crowdsourcing Policy event, 23^rd January 2012. The first drew on our work on public engagement generally to make a simple point: the starting point for government interested in engaging the public in policy making should be to let the purpose of the public engagement dictate the process used. Government should not let the excitement about using something funky like crowdsourcing drive everything else – just as it would be a mistake to let the fact that you’ve seen citizens’ juries, for example, work before lead you to running lots more in different circumstances.

The third post (link to come tomorrow) will explore some wider principles government should bear in mind before even thinking about engaging the crowd.

In this second post, I want to explore four uses government could put crowdsourcing to. This post draws on the ways that crowdsourcing has been used in general, and explores their relevance to the policy world.

Use #1 – tapping into the wisdom of the crowds

The first problem amendable to crowdsourcing taps into popular notions of the wisdom of the crowd. This is based on the premise that, while no-one knows the exact answer, the crowd will get the answer right together.

In my talk at the Institute for Government I illustrated this by inviting 100 or so people at the event to guess how many beans there were in the bag of beans pictured at the top of this post. Each person was given a bean to help them. You’d expect the distribution of answers to fall on a basic bell curve (the bench pictured below roughly follows this shape). If crowds really are wise, you’d predict that the correct answer will be the mean of the total number of guesses.

The bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that the mean will represent the true number of beans in the bag. The rise of the internet and social networking has made it a much easier to increase the size of the crowd. It would have been relatively simple for me to open up my call for guesses to my twitter followers in order to increase the size of my crowd.

This is, in the form of the jelly bean example, a fairly trivial use for crowdsourcing. However, I’m finding it hard to think of use for government that it couldn’t do much better with scientific, economic or other technical advice rather than resorting to a glorified guessing game with the public.

My second use is one that I think is of more relevance, however.

Use #2: accessing information that is highly distributed

It would be more time consuming to sort the beans in order to work out the distribution of colours in the bag. Given that everyone in the audience had a bean, it would be fairly easy to quickly collect information about the distribution of different colours. Whether it was worth doing or not would depend on whether the system for collecting the information from each individual was quicker than having one person separating the whole bag. Again, the larger the crowd the more accurate the information.

This is something that has been used in the policy world. One example that caught my eye a couple of years ago was initiated after typhoon Ondoy devastated the Philippine capital Manila. A geology professor, Alfredo Mahar Lagmay, put out a call on Facebook for data on the maximum flood height at different locations; the crowdsourced flood prediction map was born.

Use #3: understanding the preferences of the crowd

Any bean manufacturer worth their salt will want to know which beans are most popular so that that this colour can be increased in proportion to the least popular colours. It would be a very simple task to ask the crowd what their favourite colour is and then working out if the proportions of bean colour match the results of the research. Again, the crowd would obviously have to be big enough to ensure that the results are statistically robust – and care would need to be taken that there isn’t some reason why green lovers are more likely to respond than blue lovers, but these are simple enough problems to overcome.

You can see how this could be useful for understanding the best times to open a doctors’ surgery, for example. Put a call out to the population living in the catchment area of the surgery and you’d expect to get a good idea of how best to arrange the opening times of the surgery. Of course, you could do this through a simple survey. Developing a crowdsourcing platform online would allow you to automate the process of data collection, but more importantly, it would allow participants to interact with, and learn from each other thus potentially improving the quality of the final answers.

During my IfG talk, I proposed one final use for crowdsourcing policy.

Use #4: policy innovation, or uncovering new ideas that are hidden in the crowd

In Use #2, I noted that crowdsourcing can be effective at uncovering preferences. However, it’s possible that there was someone at the back of the room with their eyes closed who was bored of the conversation, it was clear to them that what we need is a new colour of bean, that those of us operating on a less spiritual plane haven’t thought of which will really differentiate my pack of beans in the market. With this new colour we’ll clean-up.

If I set the process up right and ask enough people, that killer idea that has occurred to the 1 in a million people will be surfaced.

This notion of policy innovation was one of the key motivations behind the government’s Spending Challenge in 2010. On the basis that Whitehall is unable to spot government waste on the ‘frontline’, George Osborne invited civil servants and members of the public to identify where public money could be saved. The Challenge clearly highlighted that there is a real appetite within the public to get more involved, as over 100,000 people responded.

However, getting the crowd to turn-up is only part of the problem. As I highlight in my final post in this series (link to come tomorrow), there are a number of principles that government needs to bear in mind before it asks citizens to give up their time and energy engaging on policy issues.

Photo credits:

Bell curve bench: c r i s

Philippines Crowdsourced Floodmap: Screenshot from 13 January

See also:

Crowdsourcing from First Principles

Crowdsourcing: Back to basics 

Much of the discussion about the ‘social’ in green economy focuses on the fact that it can generate new jobs. The Green Alliance of Portsmouth, Newhampshire USA is one illustration of how it can offer so much more. A network of nearly 100 local businesses and employing about 1,851 people, it demonstrates that energy and resource-efficient businesses can be started by communities themselves. They have produced a profitable alternative to normal business practice. And have brought wider community impacts too;

“The apparel we make is encouraging people to rethink the lifecycle of things they buy. We are inspiring a smarter consumer, a consumer that rewards socially responsible companies with their dollars.” Dennis Randall, CEO of Earthtec and member of Green Alliance.

Green businesses, like those in Green Alliance, are given positive encouragement by the federal government. For example New Hampshire’s Office of Energy and Planning has established the ‘Green Launching Pad’, with funding from US Dept of Energy. The GLP is a green business incubator based at the University of New Hampshire (State Impact, viewed January 2012). It is a collaborative fund, connecting entrepreneurs and private industry with technical and business academics and state-level resources. It demonstrates the value of government acting as a community ‘enabler’, encouraging people to launch and accelerate the growth of new green businesses

Communities themselves are offering real leadership in moving towards a greener economy. The village community of Wildpoldsried in Germany is driving energy efficiencies to such a degree they are producing three times more renewable energy than they need and putting it back on the grid (Biocycle, August 2011). Again the community is supported by the town council. This is vital to make progress on practical issues from planning and funding, through to development and maintenance of new infrastructure and services.

A third example comes from the Municipality of Ravenna (Italy). It was recently been awarded for its use of participatory planning and partnerships to drive water and waste efficiencies, as part of its EMAS programme (Environmental Management system). Strong community involvement led to a reduction of daily water consumption per inhabitants by 6% between 2008 and 2010 in one district. A partnership a private company, Hera Ravenna, for waste collection involved around 13,000 students and their families. The number of families that bring their waste to ecological stations doubled since the launch of the project. Additionally, the municipal “Agenda 21” website allows stakeholders and the public to view urban development projects. They are continually informed and can participate directly by making recommendations and proposals on development projects (EMAS Team, Environment DG, European Commission, December 2011).

One of the challenges for local government, as with central government, is that it’s leadership is temporary. This can impact directly on continuity of programmes supporting communities on the green economy. In July 2008 Somerset County Council agreed to support various local ‘Transition Town’ initiatives aiming at stimulating low carbon communities. The British elections of 2010 saw many councils, including Somerset, switch political hands. Sadly for those involved in transition initiatives in Somerset it also resulted in pulling back of support by the county council.

“From a Transition perspective, there is a huge amount that local authorities can do if they take an engaged and pro-active role in the process of building resilience in their area. There are some great examples of councils working with their local Transition groups. Woking and Kirklees spring to mind as councils that are doing bold and visionary work on climate change.” (Transition Towns, March 2011).

Recognising the importance of community-led green economy initiatives and enabling them to flourish should not be a party-political issue. They can bring a number of wider benefits to communities and help ensure greater continuity in the long term. Experiences like ‘Mondragon’ in Spain and of cooperatives around the world indicate the scale of what is possible, given the right institutional frameworks (BBC Radio 4 ‘In-business’, Jan 2012). Such ‘inclusive’ business models need to be encouraged to grow in the environmental economy too.

This is not a time to be indecisive or half-hearted in supporting local community actors who are trying to deliver innovative, efficient, equitable and environmentally-sound alternatives to the current economic system. The public sector needs to be an enabler rather than an obstacle to socially-inclusive green economies.

All this raises a key question for those keen to promote inclusive green economies – what are the most effective means of supporting dialogue / deliberation, community development and engagement in order to make this happen?

Local councils have a number of tools at their disposal, from procurement to training and skills development, for building open dialogue and direct support of community groups. I discuss these issues and tools in more detail in a contribution to the forthcoming book; “The Economy of Green Cities” (Otto-Zimmermann, April 2012).

The use of crowdsourcing in policy making may be a relatively new phenomenon. However, the principles that should guide its use are not. 

This is the first in a ‘series of three posts. The series is based on a talk I gave at the Institute for Government at their ‘Crowdsourcing Policy’ event, 23^rd January 2012.

Crowdsourcing, as a term, is a recent neologism, coined by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine, in 2006 to mean:

“the act of an institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”

As I did the research for my talk, I came across a number of websites and activities that describe themselves zeitgeistily as doing ‘crowdsourcing’, when they really aren’t doing anything different to what many have done before. I’m thinking particularly of the sorts of sites that provide a shop window for small traders and freelancers (for example), and those that seek funding from a large(ish) group of individuals (for example).

So, while the term may be new, the ‘process’ of crowdsourcing certainly isn’t. Howe notes in his 2006 piece that crowdsourcing as a concept has a longer history than this, referencing the 1841 book by Charles MacKay, the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I suspect that it goes back longer than this.

The reason I think that this is important is because while I think that crowdsourcing for policy has the potential to bring something new and interesting to policy making (my subsequent posts will explore what), there are a lot of assumptions and half-thought through notions of what it can do.

In fact, crowdsourcing is like any other public engagement process, just because it has worked in some places and a policy maker is excited about its potential, doesn’t make it the right process to use in every situation. We often find that the starting point for many government is the funky new process that is in the headlines, rather than it being the reason they want to engage citizens in the first place. As the slides below show, our starting point is always the purpose of the public engagement exercise and it is this that should dictate method (or process), rather than the other way round.

The reason this is important is because poorly thought through public engagement processes have significant negative effects. As our Pathways through Participation project shows, poor consultation and engagement doesn’t just turn citizens away from engaging with government, it can turn them off engaging in their communities much more widely than this.

What I do in the next post (link to follow) is explore the uses which policy makers can, and cannot, put crowdsourcing to. The final post (link to follow) in the series will then draw-out a set of principles which I hope will provide some guidance for how to ensure that crowdsourcing can have an effective impact on the policy making process.

In the end, the principles that should guide any public engagement process aims to bring citizens views into the heart of government are the same as those that should guide crowdsourcing. If you don’t have time to read my other posts, which will draw on case studies and analogy, then please do at least take this message home.

Photo credit: ad551

See also:

Using the crowd effectively 

Crowdsourcing: Back to basics

Could giving students more of a say in the way that schools are run lay the groundwork for more engaged and thoughtful citizenship later in life?

The Department for Education is currently running a review of the curriculum (soon to be open to public consultation). One of the subjects in danger of being cut is citizenship education. Many pro-democracy organisations who feel passionately about political education and the need for an active citizenship have been campaigning to maintain it as an important subject. Their general argument is that in a age where the government is relying more and more on an active citizenry, not only to engage in formal politics but also to co-produce public services, it’s madness to cut out the teaching which provides young people with the skills and knowledge to carry out this function.

And quite right too.

And yet, I’m sure I’m not the only one whose memories of citizenship classes are less than inspiring. Apart from anything else, it always seemed to me that there’s something slightly strange about being made to sit in lines listening to my superiors lecturing me about the importance of my rights, responsibilities and the glorious equality of democracy. In fairness, since I was at school, the subject area has developed considerably and there are some fantastic examples of citizenship education which use the time to develop debating skills and critical thinking.

But the general point remains: How effective is it to teach students about democracy in such an undemocratic setting?

While there are some genuinely democratic education models at work in the UK private sector (eg. Sands or Summerhill), the more common form of participation comes in the form of Student Voice. Done properly, the idea is that students are involved as legitimate stakeholders in decision-making about issues affecting them, from timetabling, curriculum, uniform or behaviour. It seems to me that school provides the perfect context to build citizenship on this ‘learning by doing’ basis.

Practice makes perfect

If the government hopes that participation is going to become a way of life then it’s totally unrealistic for this to only kick in at 18. The idea behind Cameron’s National Citizen Service is exactly that starting these ideals young is the way to embed them in society, or, in his words “inspire a generation of young people to appreciate what they can achieve and how they can be part of the Big Society.” But the focus on volunteering and giving to your communities is only one side of the coin – young people also need to get engaged in having their say, making sure that they’re getting what they need from society as well as giving what they can.

We know that attitudes set in early. Participation needs to start early too. And where better than in schools, the institution set up wholly to serve the needs of the students who attend them?

Having a stake

While I don’t want to jump on the riots band-wagon and argue that a lack of student democracy was somehow responsible, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that student democracy can be part of the answer. The LSE and Guardian’s recent research on ‘reading the riots’ found that half of rioters did not see themselves as ‘part of British society.’ They also spoke about the need to be heard, felt marginalised and explained the disturbance as one way of getting people to listen – or even notice – them. The picture painted is one of people, many of them young, who do not see themselves as having a stake in society. Why then, engage constructively in it? It seems to me that a more democratic school system could give people a stake at a crucial point: the first major contact many young people have with society’s public institutions.

Size matters

One of the real challenges with participation on a national scale is that it’s very hard for people to really see the long-term impact of their actions. One of the most consistent findings om participation is that people are more likely to continue participating if can see the difference they have made, or at least that their views have been considered (for example, see our Pathways project or the recent Sciencewise evaluation).

And yet in fact it’s very hard to really see the impact you’ve had on a national level. The numbers of people involved are massive, and the cogs of the machine are many – the actual outcomes on peoples’ lives can be years down the line and it can be difficult to attribute it back to participation. Indeed, this is one of the key arguments for localism. However, in a school context, students setting out to really improve their school could have made a real and visible impact by the time they leave. Experiences like this can give young people the insight into how much difference they can have, a conviction and an self-confidence which can stay with them later in life when participating in larger decisions where the ‘reward’ might be less visible.

Just as importantly students may also be able to see the adverse effects of some of their suggestions, and learn from them. Because the feedback loop is so much shorter, young people have time to learn from their mistakes, developing a more responsive form of citizenship with more insight into the impacts of their actions.

In conclusion…

Over the past 10 years, there has been a general acknowledgement of the importance of students having a say in schools, but not nearly enough focus has been put on its massive potential to feed into the Big Society agenda.

I know I’ve made rather a lot of grand claims, and I’d love to be challenged on them. While the research out there on student voice is very positive, there is not nearly enough, perhaps because it is relatively new as a major national agenda. These claims also come partly from my personal experience working directly with young people within (and excluded from) education through Student Voice. While there are many challenges, I remain optimistic about the impact student participation can have not just on the education system but also on the lives of young people and society as a whole.

As with any participation however, done badly, student voice is worse than nothing at all. While school councils can sometimes be really valuable tools, it still remains that many school councils consist of students chosen directly or indirectly by staff, breeding cynicism early in the rest of the student population. There are, however, a host of other more inclusive methods. To come full circle to the government’s curriculum consultation, citizenship classes are often used to spend time developing genuine student voice programmes, so their protection is key to student democracy as well as political education.

While everyone agrees we need a more active and engaged citizens, it’s much harder to know how to make this happen in practice. A contained mini-society set up precisely to prepare young people for the adult world, seems too good an opportunity to miss.

Image: U.S. National Archives

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Today we are launching our latest briefing paper. It explores the potential for impact of public engagement on individuals’ attitudes towards climate change and potentially their behaviour to reduce it. The paper is based on a literature review we conducted last year and builds on our thinking about public engagement around complex issues such as climate change.

Drawing from compelling results and evaluation findings of a range of public dialogues around climate change, we argue there is clear evidence that engaging people in a meaningful way has the potential to change attitudes and behaviours towards tackling climate change. In this way, public engagement can complement legislative changes that force change, as well as the government’s agenda of ‘nudge’. Only by involving the public in decision-making and in the design of projects will the government be able to bring about the changes in public attitudes and behaviour of the scale that is required.

Our experience, as well as evidence of others in the field of public engagement in the UK and beyond who have been involved in similar dialogue processes, provides a solid foundation for arguing that such public engagement processes have the potential for far-reaching impacts on individuals’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviour regarding climate change, if they are suitably tailored to the circumstances.

From our experience of running public engagement processes we know that involving citizens more deeply in difficult problems has the potential to make a significant impact on individual’s attitudes and behaviours. It is a myth that ordinary citizens cannot be engaged in complex issues such as climate change. On the contrary, participants in past climate change dialogues felt able to engage with the material. On top of this, it appears that confidence in talking about the topic increased, not just at the event, but also after the events with other people. Overall participants seem to enjoy being part of these dialogue processes and commonly aspire to be involved in other engagement processes in the future.

We argue that policymakers should engage as part of their approach for changing behaviours and promoting more sustainable living. Studying the results and evaluations of a number of past engagement processes around climate change there is convincing evidence that public engagement can have a profound impact on attitudes and behaviour. We therefore advocate the scaling up of public engagement, and its evaluation, around climate change.

Distributed dialogue provides a way of engaging a significant number of people in a long-term meaningful debate about complex and interlinked issues. Building such an ongoing conversation around climate change between government and citizens can potentially have great benefits. Tailoring the process to the circumstances and the audience will maximise the impact of public engagement on attitudes and behaviour.

We are keen on collecting more evidence on public engagement with climate change. If you have any case studies or examples of well run public engagement processes around climate change that have had a significant impact on people’s attitudes towards climate change and potentially their behaviour, please get in touch.

Image by Garwee