I remember how very expensive such exercises were if farmed out for professional data colleciton and interpretation, and ahve done my share of collecting longitudinal data for studies commissioned by various government bodies and by commercial firms.

Facilitated dialogue would deal with the challenge of obliterating noise interference is well known.

Setting up citizen’s juries, allowing sufficient time for consensus etc will be challenging, but will provide a broader base and cater for several viewpoints.

I can see some hiccups with people’s individual approaches. My data is stored electronically. I am able to respond promptly because I have stored data that is often relevant. I could not do the same if sitting with a group of people without access to my own data or make the types of responses I do in the depth that I do. I often prefer to search out material on topics that I am unfamiliar with or wish to use to support a point.

In my view some of the existing policy bottlenecks need specific solutions not general approaches

On the other hand I believe it was Nicholas who observed how very difficult it was to identify citizens out there with sufficient interest and stamina to stay involved and contribute to the dialogue.

To some extent I feel I did Ron an injustice in one of my recent postings as I failed to acknowledge his strong points or take proper care in response, – which I will have to return to another time, since I too am interested in the concept of deep penetration of policies and real collaboration that is citizen-focused.

Ron is far better versed in the concepts of deliberative decision making and to make any sort of further comment I would need to read further.

That’s all I can manage on this for now.

Cheers

Madeleine

In planning online participatory systems – it’s can be useful to try (or at least offer) to meet and interact with people where they like to ‘hang-out’ rather than forcing them to come to a central place / site.

Being available to someone in their preferred space can improve the perception of comfort / security and the likelihood and frequency of interaction.

This may be achievable through broadening the range of potential electronic touch-points eg. access via mobile phone, facebook, twitter, interactive voice relay, redistributable blog widget and even simple email.

The worst thing… is that anyone – absolutely anyone – can get in there and participate.

Why do we tend to worry so much about whether or not such environments are “…representative…” or even free of cranks, wannabes, fraudsters and/or self-interested or conflicted-interested contributors? Sure, these types often muddy issues, they can make it harder for more ‘genuine’ or more ‘valid’ contributors to get their voices heard, but in the end, is that so bad? In the Obama example given by N Gruen, the bias was identified – not via moderation at the point of input, but by reasoning people looking at the outputs. So what if your cranky retired neighbour spends all day writing letters to the editor or messing up comments pages on blogs like this? In the final analysis, we end up tuning out such background noise, just like we do in ‘real’ life, usually by simply ignoring it.

I say that we should worry less about moderating inputs, and we should worry more about understanding and judging what people are saying.

Slashdot uses a very different approach, feedback from registered users, in two layers. Moderation and Meta-Moderation.

http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

The most interesting part of the Slashdot is how they deal with the nasty undercurrent, anonymous users are labelled with an embarrassing name and they are also given a credibility rating of zero. Users with very high credibility ratings are generally those who participate responsibly, non-disruptive to the community, have been in the community for some time and moderate others fairly.

http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

You can choose to view any level of content you like, but the default is not zero.

It is important that ALL moderation is reviewed and critiqued so that no moderator can edit the conversation to a point where it’s altered completely.

In contemplating a possible role for layered participation in government/citizen interaction, I would treat the poll results as one set of indicators of public preference along with other sources. Poll results are what they are – snapshots of perspectives at the time and it depends on who engages in the polling. Still, as well as polling platforms, there are others to take advantage of. The social web has scale and depth like no other social network. Just as there could be layered participation so the potential is there to tap into multiple social networks using multiple platforms. And let the computers to the aggregating and categorising.

Self-selection is an issue but there are ways to build depth into the conversation. The platform in question in this posting has space for participants to discuss issues, upload documents and share information across web platforms. That whole issue of linking and sharing has massive networking potential.

Participant reputation is a significant factor in evaluating preferences. There are new influencers active in the social web and their views would carry more weight…that may be positive or negative depending on value judgements and so on.

The list priority problem is one of process. If you are running a visioning exercise, then listing priorities is precisely the aim. But if you want a specific solution (or solution set) to a policy problem, then micro-processes can be used by a citizens’ jury to reach that goal that are more consensus-seeking.

The last point I make about such deliberative processes is that they are facilitated, which tends to iron out the noisy participants and encourage critical thinking.