Most of you reading will know about the Consultation Institute, and if you don’t, you should. Every other Tuesday they send out a ‘Tuesday Topic’ email to members, a short article with some thoughts, facts and ideas on an issue of relevance to consultation.

Today there was one on ‘The Online Only Pitfall’, how it’s a bad idea to run a consultation only through online mechanisms without any opportunity to respond in a different manner. An excellent thing to note, I can’t think of a time when we’ve been part of a consultation exercise that hasn’t had an offline response mechanism as well, and we wouldn’t recommend doing one.

But that said, whilst the broad conclusion seems to be right, I’d disagree with many of the premises within it and its final recommendation.

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First of all, where are these consultations that are taking place in an online only format with no other mechanism for response? They may be out there but I’ve genuinely not seen them. The article cites the Labour Party’s ‘Big Conversation’ exercise in 2003, which was widely claimed not to have been a consultation exercise as much as a voter ID exercise for future canvassing purposes. Aside from that, according to this article, the project was accompanied by a series of focus groups across the country as well.

The article also says “Even with 60% and rising, internet access, the propensity to participate online is much smaller and usually concentrated among professional, educated males.”.

If you unpick those figures somewhat, you’ll find that the current tally is actually somewhat less depressing. Figures out as of last month (link is to a pdf download) show current internet access at home is at 65% for both the UK and Great Britain populations. Additionally, 10% of those who said they do not have internet access at home said they do not as they have access to the internet elsewhere. So, if you’re doing something online, chances are around 2/3rds of people will be able in theory to take part in it.

Yes, there are differences between internet usages amongst different groups of people in terms of education, employment status and the like, but if you look at the figures for say education, 93% of those educated to degree level or higher had internet access at home, but still a majority of people (56%) with no formal qualifications had internet access at home. Looking at another group often termed ‘hard to reach’, did you know that Leonard Cheshire Disability found that, over a year ago, 90% of people with a disability had access to the internet?

Indeed, if you look again at the latest figures as to why people don’t have internet access at home, ‘Don’t need Internet’ (34%) and ‘Don’t want Internet’ (24%) rank well above reasons such as ‘Equipment costs are too high’ (15%), ‘Lack of skills’ (15%) and ‘Access costs are too high’ (11%).

So, it’s not really accurate to perpetuate the view that somehow the internet is a thing primarily of the well off and well educated. It’s now a tool for pretty much everyone except some small hard to reach groups and those who don’t see the point of taking part in it, hardly dissimilar to any offline consultation process then.

Indeed, It doesn’t seem too bold to say that we should now be looking at the issue the other way around, and seeing it as exclusionary not to use the internet for consultation alongside other channels.

I’m not sure how the propensity to participate online is much smaller as the article states, not seen any stats put together on that recently, but would be interested to see them. Suspect though that there’s a real risk that once again the public or government sphere is confusing its own online activities with the internet generally.

I’ve said it before and will say it again, the reason you see low participation rates in some online consultation activity is because that activity is badly executed.

Thankfully the days of ‘piloting’ in e-democracy seem to be largely drawing to a close, ending the constant cycle of reinventing the wheel just to watch it fail not a moment too soon. Hopefully we can now start to integrate the government and private spheres online more accurately, and realise that people do use the internet for participation on a massive scale, they just very rarely use government backed sites for this (My Society’s e-petitioning system being the most notable exception).

In another section, the Consultation Institute article also claims “Discovering why people hold the views they do requires an iterative dialogue of some kind. The e-discussion forum comes closest to mimicking a deliberative debate, but lacks the immediacy of face-to-face alternatives ”

This again is a misconception, founded on the fact that most, if not all, e-discussion forums in public consultation have failed pretty spectacularly. When they work, they’re not just about software, they’re about genuine online community building, something very few people working in this sphere know how to do. That’s why we tend to use other mechanisms for building discussion with clients who haven’t the genuine timescale and budget to get involved in running a forum properly.
If you look at public discussion forums far removed from the world of government, you’ll see massive communities chatting together using a post moderated system with no complex rules of engagement. The speed of these discussions almost reaches that of offline conversation, and some of the better software even has functionality built into it to allow users to keep up with this fast pace. Nuance can easily be expressed through the internet, background context on participants, the lot. Good forum debates always have these components in them. If you want to find out more about the many and various different processes and rules set up and now widely adopted for online discussion, you could do worse than start here then get lost amongst the related articles at the bottom the page.

Sure, people can spoof who they are online, and do do so, but if that’s happening, an experienced online facilitator can usually spot it a mile off, and would have put in place steps to prevent it in the first place, again through the careful construction of the community.

Don’t forget as well that many people actually feel safer and more comfortable expressing their views through the relative anonimity of the internet than they ever would in a face to face environment.

I guess an analogy when it comes to low participation rates in online discussion could be of a nuclear power station. You wouldn’t say that produces low levels of electricity, but you would expect it to if you placed a whole bunch of people who’d never used one before in charge of it. Indeed, if you did, you might not be that surprised if it blew up in your face. Public sector and consultative discussion forums are, metaphorically, little different.

Thankfully, we’re seeing local authorities now get wiser to this, and start employing people with appropriate skills to manage these processes, but it certainly has taken a while.

So, what’s the point of all this then? Well, I wouldn’t disagree with the Institute’s assessment that online consultation should always be a part of a wider consultation process, and should never be the sole means of participating. However, I would vehemently disagree that online consultations are somehow limited and ‘essentially supplementary tools’.

When you know how to do it, you can replicate offline consultation processes excellently using online methods, and access a massive range of people of all sorts of different demographics. With participation in traditional offline consultation and democratic processes hardly at an all time high at the moment, it seems odd to see a process that could help turn this around be seen as a mere supplemental. Indeed, in many of the consultations we have run using combined online and offline techniques, the offline response mechanisms have been given greater promotion, but been consistently out performed by the online mechanism.

All of that said, there is an irony in this whole debate is there not. The original material that prompted this blog was sent as an email, this response to it is on the internet, and if you want to respond to it, you pretty much have to through the internet as well by using the comments feature.

Of course, if you do know of someone who might be interested in responding to this debate but doesn’t have access to the internet, then do pass them our phone number (0845 638 1848), my email address (gez AT delib.co.uk) or invite them to write to us (Ropemaker Court, 11 Lower Park Row, Bristol, BS1 5BN).

But the thing is, i doubt you do know anyone who would be interested in it who couldn’t be reading this online now. More to the point, this debate, and hundreds of thousands of others like it, couldn’t even be being had if it were not for the immediacy and democratised participatory opportunities of the internet.

People don’t have to wait for someone else to run a consultation exercise before they can have their say any more, and for me, that’s what we really need to be looking at next. It’s not that public bodies will be excluding people from their discussions if they move to new technologies, it’s that people will start (and indeed have started) to exclude public bodies from their discussions if those public bodies don’t get out there and join in.

The time to see new technologies in consultation as a supplemental has long since passed. The real risk is that public bodies that continue to do this will start to be seen as supplemental themselves.