Giving Citizens an Effective Voice

At Saturday’s UKgovtweb barcamp I am hoping to run a session on consultation with the UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills’s Steph Gray. He will bring a wealth of experience in relation to innovation consultations. I will bring one of my current obsessions – how do you aggregate citizen input into public sector consultations? With the best will in the world ministers and civil servants face an impossible task in trying to “take onboard” hundreds or thousands of differing comments and suggestions, so how could we develop forms of citizen input that ministers and their advisers will find easier to use and harder to ignore?

Here are some suggestions for discussion.

1) Setting the agenda. Rather than just consult, let the citizens set the agenda by allowing anyone to put an issue on the agenda and letting everyone else vote the idea up or down. This is what Obama did with his Citizen Briefing Book. An excellent example of a private sector company doing this kind of thing is mystarbucksidea. I  particularly like the simple and clear actions that are highlighted, viz. see (post an idea), vote, discuss and see (what’s happened to popular ideas). I think this kind of thing would be very easy to implement at local government level, but a bit harder at government level because of the huge range of issues that could be raised. I suppose each government department could have a site of this kind, but is there a risk that a permanent site of this kind would fail to generate much interest if it was always on? Perhaps in central government this sort of site should be reserved for an obvious moment of change, e.g. creation of a new department or advent of a new minster/ministerial team or focussed on a particular issue (my-idea-for-a-digital-britain or my-idea-for-an-innovative- nation etc). What do you think?

2) Aggregating reaction to a policy package(1) When consulting on a package of measures include a section in the consultation that is explicitly designed to aggregate reaction. For example, you could ask respondents which statement best captures their reaction to the policy package:

i) I agree there is a case for government action and broadly support these proposals

ii) I agree there is a case for government action but think the package needs minor revision with this mainly involving refining some of the proposals.

iii) I agree there is a case for government action, but think the package needs minor revision with this mainly involving adding some minor measures to the package.

iv) I agree there is a case for government action but think that the package needs major revision with radical changes to the proposed measures and/or significant new elements being added

3) Aggregating reaction to a policy package (2) Another, more ambitious way of trying to aggregate input would be to let citizens vote on each element of a policy package, so you ended up with a list of the proposals in order of popularity. Or you could make this a bit more nuanced by giving consultees three options – overall positive impact; overall negative impact; unlikely to have much impact. This might have the advantage of highlighting not just the good and the bad but also what is seen as irrelevant. An interesting twist to this idea would be if consultees were able to add measures to government package. You could put some sort of reasonable limit on how much citizen proposers could say in favour of their idea and you would probably have to allow some form of official comment on the proposal, but it would be fascinating (and useful) to compare how government proposals fared compared to externally-sourced ideas.

4) Revising a policy proposal – This would be a detailed consultation on a specific proposal. In the first round of consultation people would be able to put forward one modification of the proposal and everyone would vote on which modification they would most like to see added. Subject to the agreement of the original proposer and/or the department, people would also be able to offer refinements to a proposal which would accrue all the voters of the original proposal (i.e. if the most popular proposal had 100 votes and you proposed a refinement of it and it was endorsed as a refinement, the original proposal and the refined proposal would both be credited with 100 votes with subsequent reactions indicating which was more popular). In the second round the department would come up with a limited number of options (could be original plus the most popular modification(s) or could be a small number of variants containing the most popular modifications) and people would be invited to vote again to confirm which proposal they think is best.

I did try to think of ideas that would involve mapping a debate, but I had real difficulty coming up with a suggestion that I thought was realistic and useful. Perhaps someone else can do better than me? Just for clarity I should say that I do envisage in all of these options giving people plenty of free text space for non-aggregatable comments!

Another possibility is to allow citizens to play around with a notional budget for a particular area or to let them allocate a priority/ministerial time budget (the department faces these 20 issues, you can identify a maximum of 3 of them as top priority and a further 5 as high on the agenda). This would be interesting and fun, but I think it would probably be rather difficult to persuade a minister to go for them.

Do you think any of the above ideas are realistic? Or do you have better suggestions for tools ministers might be prepared to use but which would deliver real impact?