Presentation: Successful Citizen Engagement

Dr. Norman J. Jacknis
Director of Program Development
IdeaScale
July 1, 2014
Norman.Jacknis@ideascale.com!
SUCCESSFUL CITIZEN
ENGAGEMENT
ENGAGEMENT & INNOVATION
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How Citizens Used To Be Engaged
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• 44!
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This Leads To A Key Question
How can the engagement of the town meeting scale up from a
couple thousand people standing in one location to many more
than that?
How do you hear from the many people who can’t show up for
meetings, but will show up to vote on election day and decide
who’s doing a good job?
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© 2014 Norman Jacknis, IdeaScale. All rights reserved!7/1/2014!
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Why Engage Citizens?
Reason #1: It’s Part Of Quality Of Life
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The Importance Of The Experience
“Goods and services are no longer enough.
Instead it’s the experience of being a customer
– or a resident/citizen of a city, state, nation.”

-- “The Experience Economy”
by B. Joseph Pine and James
H. Gilmore
You can do everything people want, get it 100% right and
still fail to satisfy citizens if the experience is not positive
and memorable.
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Survival Question For Cities/States
When most people can work anywhere, where will they choose to
live & work? Many people will choose based on quality of life
And quality of life includes the citizen experience.
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Why Engage Citizens?!
Reason #2: To Understand
Their Priorities
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Calgary and also NYC, Chicago, Vallejo.
City Of Calgary, Canada
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Ideas for cutting the
state budget were
generated with this
online campaign:
•  2,000 ideas posted
•  130,000 votes cast
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Reason #3: To Get New
Ideas & Innovations
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Why Open Innovation?
Generate ideas from a wide number of sources – internal and external.
Increase community diversity in the ideation phase to stimulate creativity.
Examples
Innocentive, P&G Connect, NetFlix Prize, Cisco iPrize
“P&G employs 7,500 people in its R&D division, but there are 1.5 million
scientists throughout the world with expertise in P&G’s areas of interest.”
"More than 50% of P&G innovation comes from external companies of all
sizes and from individual entrepreneurs too”
Larry Huston, Procter & Gamble’s former Vice President of R&D
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•  Determiningthecourseleadingtothe
President’schallengeforhumanorbital
explorationofMarsinthe2030s
•  Objective: engage and inform
citizens on Mars exploration
progress
•  Visitors presented questions, but
also answered each others questions
•  Engagedover1,400userswhoasked
nearly600questionsinonly3months
•  Video page for experts to weigh in
on popular topics
NASA: Mars Program
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Madison, Wisconsin
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City of Ottawa HaveaSay!Sustainability Campaign
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•  In 2013, a new global partnership
called Making All Voices Count
launched with a single initiative:
create a world in which open, effective
and participatory governance is the
norm, not the exception.
•  Objective: source and sponsor
creative solutions to transform the
relationship between citizens and
their governments.
•  Of the original 196 submissions, ten
finalists were invited to Global
Innovation Week in Kenya where the
winner was announced.
•  Winning ideas included improvements to
civic services, citizen engagement, and
health services delivery among others.
Making All Voices Count
46,319
users
196
ideas
68,000
votes
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Reason #4: To Improve
Legislation & Regulations
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Snowmobiles In Finland - Crowdsourced lawmaking
suomijoukkoistaa.ﬁ!
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Reason #5: To Predict Public
Reactions To Proposals
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Reason #6: To Get Their Help
Delivering Services
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29

30

Reason #7: To Gain Their
Understanding About The Realities
Of Governing
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33!
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Reason #8: To Regain Their
Trust And Support
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The Internet Changed Expectations
•  Governing consists of conversations.
•  The Internet is enabling conversations
among human beings that were simply
not possible in the era of mass media.
•  As a result, citizens are getting smarter,
more informed, more organized.
Participation in a networked society
changes people fundamentally.
•  People in networked societies have
figured out that they get far better
information and support from one
another than from government
agencies. So much for government
rhetoric about the value of their
professional way of doing things.
•  The networked citizenry knows more
than governments do about their own
services and programs. And whether
the news is good or bad, they tell
everyone.
•  Citizens want to talk to public leaders.
•  What's happening to citizens as a whole
is also happening among employees.
[more of the 95 Theses at http://
njacknis.tumblr.com/post/
8651385911/government-consists-of-
conversations]
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Things To Consider To Ensure A
Successful Citizen Engagement
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Be Realistic & Set Expectations:
Remember The 90/9/1 Rule
If you’re really
good, you’ll get to
70/20/10 – still
only a minority is
active
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The Target Audience
Identify who you want in the conversation
•  All members of the jurisdiction?
•  Just those served by or of interest to a particular agency?
•  Just “experts”?
•  Employees and the public?
•  People beyond your jurisdiction?
The answer will depend upon:
•  What goals you want to achieve
•  How complicated the problem is
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Conditions For Good Crowdsourcing
Not all crowds are wise
Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds
recommends these conditions to
achieve maximum accuracy of the
results:
•  A great variety of perspectives on
the problem, bringing individual
knowledge and coming from
different places
•  Each person's judgment is
independent of the judgments of
others
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Getting People To The Party
Like any other initiative, this needs to be publicized, promoted
using all media. But don’t hype – call it an experiment to keep the
public’s expectations realistic.
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You – the government – need to get the conversation started
The “ask” should be:
•  Brief
•  Clear
•  Writteninanobjective,fairway–notobviouslylookingforanaffirmation
•  Of interest to the target audience, even compelling
•  Open to new ideas
•  Encouraging to people who don’t normally get asked or who feel they
have a rare perspective
•  Not so sensitive politically that you won’t be able to use the results
•  Balanced between too broad and too narrow a topic
Starting The Conversation
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Structure The Conversation If Necessary
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How Things Can Get Off-Track
Tone
•  Inappropriate and offensive
comments
•  Merely criticism
Accuracy
•  Gossip and misinformation
Technical Issues
•  System down
•  Data breach
•  Privacy issues
Hijacking
•  Excessive lobbying and
promotion
•  Too few participants
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Keeping Up The Conversation
All conversations need some degree of editing (“moderating”)
•  To maintain an acceptable environment for all participants and to
keep things on track
•  The question is how much you’ll need to edit?
Analytics
•  Analyze participation, patterns, etc. quickly so you can respond and
improve things
To ensure you understand what people are saying, find ways to confirm
they mean what you think they mean.
Don’t forget to sustain the engagement as long as it is useful and then
formally end it.
48

Don’tLetthe
EngagementgoStale
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No New Ideas!
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Use game mechanics to sustain engagement
•  Reward certain actions
•  Measure behavior and makes it transparent
Different motivations for different people
•  Accomplishment: Recognition by moving up levels; see how many
others are at your level
•  Recognition: Leaderboard or photos
•  Social Goal: Make the city/nation/community a better place – see the
impact on greenhouse gasses, etc.
•  Social Network: How many people followed something you did? how
many people are in your social graph?
ToGetPeopleToStayAtTheParty–ThinkLikeAGameDesigner
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What Will You Do With It?
•  If you don’t do something with the results, people will be
unhappy
•  Explain what you’ll be doing and how the engagement process
helped you do things better
•  You don’t have to take the ideas exactly as stated
•  This is a conversation, so you can refine the ideas
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Ideas for cutting the state budget were
generated with this online campaign:
•  2,000 ideas posted
•  130,000 votes cast
Problems:
•  The ideas were not implemented
•  Both the government and citizens
were left unsatisfied
•  Some ideas did not "reflect the
relationship between Federal and
State Government"
•  Somewerepoliticallysensitiveandnot
evenamodifiedversionwentahead
Be Prepared To Act – Or Don’t Ask
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Who Will Get This Done?
Who is going to manage this?
•  It doesn’t all have to be done by you and your staff
Get volunteers from outside the paid staff
•  Give campaign workers something to do between campaigns
•  Use people on agency advisory boards
•  Identify active (objective, fair-minded) members of the community
and deputize them as leaders
You can use the network to build your network
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Shouldnotbeanadditionalworkloadforestablishedbusinessunits
Keep it simple for users
Let people start now:
•  Avoid long planning cycles and drawn out implementations
Let it grow organically:
•  Voluntary participation cannot be driven top-down
Treat The Initial Engagement Project Like A Startup
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Take Aways
•  We can now scale up collaboration and participation
•  This is a great way to get help and new ideas, test proposals,
understand priorities of voters and educate citizens
•  In response to the general decline in respect for major public,
nonprofit and private institutions, crowdsourcing is a way of
earning back respect and trust - and convincing a skeptical
public that you really care
•  All this makes it easier to govern better
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Thank you!
Norman.Jacknis@ideascale.com
Twitter @NormanJacknis
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/njacknis/
Tumblr njacknis.tumblr.com
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