What does digital engagement look like?

Two of this week’s readings – “Digital Deliberation” by Thomas C. Beierle and “Design of Digital Democracies” by Pirjo Elovaara and Christina Mortberg – investigate different ways we can design the IT systems that control our engagement with government agencies.  These authors have discovered similar lessons that we have uncovered through our readings of Joe Trippi and others: top-down moderation of collective channels enables discussion, but systems designed to interact on an individual basis can empower citizens to become engaged with their government processes.

Thomas Beierle’s piece recounted a 2001 forum conducted by the EPA to moderate discussion and receive feedback on the agency’s new Public Involvemenet Policy (PIP) and to gather ideas on how it should be implemented.  This dialogue featured several elements, including an advertising campaign to recruit members, a briefing packet for participants to ready themselves for debate, basic forum tools (such as sorting options, daily summaries), and moderators who would lead discussions.

These tools, Beierle adds, make up an “interactive dialogue [that] can support a more reasoned analysis of issues by reducing the incentives for opposing interests to hew to extreme views and by subjecting assertions to direct rebuttal.” (157)

He is also keyed into some early lessons of online forums, including:

• increased access for formerly uninvolved populations;
• the creation of resources to help practitioners design more effective forums; and,
• the likelihood (86%) of participants to already be active internet users.

I believe the second point is one of the biggest takeaways.  Since the mid-90s there have been several free and fee-based services that will guide the development and design a website or forum.  That is simply not enough, though, and those who build and participate in online dialogues need to share resources to make their discussions more productive and responsive.  This practice can reduce barriers to entry for unexperienced designers and facilitators and can help future conversations avoid the common mistakes of previous efforts.

One great example of this type of work is E-Democracy.org:

Begun in 1994 as Minnesota E-Democracy, the first election information website, E-Democracy.org has evolved into the world’s largest network of online “issue forums”, with groups centered in Minnesota, England, and New Zealand.  This organization, however, hosts more than just a website.  With active blogs, listservs, and resources, practitioners from all over the world are sharing ideas and best-practices to help bolster the growing community of online civic engagement.  For the community engagement field, this is becoming the open source solution.

Another interesting development is the Open311 and OpenMuni projects launched by CivicCommons. This collaboration is an effort to create a community of developers whom are working to build more effective platforms for local governance.  In simpler terms, CivicCommons is attempting to build a website that any government can deploy that will include an “app store” of add-ons.  By cultivating a community of web and application developers, this project aims to build a sort of WordPress model for local governance, which will take an enormous amount of the costs of proprietary systems out of the equation for government IT teams.

Back to the EPA: The third point, that 86% of the EPA’s dialogue participants were already active internet users, is potentially a greater issue.  This clues us into the state of the digital divide in 2001, which has definitely been reduced in our nation over the last decade, but still pervades our public sphere.  According to the Seattle Dept. of IT”s annual report, 84% of households in our city have internet access, which is on the higher end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, the following statistics show room for improvement:

• Households earning under $30,000 are 66% as likely to have home internet access as those earning over $40,000;
• People with no college degree are 33% less likely to have home internet access;
• Less than 50% of Latinos/Hispanic Americans and 66% of African Americans have home access, whereas 90% of Caucasians have access; and,
• 62% of persons with disabilities have internet access at home.

These are issues that many governments are working to address, and there are a great deal of organizations bringing pressure to our legislators to find solutions to the digital divide, but, as “Design of Digital Democracies”  addresses, there are also aspects of society, including gender, that need to be included in the development of these systems.  Building a system that can be used by active internet and government users is not enough.  Different populations need access, and, as digital divide numbers show, many of those we need to include in the process are already excluded.

Elovaara and Mortberg looked into the work of Women Writing on the Net (WWN), a project directed in Bologna, Italy, London, England, and Ronneby, Sweden.  This projected intended to:

Further grassroots democracy by working with empowerment to conquer and redefine the public arena, to stop the drawing up of boundaries or dualism between public/private and expert/non-expert, and to build communities.  The goal of working with ‘empowerment’ within the WWN project was to encourage the participating women to redefine themselves: to become  and act as insiders in IT contexts, as well as in society as a whole.

Their analysis continues to dissect women’s interaction with a test IT system and concludes that women need to be recruited to be involved in the process of developing and managing government IT infrastructure.  They believe that through inclusion, government web systems will be more responsive to a larger population.  Extending this observation to the realities of the digital divide, it should be said that we need to recruit well-rounded teams of managers and developers to build responsive and flexible government websites.  Input is needed from all sides of society, and top-down approaches to dialogue do not tend to be wholly inclusive.

Perhaps the combination of addressing the digital divide and developing open source-like communities will help bolster society’s ability to build a more interactive governing structure.  Experts believe that including more people in the debate and development of these tools has the potential to build a more robust representative democracy.  Tools like KnowledgeAsPower, OneBusAway, and VanTrash are taking advantage of the first waves of freely distributed government data, while organizations like ParkingMobility have crowd-sourced the creation of much-needed data (i.e. availability of handicapped parking) – and there are plenty of practitioners who look hopefully upon the Open Government movement to drive this era of innovation.

What do you think?

• How do you interact with your elected representatives?  With your surroundings?
• Are there any issues you wish could be resolved with a text message or a tweet? (i.e. potholes, fallen branches, crime)
• Do you see any downfalls in developing a more robust governing structure this way?
• Are there dangers to creating civic engagement through fragmented services like VanTrash and KAP?

Advertisement