Sydney conf presentation

Part 1: Adventures in digital democracy @DelibThinks

Chris Lopez - Flickr What I did last summer Whilst I’d planned a 4 week road trip across the vineyards of France . . . Me in a vineyard

But new gov wrecks my holiday! Chris Lopez - Flickr The new Coalition government decide to run 2 different mass participation exercises over the summer.

Your Freedom explained Chris Lopez - Flickr The Your Freedom crowd-sourcing site allowed uses to share ideas Add ideas Search via tags Read and rate ideas

What people were saying Chris Lopez - Flickr ` There was a mix of general popularist ideas, together with useful niche actionable ideas.

Your Freedom in numbers Chris Lopez - Flickr
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-levels of engagement. Each person who took part, on average made x2 comments, x5 ratings. 1/3 added an idea.

What happened (in stats) Chris Lopez - Flickr On launch the site saw a massive spike in traffic on day one, and generally high-levels of engagement. 90,000 visits on day 1 1/5th of all participation. High levels of engagement

Massive spike + high participation Chris Lopez - Flickr Over 700,000 page views on day 1, and 4.2 million page views across campaign. 700,000 page views on Day 1.

How we generated such volumes Chris Lopez - Flickr A mix of launch PR, social media buzz, together with RSS content syndication across partner sites. RSS widget Embedded in key sites.

What happened in practice Chris Lopez - Flickr Due to spikes in traffic, in the first few days the site crashed - due to lack of server capacity.

Insights into the Spending Challenge Chris Lopez - Flickr The Spending Challenge used our Dialogue App - re-skinned to tackle this specific issue. Same format as Your Freedom

A two-part strategy Chris Lopez - Flickr Unlike Your Freedom, the Spending Challenge was run in two distinct parts: 1) ideas stage 2) sorting stage
Ideas stage
People asked to give ideas
of how the government
could do more for less.
2) Sorting stage People then asked to rate all ideas, to help the government sort through the 10,000’s of ideas.

What people were saying Chris Lopez - Flickr 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”.

Spending Challenge numbers Chris Lopez - Flickr
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 average x2 ideas each.

Spending Challenge (in stats) Chris Lopez - Flickr 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 launch of the 2 phases High engagement

What happened next Chris Lopez - Flickr
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.

. . . so what did this all cost? Chris Lopez - Flickr £25,000 total £0.45 per idea £0.03 per citizen The costs involved in running these processes was about £25k between them (N.B. certain server and design costs were shared)

And what we learnt . . . Chris Lopez - Flickr
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.

Chris Lopez - Flickr + make sure it doesn’t clash with your holiday!

Part 2: Vision

An extreme vision of the future

A more practical vision: “Government as a participative platform” Chris Lopez - Flickr 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 .

Part 3: turning vision into reality

UK’s *Citizen Space* 3-layer model Chris Lopez - Flickr 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.

Citizen Space in a nutshell Chris Lopez - Flickr
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.

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.
Chris Lopez - Flickr

Who uses Citizen Space Chris Lopez - Flickr 30+ Local and central government, to NGOs (like BBC), and it’s now being taken up by government in Australia

Core Citizen Space functions Chris Lopez - Flickr
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.

1: Organise consultations Chris Lopez - Flickr All consultation information in one place

2. Consult on complex policy documents Chris Lopez - Flickr Structure your consultation with as many sections as you like. For lengthy documents, divide into Chapters, and let people consult on specific sections Indication of whether you’ve responded to a Chapter or not

3. Filter + analyse responses Chris Lopez - Flickr Filter response and create Cross-tabs of results, to dig In-depth into results. Export data for reporting and Further analysis.

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 want
Chris Lopez - Flickr Citizen Space is open source, so any government around the world can use it. More info: www.CitizenSpace.com

Part 4: DIY digital democracy

Empowerment = future
people to do X, Y or Z”
Chris Lopez - Flickr Empowerment is a growing cultural trend: both citizens and government have become empowered by technology Citizens want to have their say 24/7 Government’s Increasing DIY culture

1) Get the basics right Chris Lopez - Flickr Implement some basic *consultation infrastructure* like Citizen Space to ensure you get the basics right.

2) Innovate Chris Lopez - Flickr 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.

3) Do it. It’s easy - and it works! Chris Lopez - Flickr 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 age of participants Hyper-local Participation

Delib Down Under
people to do X, Y or Z”
Chris Lopez - Flickr 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*.

www.Delib.co.uk www.CitizenSpace.com www.Dialogue-App.com [email_address] @DelibThinks

Sydney conf presentation

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