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Part 1: Adventures in digital democracy

@DelibThinks

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What I did last summer

Whilst I’d planned a 4 week road trip across the vineyards of France . . .

Me in a vineyard

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But new gov wrecks my holiday!

The new Coalition government decide to run 2 different mass participation exercises over the summer.

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Your Freedom explained

The Your Freedom crowd-sourcing site allowed uses to share ideas

Add ideas

Search via tags

Read and rate ideas

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What people were saying

`There was a mix of general popularist ideas, together with useful niche actionable ideas.

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Your Freedom in numbers• 500,000 people visited site• 47,000 took part• 15,000 ideas• 97,000 comments• 242,000 ratings• 11,000 tags• Upto 40 Moderators at same

time

An indication of high-levelsof engagement.

Each person who took part, on average made x2 comments, x5 ratings. 1/3 added an idea.

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What happened (in stats)

On launch the site saw a massive spike in traffic on day one, and generally high-levels of engagement.

90,000 visits on day 11/5th of all participation. High levels of

engagement

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Massive spike + high participation

Over 700,000 page views on day 1, and 4.2 million page views across campaign.

700,000 page views onDay 1.

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How we generated such volumes

A mix of launch PR, social media buzz, together with RSS content syndication across partner sites.

RSS widgetEmbedded in

key sites.

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What happened in practice

Due to spikes in traffic, in the first few days the site crashed - due to lack of server capacity.

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Insights into the Spending Challenge

The Spending Challenge used our Dialogue App - re-skinned to tackle this specific issue.

Same format as YourFreedom

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A two-part strategy

Unlike Your Freedom, the Spending Challenge was run in two distinct parts: 1) ideas stage 2) sorting stage

1)Ideas stage

People asked to give ideasof how the governmentcould do more for less.

2) Sorting stage

People then asked to rateall ideas, to help the

government sort throughthe 10,000’s of ideas.

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What people were saying

Uses could rate

. . . comment on

. . . And tag

The most useful ideas added were niche ideas. Beyond these there were lots of more general (and quite political) ideas like “Pull out of Afghanistan”.

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Spending Challenge numbers• 250,000 people visited site• 20,000 took part• 43,000 ideas• 14,000 comments• 280,000 ratings

Interestingly, participants in the Spending Challenge added 2 ideas each, compared to 0.3 ideas per person in the Your Freedom dialogue.

Users added on averagex2 ideas each.

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Spending Challenge (in stats)

The Spending Challenge had even higher levels of engagement compared to Your Freedom: over 15 page views and over 9 minutes on the site.

Spikes related to launchof the 2 phases

Highengagement

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What happened next

• 6 weeks after the end of the process, the Chancellor announced which initial ideas he was going to take forward.

• 3 ideas were identified:– a more common sense approach to Criminal

Record Bureau checks for junior doctors.– piloting an online auction site for surplus

and second hand Government equipment– replacing the plastic National Insurance

number card with a letter reducing costs.

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. . . so what did this all cost?

£25,000 total

£0.45 per idea

£0.03 per citizenThe costs involved in running these processes was about £25k between them (N.B. certain server and design costs were shared)

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And what we learnt . . .• Invest in more servers!• Create a compact process: define

timelines upfront, and pitch it as an *event*, rather than ongoing process.

• Provide a timeline for feedback, to give the process closure.

• Make sure the question asked is specific enough to generate useful ideas.

Possibly the 2 biggest things we learnt were 1) invest in servers 2) create a compact process.

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+ make sure it doesn’t clash with your holiday!

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Part 2: Vision

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An extreme vision of the future

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

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A more practical vision:“Government as a participative platform”

A more practical and achievable vision for government is the concept of “government as a platform” - where government can be fed ideas from relevant sources at relevant times via a layer of apps.

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Part 3: turning vision into reality

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UK’s *Citizen Space* 3-layer model

UK government have developed Citizen Space - based around a 3 layer model: organising layer, engagement layer and understanding layer. The core aimed at get ting the basics right, so you can innovate on top.

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Citizen Space in a nutshell• A consultation platform built for

government by government.• Designed as a collaborative

project between Delib and the UK government between 2009/10.

• Invested over $750,000 in development

• Open source - meaning the code is freely available to be developed + innovated on.

Citizen Space was developed to collaboratively solve the basic challenges, so government can innovate on top.

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Problems we set out to solve

• Every day efficiencies - create a central consultation platform designed to address *core* government consultation needs.

• Cross-departmental collaboration - to make it easy for multiple partners to set-up consultations together.

• Address legal challenges - create standard functionality to *minimise* legal challenges.

• Future-proof platform - provide an open-source platform that can be built on in the future.

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Who uses Citizen Space

30+ Local and central government, to NGOs (like BBC), and it’s now being taken up by government in Australia

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Core Citizen Space functions • Consultation management: manage all consultations in one place, across multiple departments.

• Consultation set-up / creation: create your own consultations (deliberative surveys to simple .pdfs)

• Respondent management and tracking: see who’s been taking part; unique user IDs.

• Analysis + reporting: quantitative cross-tabbing and qualitative coding.

• Syndication: RSS syndication.

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1: Organise consultations

All consultationinformation in

one place

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2. Consult on complex policy documents

Structure your consultationwith as many sections

as you like.

For lengthy documents, divideinto Chapters, and let peopleconsult on specific sections

Indication of whether you’ve responded to a Chapter or not

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3. Filter + analyse responses

Filter response and createCross-tabs of results, to dig

In-depth into results.

Export data for reporting andFurther analysis.

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Wow, how can I get some?

• Already paid for by UK government• Open source, so any government can

use• Quick and easy to implement, taking

roughly 10 days to implement• Costs $12,000 to set up• No ongoing license fees - run as many

consultations as you wantCitizen Space is open source, so any government around the world can use it. More info: www.CitizenSpace.com

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Part 4: DIY digital democracy

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Empowerment = future

people to do X, Y or Z”

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are needed to see this picture.

Empowerment is a growing cultural trend: both citizens and government have become empowered by technology

Citizens want to have their say 24/7

Government’sIncreasing DIYculture

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1) Get the basics right

Implement some basic *consultation infrastructure* like Citizen Space to ensure you get the basics right.

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2) Innovate

Once you’ve got the basics right, innovation (the exciting bit) is easy! Especially as there’s lots of low-cost tools available to use - e.g. Delib’s Dialogue App.

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3) Do it. It’s easy - and it works!

Running citizen dialogues is really easy - even at a local level. It’s also a pretty cheap thing to do. For example Delib’s Dialogue app costs $8,000 a year, and you can run as many dialogues as you’d like.

Broad ageof participants

Hyper-localParticipation

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Delib Down Under

people to do X, Y or Z”Finally, some good news. Delib is launching in Australia via a number of collaborations - with the mission to help Government agencies embrace *DIY digital democracy*.

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www.Delib.co.ukwww.CitizenSpace.comwww.Dialogue-App.com

Chris@Delib.co.uk@DelibThinks