Promising Practices in Online Engagement

This briefing looks at a selection of online engagement practices, from high-level national politics to the public realms of neighbourhoods, and particularly focuses on how to bridge partisan divides and bring together individuals from all over the political spectrum in meaningful dialogue and deliberation. Its focus is approaches that have successfully included diverse voices and produced tangible results outside of political party lines.

From the introduction: "The patterns of opinion shaping, dialogue and decision making on each level have changed through the widespread availability of new communication tools. Nonetheless, the differences between scope of engagement and communication tools can be tremendous. At a national level, partisanship strongly affects the political discourse in the general online realm. We will highlight multiple approaches that try to bridge this divide and bring together individuals from all sides in meaningful dialogue. While we focus here on a range of national and local examples, we have organized what follows according to a number of principles that we think are especially salient:

• Allow Citizens to Set Priorities
  
• Use Citizens as Fact Finders
• Generate Bi-Partisan Buy-In
  
• Merge Online and Face-to-Face Engagement
  
• Help Experts and Citizens to Collaborate
  
• Foster Local Problem Solving"

The first example of online engagement is Change.gov, an example of “eConsultation” at the national level that was put in place by the Obama United States (US) Presidential transition team. This system tried to feature deliberative elements that were not found in Great Britain's online petition systems like "10Downingstreet.co.uk". Change.gov focused on idea generation and storytelling. "[T]he “Your Seat at the Table” section on Change.gov allowed citizens to see and comment on what outside groups were telling the Obama transition team. “Join the Discussion” featured weekly questions from the transition team to start an online discussion, followed by a video response from the Obama team." The idea generation site “Citizen’s Briefing Book” pushed ideas for policy change on various issues to a focused list through a rating system. The site structure raised questions about anonymity of authorship, which prohibited transparency and encouraged poor behaviour in commenting, and "sock puppet" comments - comments from interest groups, not individuals. Also, “early submission bias" occurred, which pushed early ideas to top rankings and later submissions of ideas to a lower ranking. Further, it was not clear whether conservatives engaged in the process, and whether "next steps" in the political process resulted.

The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) Health Care Forum asked participants to set priorities on a focused topic: safeguarding patients’ rights to privacy while using information technology now available to improve the health care system. As a group, participants came up with new ideas and principles that were to be presented to the new US administration at the inauguration in January 2009. "Three core components were necessary for this online dialogue to be successful: First, awareness of the issue at hand had to be generated to promote active participation by interest groups and the broader public. Second, the Web site needed content to inform participants and create a similar starting point to the discussion for everyone. Last, a sophisticated Web platform was needed to support, capture and aggregate the dialogue. To get the word out to as many people as possible, a social media strategy was applied which included channels such as Twitter along with outreach to blogs and even YouTube. A YouTube video about the event was used to introduce the issue and proved to be a valuable low-cost marketing tool for this event that ended up being reposted on multiple blogs. Attempts were made to get participants who weren’t outspoken to engage in the discussion. All team members, including the organizers and even the advisory board members, actively communicated with the participants. The use of moderators, while using more of a passive facilitation approach, helped to enforce ground rules and maintain a safe area to discuss issues. Multiple e-mail updates kept participants informed about what was happening in the dialogue. The combination of all these strategies made the effort a great success." Strategies that supported the effort included: a long registration period before the weeklong discussion; pre-populating the forum with comments from thought leaders and others, giving the site a tone and giving new participants material from which to begin; and having a finite time period - one week. Strategies that detracted from the success of the forum included: continuous voting, which resulted in early submission bias; and ideas that were very similar competing for votes, detracting from their vote totals. The 1 - 5 rating system may not have been as accurate, due to interpretation by voters, as a thumbs up or thumbs down system.

Mobile use for fact finding can involve short message service (SMS). Twitter Vote Report was designed to enlist mobile-phone-armed citizens into a network of US poll watchers. Using text messaging and phone hotlines, voters could alert others of developing problems in real time. National Public Radio broadcast some of the resulting experiences of voters. The project included the ability to provide a venue to ask questions and build a database of information to give voters the help they needed. This was reported to have enhanced traditional face-to-face approaches with an additional back-channel.

In one of Public Agenda’s Community Conversations around "Math, Engineering, Technology and Science" education in Liberty, Missouri, US, "a mobile phone-based survey was used to collect opinions from the audience during dinner. Handouts on each table asked participants a set of three questions and gave instructions on how to submit their answers via text message. The polling software tallied the responses and, right afterwards, the host was able to compare the results to a state-wide survey..." showing differences of an actively interested audience and of general state residents. "[W]ith mobile technology maturing and gaining widespread adoption, these kinds of exercises can be applied in new and creative ways to enhance face-to-face civic..." though by nature, as stated here, they do not support a depth of information gathering.

The function of watching government sources and services includes the following sites:

• Sites like OpenCRS ask visitors to gather and share government information that wouldn’t otherwise be available.
  
• The goal of SourceWatch, a wiki created by the Center for Media and Democracy, is to monitor the hidden worlds of the lobbying and public relations industries in politics. It includes an editor and a debate wiki to increase the accuracy of entries.
  
• "Mash-ups" are websites that combine content and information from different sources, processing it to add interactivity to what were formerly static PDF or CD-ROM formats. Google Maps is an example. Others include: Walkscore.com, a web site that provides walkability rankings for neighbourhoods by aggregating geographical, business, and other data; and Every-Block.com, which overlays geographical information with crime statistics, news stories, and election data on a neighbourhood level.
  
• United Kingdom (UK)-based FixMyStreet lets people report infrastructure problems in their neighbourhood using a mapping tool.
  
• The British organisation, mySociety, founded PledgeBank to provide a new way for individuals to gather support for actions that go beyond what anyone can do by themselves. Pledges can include time, skills, money, or other goods.

Deliberative democracy that gathers bi-partisan discussion and consideration is a challenge for online sites, as reported in the brief. Tech-President is a blog on the use of technology in the 2008 presidential campaign put together by Personal Democracy Forum. Its site "10 Questions" used personal videos to bring attention to questions of public concern, which were then ranked. Some US presidential candidates responded to them. Because, as stated here, "the bias of TechPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum is [perceived to be] only that technology is reshaping politics", there has been bipartisan contribution. "Public Agenda has had a similar experience with its Facing Up to the Nation’s Finances initiative, a nonpartisan effort to deal with the national debt and the long-term fiscal challenge."

According to the briefing, generally, online community building efforts have shown that only 1 percent of visitors to social network sites make up the core group that consistently posts, asks, and answers questions and acts as the life-blood of a network. Another 9 percent are less frequently engaged. Merging online and face-to-face engagement can increase participation. It is demonstrated through the following example:

• Kansas City, Kansas, US, leaders dedicated to supporting “Math, Engineering, Technology and Science” achievement use a website to gather participants for "Community Conversations", organise planning teams , and publish ideas from the conversations and planning processes.
  
• The participatory budgeting process in Berlin-Lichtenberg, Germany, is an example of online deliberation as part of a broader annual civic participation effort using face-to-face meetings and online fora to gather ideas, submit them to discussion and voting, and then hand them to decisionmakers, as well as take a survey of a wider public to add data for the decision makers' use. 4,000 people participated in 2005/2006.
  

Citizen contribution, as seen in citizen journalism, is a rising source of engagement. It can be combined with "expertise" provided by professionals, for example:

• NewAssignment.Net has created a series of experiments in “pro-am” journalism, where citizen journalists work together with professionals.
  
• Off the Bus, in collaboration with Huffington Post on the 2008 presidential campaign, gave citizen reporters assignments to cover the campaign, including events in their communities.
  
• Beatblogging. org is designed to enable specialty reporters (who cover a specific "beat") to use social networking to connect with experts and interested citizens on their coverage.

More local discussion fora include:

• e-Democracy.org’s Local Issues Forums are local online discussion boards where citizens, local officials, or journalists post their questions and get an idea of how residents feel about these issues. They have resulted in on- and off-line communication that encourages respect for a variety of opinions, discussion rather than complaining, and a citizen-driven agenda oriented toward face-to-face action and activism on issues. They use email similar to a listserv and a bulletin board format, as well as digest-type summaries. They use the strategies of allowing two posts per person in a 24-hour period and use of real names to encourage meaningful exchange.
  
• Harringay Online was built on a social network platform to generate and provide neighbourhood information by neighbours for neighbours. This may consist of information about safety, health care, businesses in the community, community event planning, and local news. It has hosted a community priorities survey with a 70-percent response rate, as well as petitions for local changes. Local police have become active members in this London, UK, borough where it was first introduced. While initially slow to gain community ownership, the online social network has “provided a bridge between individuals, groups of individuals and local government officials.”