*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do *** I decided to take a closer look at the detailed consultation recommendations at the very end of the New Media and Social Inclusion report I mentioned in the previous post and pass them on below. Over the next few years we will see parliaments and legislatures increasingly use ICTs in their traditional committee hearing processes. They will increasingly promote full real-time remote access to the "print" materials that complement the audio and video webcasts/broadcasts. They will also allow more testimony via videoconferencing, first point-to-point over ISDN (need to guarantee bandwidth) and then over time via Internet-based video conferencing. This will help "internet-enable" existing representative democracy practices. As a complementary step, parliaments will need to use the Internet to fundamentally improve the public input process to improve decision- making and policy outcomes. This must allow what I call "on your own time" representative democracy. Democracy will not survive in wired societies without a "drive-up window" that allows citizens to effectively participate despite their busy lives. User-friendly, asynchronous citizen participation must become a formal and legitimate complement to time-exclusive forms of participation. The fact that the vast majority of public participation by citizens and interest groups requires physical presence is a central problem in our growing democratic divide. I appreciate and cherish in-person involvement, but with fewer and fewer citizens engaged in traditional forms of public participation, we now have "drive-by democracy" where people shoot their protests at government without seeing themselves as viably part of the sustained solution to solving public problems. Anyway, the Hansard Society's work with the UK Parliament is a first step toward understanding the usefullness and resource requirements of formal online consultations designed for representative institutions. Read on. Steven Clift Democracies Online Section quoted from page 41-43: http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/Social_Exclusion_Report.pdf 6. Recommendations 20 recommendations for running online consultations linking citizens to parliamentarians: Before the consultation · Allow at least a six-month pre-consultation phase. · To assemble the evidence-giving group, contact organisations and interest groups who have knowledge of the subject and access to relevant participants. · Establish an expert advisory panel who can both assist in assembling the evidence-giving group and formulate relevant opening questions for the consultation. · Make sure the participants have sufficient understanding of computers and the internet so they can access the consultation. Basic internet training must be given when necessary. · Provide the participants with a short IT-manual which explains how to get onto the site, how to post messages in the debate forum and how to cut and paste offline (in Word, for example) in order to cut costs. · Inform the relevant representatives about their role in the consultation and provide them with background information and guidelines on how to use the site. · Develop a system that ensures that the site is sufficiently safe and secure for the participants to log on. Ideally, use computer generated software to create random usernames and passwords - or allow 5-6 days in order to guarantee confidential user-ID. · To secure confidentiality and validity, participants in a consultation must fulfil the relevant requirements. In the case of the online consultation on domestic violence, access to the secure discussion section was allowed only to survivors of or workers in domestic violence. · Make sure that participants are authentic by establishing a thorough registration process. Participants must fill in a questionnaire on social demographic factors and domestic violence before they are granted a password and username. In the case of the online consultation on domestic violence, registration forms were available only via women's organisations and refuges with personal knowledge of the women, or from the consultation co-ordinator who registered individual women over the phone by taking them through the questionnaire step by step. During the consultation · Create a web site which is logical, easy to use and takes the participants through the information needed in a sensible order. As many of the participants will be first-time users of the Internet, a clear and welcoming design is essential - the participants must feel at ease so they are able to navigate the site and post their messages in the right locations. · For the evidence giving to be as useful as possible, there must be a secure section which only approved and registered users can use. As well as this private section, there should also be a public section in which non-registered citizens can contribute to the debate. · Include relevant background information on legislation, latest government initiatives, links to organisations and interest groups working in the area, and most importantly list a contact address for support and help. · Inform the media about the consultation. This secures as broad a participation as possible and recruits participants who might not otherwise hear about the consultation. · Introduce the moderator at the beginning of the consultation to establish a personal tone and create an encouraging and inclusive atmosphere where participants are willing to submit frequent and personal evidence. · Daily monitoring and moderation of the site. The moderator must: 1. Ensure that the debate proceeds in accordance with the ground- rules: no user must dominate the debate to the extent that they discourage new users from joining in. The language must not be inappropriate or too aggressive. 2. Post messages and information with relevance to the debate forum 3. Post a minimum of one summary of the discussion in the consultation period. This helps to steer the discussion and keeps the debate focused on the opening questions. · Encourage the representatives who have agreed to participate to do so. After the consultation · Post a post-online consultation survey on the site in the last days of the consultation in order to gather feedback from the participants. Send a hard copy of the survey to participants who do not complete the online survey. · Allow enough time to analyse the evidence of and the interaction on the site. · To apply a quantitative methodology to the qualitative data, use content analysis. An inductive coding framework using the statistical SPSS-software is a useful tool for data reduction. · Post any results, analysis or reports based on the consultation onto the site for the participants to read. ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. 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