We like the Consultation Institute. Their courses are interesting and they’ve come from nothing to national prominence in just a few years, all impressive stuff.
But occasionally, when it comes to online consultation, they seem to miss a few tricks. Their newsletter this week is interesting, reflecting as it does on media stories that the government may be putting its new ‘Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act’ on hold. For those not keeping an eye on the vellum moving through Westminster, this is the act that proposes yet more increases in the duties for local authorities to promote citizen involvement in decision making. The part of it that’s best known at the moment is its requirement for local authorities to have an e-petition system.
Putting this act on hold is, in some ways, no bad thing. We’re hearing lots of confusion about e-petitions already, and as ever, this isn’t about the software, it’s about how you use it. Merely deploying an e-petition system could raise expectations that are just not met, leading to a net loss in public engagement overall. The cost of getting a system seems to be a worry too, but there’s an open source e-petition system out there to download straight off the web, so that shouldn’t be a massive issue.
The Institute takes a similar view in its thoughts on why implementing the new act may be a bad idea, but says one of these reasons is because “When money is scarce, Authorities will discharge this duty by using internet websites and this will do little to widen participation and encourage greater inclusivity ”
Quite frankly, nonsense.
We’ve been over the web usage stats here before , and it’s clear that not using the internet is now a primary factor in not encouraging greater inclusivity. This can be especially true of ‘hard to reach’ groups, from those with disabilities to those who are time poor and cannot attend public meetings and events. I can’t think of any project we’ve done that hasn’t seen an increase in partitipation rates from taking engagement and consultation online, at least where there’s been a prior activity benchmark to compare against.
Not just that, but some of the projects we’ve done simply would not have been able to handle the participation levels they achieved without using an online component to their practice.
As ever, we wouldn’t propose running an online only process, and some of the claims made for e-participation generating cost savings that used to go around a few years ago were indeed wide of the mark. But times have moved on, software is now open source, and internet usage is huge.
To state that using ‘internet websites’ will do little to widen participation and encourage greater inclusivity just runs counter to the evidence found time and time again. Using the technology poorly, now that’s what will cause the problems.
UPDATE: The Consultation Institute have asked that I clarify that their comment didn’t appear in their general newsletter, but in a fortnightly members only briefing written by Institute Programme Director Rhion Jones, which I’m happy to do!
A citizen who participates in online democracy is promptly labelled a “usual suspect” and the value of their opinion demoted accordingly.
Yeah, heard that yesterday oddly enough. It’s impressive when it’s said alongside other fallacies such as ‘you can’t tell who’s responding online’ and ‘no-one uses the internet’, despite the mutual exclusivities between the different thoughts.
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With the merging of web/mobile/TV technologies there is potential to attract the time poor; typically those in the 20 to 40 age ranges, or, say, rural people; who don’t want to or can’t drive miles to give their view (as most projects don’t have resources to do that much outreach). The ‘usual suspects’ is a throw away line, often used by those wanting to dismiss consultation findings. However, consultation often finds demographics skewed towards those over 60, sometimes to such an extent that weighting becomes meaningless. The new technologies can, and have been very useful in the field in approaching a broader audience. It should not be assumed either, that technology is just for young persons.
There is evidently a switch with some audiences to prefer online to more traditional approaches, but as with anything it is taking care to match methods to audience, not just jump at the latest whizzy thing.
The main problem with the new act is that it is yet another in succession, so the temptation will be to wait to see what the next act says, as by time the practice from the last one would be in place it would have changed, and who knows what the election will bring.
Quality, not quantity.
I agree – by offering online surveys we have changged the age profile from predominantly male over 60 to a more representative balance of ages. However it should be one tool in teh box not the only tool.
A recent experience that my neighbours and I have had with Brent Council echoes Gez’s warnings about that new ‘Duties to Involve’ risk increasingy disillusionment with politics if done wrongly or insincerely.
In this instance, Brent Council faced losing tens of millions of pounds for new social housing if planning permission were not granted for a new building in January. In a tight economic climate, it is understandable that the Council made a foregone decision to grant the permission. What is neither understandable nor acceptable is that the Council pretended that an incomprehensible mailing to residents upheld its own ‘Duty to Involve’ policy, and that the planning meeting itself was an open and unbiased event.
Believing Committee members were genuinely open to facts my neighbours spent countless hours drafting model mock-ups of the proposed building, trawling through highly technical documents and crafting extensivly detailed arguments regarding the inadequacy of the proposal, only to find Committee members more interested in whether the windows of one house in one neighbourhood violated conservation codes than the overall impact of 150 unit dwelling. That legally mandated information was not available until just days before the meeting or that an arcane and inaccessible website kept crashing so much so that residents had to stay up until after midnight simply to down load key documents is another matter……
Having attended the Planning Meeting myself, I saw first hand the disillusionment that a ‘faux’ consultation exercise can have on citizens. Having dutifully trudged along to a so-called ‘site visit’ in the freezing cold – only to be presented with arcane architectural plans on a sub-zero street corner, my neighbours did not even realise that current technology would have made it relatively easy for the Council to post virtual mock-ups of the proposed building with easy to understand depictions of its noise and light impact on the neighbourhood on their website. While they may not be blaming the Council for a sub-standard use of ICT, they are certainly all disgusted by a sham ‘Duty to Consult’ that wasted their time, and made a mockery of the Council’s own policy.
This same Council is now hosting a community seminar next week on ‘Community Involvement.’ My neighbour passed what he referred to as ‘this joke’ along to me because he knew I would be interested in the subject. I am. But the ‘open’ seminar is a being held in community centre between 12-4 on a weekday. I would ask the Consultation Institute how ‘open’ – let alone representative – an event which excludes most of the working population really is? Surely, a Council that genuinely wants to hear from all its citizens would make some sort of attempt to leverage the Internet? Unless, of course, it is really not interested at all?