This fall I’m teaching two e-engagement programs through Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. One of the programs is a TeleForum (a series of conference calls) so it’s accessible to participants anywhere in the world.

Please let your colleagues and friends know about this chance to learn about online engagement and dialogue:

Do you need to build relationships with new stakeholder groups? Are you managing complex issues and relationships with limited resources? Is information management and information sharing crucial to your stakeholder engagement work?

Online tools can help you manage all of these stakeholder engagement challenges. Engagement leaders have recognized that tools like online discussions, resource libraries and surveys can increase the reach and effectiveness of almost any stakeholder engagement program.

Beginning in September 2005, the Collaborative Learning & Innovation program at Simon Fraser University is offering two opportunities to learn more about the values, tools and approaches that drive successful online stakeholder engagement.

The Online Stakeholder Engagement Teleforum (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_engagement_teleforum.htm) is a series of six monthly conference calls for engagement practitioners. These monthly discussions will focus on collaborative knowledge-building among participants in order to create a learning community that is useful to the work of its members. Participants will develop the field knowledge and analytic framework to assess e-engagement options and to plan for effective online engagement with key stakeholders. The first session will be held on September 14; calls will be held from 10 am – noon PST, and international participation is welcomed.

The Online Stakeholder Engagement Workshop (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_workshop.htm) will be held on October 17 in Vancouver, Canada. This one-day workshop will provide an intensive introduction to online engagement work, emphasizing online engagement as a catalyst for increasing the depth and value of public involvement work. Participants will get hands-on experience with a range of online engagement tools, and will develop their own perspective on the opportunities for online participation through discussion and group exercises.

Both the Teleforum and the in-person workshop will be co-taught be Alexandra Samuel and Ann Svendsen. For further information please visit the CLI web site at http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/executive_programs.htm, or e-mail Alexandra (alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com) or Ann (svendsen_at_sfu_dot_ca).

The Canadian Policy Research Network has released a new paper called “Democracy — Updating the Owner’s Manual” by Mary Pat MacKinnon, the Director of CPRN’s Public Involvement Network.

The paper provides a very useful introduction to citizen engagement, informed by CPRN’s own extensive experience in engaging over 2,000 Canadians in public dialogue. Mary Pat suggests four reasons that citizen engagement matters:

1. To safeguard democracy
2. To support democracy with informed, engaged citizens
3. To improve policy outcomes
4. To nurture democracy for future generations

And among the challenge that Mary Pat identifies for citizen engagement practitioners, she asks:

How do we scale up to institutionalize democratic participation at all levels of government, within public service and parliaments? How do we capture the full effects of public involvement – how do we improve our ability to evaluate and communicate results to the public?

This is just the challenge that online engagement is uniquely able to address. Face-to-face engagement imposes enormous informational, personal and financial demands. Would-be participants have to keep informed about a range of issues and events if they want to be ready when the consultation wagon comes through town. They have to juggle scheduling pressures, geographic barriers, and inhibitions about speaking up in a room full of strangers. And the cost of organizing a series of town hall meetings requires a significant resource commitment.

Online engagement and online support for face-to-face engagement can address some of these challenges by transcending many of the informational, personal and financial obstacles to large-scale participation. Many countries – Canada included – offer consultation portals that list current requests for input and links to relevant background information. Online discussions give people the opportunity to participate whenever and wherever is most convenient for them, and makes it easier to speak up. Most crucially, online consultations can engage a much wider range and larger number of participants than would otherwise be logistically or financially feasible.

But to realize that potential, we need to push beyond the resource-intensive focus on professionally moderated small-group discussions. That’s the model that still dominates the online consultation field, even though it imposes many of the same barriers and costs that limit face-to-face engagement. If we reduce every engagement process to 50-person moderated groups, we’re never going to break through the glass ceiling that counts 1,000 people as massive participation.

And what’s at stake is far more than numbers. If we agree with Mary Pat that “a well functioning democracy requires a well informed and engaged citizenry,” then we need to think about the tipping point at which a sprinkling of consultation participants starts to foster a broader culture of engagement and participation. Face-to-face engagement is a crucial part of developing that culture, but I suspect that only online engagement is capable of getting us to the numbers that will turn citizen participation into a pervasive, enriching and habitual part of public decision-making.

This week’s challenge: coming up with a common set of e-democracy tags for all of the e-democracy bloggers and bookmark collectors out there.

For those new to the tagging concept, here’s a brief intro: In the process of setting up Diablogue, I’ve been exploring the world of social bookmarking and tagging. Social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us, furl, and my favourite, spurl) allow people to create online bookmark collections (or even complete web page archives) which they can share with other like-minded folks.

The key to sharing is the use of common “tags” — essentially keywords that indicate the subject of any given web page. The tagging concept has also moved into the blogging world, where Technorati (a fantastic tool for tracking what is going on in the “blogosphere”) uses tags to categorize different blog posts. Many blogging software systems (like WordPress and Movable Type) automatically tag blog posts by converting post categories to tags.

To see what tags can do for you, check out the Technorati page for the “e-democracy” tag which shows recent blog posts that have an e-democracy tag, as well as e-democracy bookmarks from del.icio.us and furl.

Tagging is a very powerful tool for collaboration, especially among groups of colleagues who share specific interests — like all of us e-democracy, dialogue, and Internet research types.

But because tagging is currently a “folksonomy” — a grassroots generated set of keywords — there is no consistency to how blog posts and bookmarks are tagged. That limits the possibilities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Want a sense of the problem? Check out the OTHER technorati edemocracy tag page.

Now back to our challenge…

It would seem that the time has come for us to pursue some sort of common tagging system.

John Gotze has made a great start at establishing a potential set of tags for e-democracy (and beyond). And Steve Clift has set up a set of keywords with links to shared bookmark collections (see also http://www.dowire.org/wiki/Shared_Bookmarks).

But even John and Steve aren’t in synch yet, and their keyword systems still leave lots of gaps to plug.

Any other tagging schemes or proposals out there? Any thoughts on how we can all get on the same page?

I’ve been checking out Drupal, a web-based content management system that could provide an interesting platform for online engagement projects (especially those with a limited budget — Drupal is open source).

For those who don’t know Drupal, it describes itself as a “dynamic web site platform which allows an individual or community of users to publish, manage and organize a variety of content, Drupal integrates many popular features of content management systems, weblogs, collaborative tools and discussion-based community software into one easy-to-use package.”

One interesting Drupal implementation at the edges of civic engagement is Civic Space. Civic Space aims more at grassroots organizing and campaigning than at consultation per se, but it’s an interesting starting point for organizations who are looking for a version of Drupal that is a little more tailored to civic engagement needs.

As part of my ongoing love-in with 43 Things, I looked into its development environment, something called Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a programming language that claims to be easy for even a new programmer to learn. Rails is a web application framework for Ruby; it sounds like it may make the process of developing web applications much faster and more efficient.

I gather than Ruby on Rails was developed simultaneously and symbiotically with Basecamp, a very intriguing web-based project management tool. It looks like a very usable, economic tool for managing internal communications, project timelines, and task allocation and completion.

New DO-Consult subscriber Katherine Beavis points out that e-consultation has now been enshrined in the Canadian government’s official communications guidelines.

The new (revised) Government of Canada communications policy was released today. One of the only changes was a new requirement to post public consultation sessions on the web.

Are there other countries or governments that have adopted similar requirements?

A recent discussion on DO-Consult turned to the question of how we can evaluate the success of electronic citizen engagement projects. One list member pointed out that the issues probably aren’t too different from the challenges of evaluating off-line engagement efforts, which inspired me to pull together some resources on how to evaluate citizen engagement.

It turns out that the Hewlett Foundation has funded a joint research project on evaluating dialogue & deliberation, jointly undertaken by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation (the NCDD’s web site is a great resource for general consultation and deliberation issues).

The project has gathered 50 assessment tools, reports and papers, some of which will soon be available on the NCDD’s resources page. To access the full set of resources immediately, you need to access the archives of the NCDD’s listserv on evaluating dialogue and deliberation (which requires you to register with the NCDD site — a very quick & easy process that will be initiated when you try to access the archive). Visit the NCDD’s e-mail list page and click on the “Evaluating Dialogue & Deliberation” list.

The NCDD’s web site also includes a paper by Angie Boyce of the Boston Museum of Science that offers a very nice review of the evaluation literature. See excerpts below; those who would find it useful to read the literature review in full (3 pages of a 9-page paper on “Evaluating Public Engagement: Deliberative Democracy and the Science Museum”) can download the paper in Word format.

The Canadian government has a report on “Evaluation and Citizen Engagement” that seems to be aimed at public servants trying to build evaluation processes into their own engagement projects. The report includes an annotated bibliography on the subject, much of it focused on “subject-centered evaluation” — i.e. evaluation by participants.

From Boyce, “Evaluating Public Engagement”, 2004:

[T]he evaluation literature on public participation and deliberative democracy is still in its infancy. Evaluation is only beginning to be considered a critical component in the development process (Rowe and Frewer, 2000; Einsiedel, 2002; Abelson, Forest et al., 2003)

Webler develops an evaluative framework based on two “metacriteria”; competence, which he defines as “psychological heuristics, listening and communication skills, self-reflection, and consensus building” and fairness, which occurs when “people are provided equal opportunities to determine the agenda, the rules for discourse, to speak and raise question, and equal access to knowledge and interpretations” (Webler, 1995). Webler qualifies competence and fairness as criteria by identifying conditions under which they are most likely to occur….

Rowe and Frewer…divide evaluation criteria into two parts: acceptance criteria, which refer to how the procedure is constructed and implemented, and process criteria, which are related to how the public will accept the procedure….

Einsiedel’s work….developed evaluation criteria from the literature on constructive technology assessment (which is front-end and design focused) and deliberative democracy (Habermas’s rules for discourse). She divided evaluation into three components: institutional/organizational criteria (which focus on how the opportunity for public participation emerged and was shaped), process criteria (which focus on what procedures were used as part of the participatory process), and outcome criteria (which focus on the impacts on participants, the community, the larger public, and the policy process in general).

… Perhaps one of the most extensive evaluation efforts that has been published to date is by Horlock-Jones et. al in their evaluation of the GM Nation? public debate sponsored by the British government on genetic modification. They used three sets of criteria: the aims and objectives of the Steering Board (in charge of implementing the debate), normative criteria (transparency, well-defined tasks, unbiased, inclusive, sufficient resources, effective and fair dialogue) and third, focus on participant views of success using surveys (Horlock-Jones, Walls et al., 2004). By using three different sets of criteria, they show that normative criteria must co-exist with stakeholder goals and participant perceptions.

…Joss describes several approaches to evaluating consensus conferences: efficiency (organization and management), effectiveness (external impact and outcomes), formative study (concurrent look at structure and process with possible intervention), cross-cultural studies (wider cultural context comparisons), and cost-benefit analysis (cost-effectiveness) (Joss, 1995).

… Interestingly, while scholars have developed different evaluative frameworks, the methodologies used in evaluation are largely similar. They look at discourse, documentation, and social relationships, using some quantitative but mostly qualitative methodologies. Indeed, it could be said that evaluation has taken an ethnographic turn. Webler advocates discourse analysis with a particular focus on the participant perspective. Einsiedel conducted participant observations, collected materials used by participants, distributed questionnaires, recorded questions to the facilitator, and did interviews with randomly selected citizens and experts of interest. Horlock-Jones used some of the same methodologies as Einsiedel as well as conducted media analysis and public opinion surveys. In addition, they divided their observations into structured observations (looking for specific behaviors) and ethnographic recording. Joss listed his methodologies the most specifically out of the scholars reviewed in this paper; he used multiple methodologies including: keeping a log book and document/files archive, conducting group discussions, handing out questionnaires, conducting interviews, asking participants keep diaries, conducting a literature search, monitoring conferences in other settings, and audio-taping all of the procedures. Future evaluation work should discuss the merits and drawbacks to methodologies used in order to inform and improve methodological procedures for the evaluation community.