Basic Functionality for Online Citizen Engagement Platform

[laurawesley]

(le français suit...)

We are gathering the requirements for possible improvements to the Consulting Canadians website (http://www1.canada.ca/consultingcanadians/). This is our draft list of requirements. Do others have ideas?

Any organization should be able to:

• publish tombstone information about a consultation
• moderate comments (approve, edit, delete, respond to)
• download all comments in a structured data format such as .csv
• publish questions for engagement
• promote upcoming consultations
• get email addresses of people who want to participate in future consultations (by topic, department or geographic location)
• get reports about engagement rates (answer the questions: how many people viewed the pages? Where did they drop off? How many submitted comments or engaged with the content is some way?)

Any individual should be able to:

• search all consultations (past, planned, current by location, topic, department)
• post comments on consultations - whatever policies, programs or questions being consulted
• post documents in multiple formats in response to specific consultations or topics
• sign up to be notified of future consultations (by geography, topic, department)
• see/interact with other comments (vote up, quote a comment, +1, "tweet this")
• be enticed by others participation, for example, by seeing the participation rates related to that consultation (# of participants, comments, page views)
• see their input reflected in outcomes and results (What we Heard reports + more immediate feedback loops).

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Nous regroupons les exigences relatives à d’éventuelles améliorations au site Consultations auprès des Canadiens (http://www1.canada.ca/consultationdescanadiens/). La liste ci-après n’est que provisoire. Avez-vous d’autres idées?

Toutes les organisations devraient pouvoir :

• publier de l’information de base au sujet d’une consultation;
• gérer les commentaires (approbation, révision, suppression, réponse);
• télécharger tous les commentaires dans un format structuré de données, p. ex. .csv;
• publier des questions aux fins de participation;
• promouvoir les consultations à venir;
• obtenir les adresses électroniques des personnes qui souhaitent participer aux consultations futures (par sujet, ministère ou emplacement géographique);
• obtenir des rapports sur les taux de participation (répondre aux questions : Combien de personnes ont vu les pages? Quand ont-elles décroché? Combien ont fourni des commentaires ou ont interagi avec le contenu d’une façon ou d’une autre?).

Tous les particuliers devraient pouvoir :

• faire des recherches sur toutes les consultations (antérieures, prévues, en cours en fonction du lieu, sujet, ministère);
• afficher des commentaires sur les consultations - quels que soient les politiques, programmes ou questions faisant l’objet de la consultation;
• afficher des documents en formats multiples en réponse à des consultations ou à des sujets spécifiques;
• s’inscrire pour être avisés des consultations futures (par emplacement géographique, sujet, ministère);
• voir les commentaires des autres et y réagir (approuver, commenter, +1, partager des gazouillis);
• être encouragés par la participation des autres, par exemple en voyant les taux de participation relatifs à une consultation donnée (nombre de participants, commentaires, visionnements de page);
• constater leur contribution en voyant les résultats et les extrants (rapports sur ce qui a été entendu et des boucles de réaction plus immédiates).

[chrismajewski]

This may be a pipe dream:

• Interact with documents in the browser as a proposal of change
• Upload updated versions of documents as a proposal of change

I'd be more apt to participate if I could edit the document with the language or corrections I have in mind.

If they could click to open, edit and click to save/propose I bet your usage skyrockets. It's a perceived 5-15 minutes of effort even if they spend an hour. If they have to register, find that document again, comment in a box describing a change and then track the mis-interpretation of their idea it becomes a hurdle most won't start.

On the technical end if it's a text format like Markdown we can run a "diff" command to see where their select changes are in a whole document.

If you show me in the document what you want to do, I'll see exactly what you meant.

[ThomKearney]

I really like that list of requirements. How do we want to go about documenting the details of each bullet? Use Cases?

[mgifford]

What @chrismajewski said. +2015

I'd add to this some share function on social media. Ultimately we want to see more citizens get involved so let's make it easy.

I'd like to see some spam protection measures. Looking at the feedback on Climate Change consultations it felt like about 10 people posted 90% of the comments. Article quality really fell when the deniers got vocal. When the focus should be what real steps can we take, it is annoying to have to wade through all the posts who angrily deny that any change is necessary and that the market will provide. (sorry, but of a rant)

If people can reply to my comment, I would like the ability to get notified. Often this can be built up.

I'd like government agencies to be able to provide additional markup (probably private) to mark up/down various comments based on it being useful for the consultation.

It would also be useful to provide linkages to other comments so that similar citizen comments can be linked together. Building those relationships is useful. There were quite a few open-source related issues in the Open Government engagement for instance, but most people just see the issues in the top 10.

[laurawesley]

Thanks for the comments so far @chrismajewski @ThomKearney @mgifford - all great suggestions...I'm going to invite more feedback via Twitter. This is perfect timing as I plan out our team's activities for next fiscal year.

[chrismajewski]

Sounds like we are looking at input streams with distinct SLA. A suggested replacement to text should be treated differently than a tweet sniped from the woods.

@mgifford agreed, separating signal from noise will go a long way to willingness to participate.

Do we add more user control for our benefit?:

• User comment ranking (let them de-prioritize spam)
• User content flags (inappropriate, wrong topic, etc...)

[hslaird]

It's a really nice starting point - simple and clear. Agree with the comments above.

Some thoughts:

1. A direct invite or sharing mechanism so organizations and individuals can easily link to the consultation to share with users who otherwise would not access the site.

2. To @chrismajewski 's point, what array of engagement options could the site facilitate?

3. This may be best as a separate project, but giving individuals and organizations the option to evaluate the efficacy of the consultation could give some really useful data about what's working / what's not - different perceptions of success that could help guide future work.

4. How could the site support higher quality engagement? e.g. prompting organizations to use plain language, include a simple purpose statement for the consultation, state a target audience and why they are the target audience (e.g. this is about land in X area so we need to hear from residents)

5. Would some of the consultations be invitational but still transparent to the public, or would all be completely open? Navigation / organization of the site could support common understanding around types of engagement.

[ThomKearney]

Sometimes it is useful to have high level business requirements that provide a frame and vision that we are working towards. This is my contribution to that vision.

The link below takes you to a short narrated slide show that explains the five business requirements I think are required to support the business of government in the context of public engagement:

1. Share Information
2. Gather Knowledge
3. Identify and nurture communities
4. Create options
5. Evaluate

The video also explains this attempt at an architectural view of the whole system from the perspective of what people want to do.

The seven minute video is here: https://vimeo.com/180523114

[patcon]

Haven't caught up on reading this whole thread, but really excited for this to be posted on an official Gov Canada account! I highly recommend looking into the citizen-led consultation process that's been developed in Taiwan over the past 2 years, as well as some case-studies, particularly in regard to their use of pol.is (an open-source tool created by a small company in Seattle).

vTaiwan's process has been created through a collaboration between long-time consultants like @audreyt and non-experts technologists, and they are now starting to speak more openly with the more established English-speaking consultation profession, if I understand correctly (@biancawylie included, if I can lure her into this 😉 )

cc: @colinmegill

Resources

• Process Diagram: vTaiwan as a Service
• Civicist Article: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy

EDIT: Added comments in reference to @audreyt :)

[mgifford]

Wow! AI & Machine Learning with citizen engagement. Totally makes sense. Amazing that this open source platform is already so far ahead.

Would love to see a government department experiment with this.. Even to just get some discussions going where there might be controversy. Break folks out of their silos....

Thanks @patcon

[audreyt]

Hi! As the Digital Minister of Taiwan I'm always happy to share our process. I gave a talk recently in LibreCon 2016 that includes more recent updates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukna6wZg-8A

[laurawesley]

Wow @audreyt I just watched the video and I am COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY!! Wow. You are more than 7 hours in the future! My mind is spinning trying to figure out how to move this forward.

Where do we start @ThomKearney @mgifford @chrismajewski @hslaird @MaryBethBaker @sboots @dyomides @patcon ?

[kentdaitken]

@laurawesley Laura, @colinmegill gave me a demo yesterday. We can spin up a test discussion next week among ourselves. Nesta's also been meta-analyzing different approaches and models, waiting to hear back from them but they have some good articles up now.

[laurawesley]

Great @kentdaitken Let's talk about it Tuesday at GovMaker debrief. I wonder if this maps to NB as Living Lab idea...Our approach must be open source, collaborative and inclusive to combat polarization.

[colinmegill]

Here are a handful of resources from our side, which I've also shared with @kentdaitken. pol.is is OSS, & our company supports both SaaS & on prem deployments. Maybe @audreyt can speak specifically to the manner in which vTaiwan was highly successful in bridging a polarized issue in the case of online alcohol sales, which I don't think has been formally written up yet.

Brief introduction: 10 minute talk from Next:Economy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Lqj5lazKM

In depth article from Liz Barry at Columbia, in Civicist: civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/

My talk in Tapei (Spring 2016) blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5

vTaiwan Uber consultation writeup by @audreyt (now a minister in the Taiwan administration) https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b