The Role of Social Media in Public Participation

The Role of Social Media in Public Participation Tim Bonnemann Founder and CEO Intellitics, Inc.

Agenda • Terms and deﬁnitions • Commonly expressed opportunities and challenges for online participation • 5 recent project examples • Web-speciﬁc considerations • Summary

Civic Engagement Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern: • Civic (e.g. regular volunteering, membership in groups or associations, fundraising for charities, community problem solving, public participation) • Electoral (e.g. regular voting, campaign contributions, volunteering for candidate or political organizations) • Political Voice (e.g. contacting ofﬁcials, contacting the media, protesting, petitioning, boycotting, canvassing)

Public Participation • Any process that involves the public in problem solving or decision making and uses public input to make decisions. • Involves interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities • Two-way communication and collaborative problem solving with the goal of achieving better and more acceptable decisions.

Social Media • A set of technologies and channels that enables the creation and exchange of user- generated content • Involves “the people formerly known as the audience”1 • Shift from broadcast (one-to-many) to conversation mode (many-to-many) 1Jay Rosen, NYU

Why Use Online? Opportunities Challenges • Widen reach (bridge • Digital divide distances in space, time) • No replacement for face-to-face • Ability to scale • Uncivil behavior • Ability to harness • Very resource- participants as resources intensive and expensive • Cost savings

5 Recent Project Examples • Portland Plan (Portland, OR) http://www.facebook.com/pdxplan • Community Asset Mapping (Biloxi, MS) http://biloxiyouthassets.org • My Idea 4 California (California) http://twitter.com/Schwarzenegger/status/2095070677 • Seattle City Budget 2011-2012 (Seattle, WA) http://seattlecitycouncil.ideascale.com • Thames Tunnel online consultation (London, United Kingdom) http://www.thamestunnelconsultation.co.uk

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Thames Tunnel Objectives • Identify the organisations and individuals who could be affected by the scheme. • Inform these people about the proposals. • Listen to their views. • Respond positively and where possible make adjustments and changes to our proposals to balance the project needs with the concerns of those potentially affected.

Quality Online Participation • Requires good process (e.g. IAP2 framework) • Requires the right combination of people, process and technology • Requires a broad skill set (technology, social media, community management, online facilitation etc.)

!"#$%&'#()*+,'#-./+,+0-/+12'304,/.(5 ! To provide the public To obtain public To work directly with To partner with the To place final with balanced and feedback on analysis, the public throughout public in each aspect decision-making objective information alternatives and/or the process to ensure of the decision in the hands of to assist them in decisions. that public concerns including the the public. !"#$$%&"'()*+(,)-.(,/"011.2-,)-.("3.+"456/-2"4,+)-2-7,)-.( understanding the and aspirations are development of problem, alternatives, consistently alternatives and the opportunities and/or understood and identification of the solutions. considered. preferred solution. We will keep you We will keep you We will work with We will look to you for We will implement informed. informed, listen to and you to ensure that advice and innovation what you decide. acknowledge concerns your concerns and in formulating and aspirations, and aspirations are directly solutions and provide feedback on reflected in the incorporate your advice how public input alternatives developed and recommendations influenced the and provide feedback into the decisions to decision. on how public input the maximum extent influenced the possible. decision. !" sheets Fact !" Public comment !" Workshops !" Citizen advisory !" Citizen juries !" sites Web !" Focus groups !" Deliberative polling Committees !" Ballots !" Open houses !" Surveys !" Consensus-building !" Delegated decision !" Public meetings !" Participatory decision-making !"#$$$%#$$&

Some Web-Speciﬁc Considerations • Accessibility • Moderation • Data security • Archiving • Identity • Mobile • Privacy & • Tool support publicness • Intellectual property

Key Take-Aways • Social media provides a lot of opportunity for broadening and deepening civic engagement, speciﬁcally public participation • Know your objectives, audience and resources and apply good process • Simple tools can go a long way, more advanced tools won’t save a broken process! • Start small, iterate, share what you learn!

Resources • Intellitics Blog http://www.intellitics.com/blog • ParticipateDB http://participatedb.com • NCDD 2010 Resource Guide on Public Engagement http://www.ncdd.org/ﬁles/NCDD2010_Resource_Guide.pdf • Promising Practices in Online Engagement http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/promising-practices-in-online- engagement • Social Media Club http://socialmediaclub.org

Thank You! http://www.intellitics.com Follow @intellitics on Twitter…

Some Rights Reserved Except where noted, the contents of this presentation are licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. The terms of this license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ v1.1 2010/11/04

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The Role of Social Media in Public Participation

by Intellitics, Inc.

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