The internet is up to things again: thoughts on some-thoughts.org

by Kent Aitken

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Note: hey, Nick posted something recently too.

Way back in the early years of the internet, online political mobilization was studied as a question, a hypothesis, a phenomenon. 20 years ago the following was a novel, while perfectly reasonable, statement in academia: “Well into the twenty-first century, the Internet is no longer an exotic political medium.”

Since, we’ve gone through a bit of an emotional roller coaster. The internet would level the playing field and usher in a new era of democracy and a country-wide public conversation. Now we’re in the era of fake news, website content farms, bots scripted to vote en mass on public consultations, and, worst of all, newspapers’ online comment sections. But there's lots of good stuff, too. Today, it's not even a question; of course the internet can be used for dialogue and community mobilization.

Happy belated 50th birthday, internet.

The above is a dramatic, exaggerated, and unreasonably short overview in order to set the backdrop for a project worth note: some-thoughts.org.

Some Thoughts launched with a social media push on that aforementioned 50th birthday. It’s a collection of just shy of 100 articles covering “an idea, policy, strategy, or best practice” for the future of cities, organized into 14 “conversations.”

Contributors span community organizers and activists, not-for-profits leads, think tank analysts, public servants, academics, CEOs, journalists, and beyond. There are names like Jim Balsillie and John Ralston Saul (whose contribution title takes a somewhat “didn’t I warn you all about this in 1992?” tone).

Skipping merrily past any assessment of the conversations themselves and into the meta, I want to describe a few reasons why this project is interesting within that history of the internet as a public discourse platform.

It’s coordinated, but independent

There was a time when Lead Now and MoveOn.org might have been the likely bets for observers guessing online political game-changers: getting massive amounts of people to sign petitions with single, one-size-fits-all statements. Or, in the same vein, open letters penned by <10 people, but written generally enough to get general agreement from a large section of the general interest community. Some Thoughts makes no statements of solidarity, nodding instead at the idea that discord and contradiction are a part of the project. However, the collection and the collective networks of the contributors made this project impossible to miss for anyone working at the intersection of technology, governance, and community.

(Perhaps, one day, the  history of governance discourse in Canada may one day point to this coordinated but independent approach and recognize the humble but rugged Civic Access Listserv as a foundation.)

It aims deep, not shallow

While the internet permitted increasingly broad public discourse, it simultaneously encouraged brevity. You can interpret any number of votes, read a fair number of short comments, but full conversations and back-and-forths break quickly at scale. This feature of online discourse is common, replicating a feature of the public townhall, people-get-a-few-minutes-with-the-mic problem described by Dr. Robin Gregory:

"When hundreds or thousands of stakeholders are asked to (a) speak before a panel for ten to fifteen minutes, (b) submit short written statements to a government body, or (c) participate as representatives of identified interests, then the invitation contains an implicit request to be either superficial or one-dimensional."

While Some Thoughts was clearly designed for internet reading, and to encourage people to read multiple essays, it’s hardly one-dimensional. Some of the more academic contributors, for instance, produced short but reference-packed miniature journal articles.

Which, in a way, starts to return us to the public engagement pedigree of the GC: technical, wonky, and long papers submitted in response to proposed changes in federal regulations, every one of which has to be announced via the Canada Gazette and opened for comment.

It rejects the convened space

There’s an idea I think is wildly important for government public engagement, and accordingly I quote it (too?) often. It’s the reminder “that communities and individuals have power of their own that is not conferred on them by the decision-maker.” This project was born out of the public engagement process around Sidewalk Labs in Toronto. For the last few years, organizations and governments have endeavoured to create and foster spaces for public discourse on issues, experimenting with new platforms and formats. However, the “official” spaces will always be situated in the much-less-controllable and much-more-densely-trafficked mass media, social media, and community spaces that already exist around those topics. Some Thoughts in this case, represents a parallel, community-generated but net new space for discourse. It’s not the first such platform, but noteworthy in its reach and execution. 

In sum

If you’re interested in the future of cities, go read and explore. If you’re interested in trends and ideas of how public discourse takes shape and can shape public engagement processes and policy option development, go explore and reflect.

I’m deliberately maintaining an observer stance with this post, but the one opinion I’ll offer is that models that create fuller, more thoughtful, and more constructively combative discourse should be warmly welcomed. We’re still experimenting with the best balance of reach versus rigour in online dialogue.

Thoughts on how we think about online collaboration

by Kent Aitken

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I threw some of these thoughts out on Twitter the other day; if this is redundant,  you have my apologies.

In October I presented at the Conference Board of Canada's Public Sector Social Media Event on the topic of online collaboration, drawing heavily from a post called The Promise of Online Collaboration. The short version is the hypothesis that we are probably not good at online collaboration - we meaning everyone (not just government), and online collaboration meaning digital-based working groups, citizen engagement, or participation in online communities*.

In the talk I suggested that it's the responsibility of those convening online collaborations to become familiar with a much wider variety of formats so they can more appropriately design interactions (as Jared Spool has written, "design the design meeting").

In response, one of the questions in the Q&A was along the lines of "It sounds like you're suggesting more tools, which hasn't really worked for us in the past."

Fair point, though I'd say it's actually a handful of things:

1. Breaking the standard mental model for online collaboration
2. Being wary of the defaults that tools drive people towards

1. The mental model

There are some beautifully creative online systems, but as a general rule there's one core: threaded comments. This forms the core of most collaboration spaces (e.g. Github, Basecamp, GCconnex, blogs and websites, Jive, citizen engagement platforms). Which seems like a close analog to group discussion, but imagine this:

Let's say every time you wanted to work with a group, your only option was to open a large room, hand people a document to read, then invite them towards an infinite number of flipcharts. They can start their own, or add to others'. Depending on what time they get there. People can vote on which flipcharts are close to the front of the room. And sometimes, but not always, the person that invited everyone there would summarize the content and send it around.

Because at the heart of it, that's often how we work together online: "Here's a thing. What do you think? Feel free to add your own ideas, too."

That's crazy.

It might work. Heck, it's something we do on purpose in person sometimes. But we tend to assume that it'll work every time, for everybody.

2. Be wary of defaults

I originally had three sections, one of which would have been about choosing between platforms. For today, let's assume we have the tools we already have.

The problem is that the design of the tools pushes you towards a small set of default approaches. An obvious example would be meeting lengths. Outlook's default is 30 minutes, thus we end up with a ton of 30-minute meetings. I love getting 15- and 45-minute meeting invites, if only because it shows that the person organizing it has thought through the discussion to be had.

A collaboration environment built around threaded comments leads us to the default of posting a document, blog, or some framing thoughts, then asking people to respond.

But there are options. The question - as it always is - is what serves the goal. What'll work. For example:

Blaise Hebert's approach to a GC-wide collaboration on Red Tape Reduction was to throw the "What do you think" approach out the window and ask people simple, short questions wrapped in pop culture, once a week: "If you could personify your challenges at work, what would such a villain be called?" Once people launched in with creative answers, then he'd dig into why, and what their reactions might mean.

Or, author Sam Sykes recently spent an evening turning Twitter's poll system into a crowd-based roleplaying game, starting at this point:

Thou entre thy dungeon, yon Halles of Cataclysm. Thou spyeth paths to ye north and ye west. What is thy action.

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) November 10, 2015

Even with a very vanilla platform, there are a raft of design questions:

• Ask for ideas first, or post a document for discussion?
• Ask broad questions that require long answers, or short specific ones?
• Organize an activity in stages and build on the discussion that takes place, or launch into everything all at once?
• Allow people to go in any direction, or provide parameters?
• Stick to one space, or supplement the main platform with other channels?
• Get involved in the conversation and try to spark interactions, or stay back and listen?

The obvious approach may not be best, and there's probably more room for creativity, design, and intentionality than it first appears.

*In fairness to our digital prowess, we don't get off scott-free in in-person forums, either. Try Thinking, Fast and Slow, or Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink of Make Groups Smarter, or Too Dumb for Democracy, or the wealth of research on our subtle gender- and ethnicity-based biases that persist in group decision-making.

The Problem With Engagement

by Melissa Tullio

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I left a comment on Kent's recent post (See: The Future Of Online Communities) that was probably out of scope of what his post was about, and started reflecting on engagement in digital spaces versus in real life. Here's a challenge question I started thinking about: "How might we make the best use of technology/online systems to capture public sentiment and insights in a deeper way?" (I'm not going to attempt to navigate that one in this post, but maybe a future post.)

I think the key to this is something Kent also asked, which got me thinking in a different direction: "The question [about online collaboration] will move from 'How can we get people to engage?' to 'Who actually needs to engage, and why would they, in particular?'"

There's an assumption we make in government, especially in the communications world where I work, that whenever we make an announcement or hold a consultation, people are engaged and interested and will come. This isn't generally a bad assumption to make. We do get engagement; we do get people at the town halls and consultations we run. But the people who attend often represent people who we've heard from, time and again, over the years. The outcome of these consultations is almost completely predictable - we issue management the hell out of it; we can anticipate responses, and come up with plans to "mitigate" them.

So my next challenge question would be, "What's the point?" If you're doing a consultation and you know what you're going to hear, isn't it a big waste of time and resources to do it? Can't we do it in a more meaningful way that generates new solutions or ways to work together?

Beyond the Usual Suspects

One thing about design thinking that's different than other problem solving methods is taking time to interview and empathize with extreme users. It's crucially valuable to do this because taking time to reach out to, and empathizing with, extreme users helps to reveal the deeper, more systemic challenges in the design of your service/program.

This type of ethnographic research is not something we normally do enough of in government. We tend to create policies/programs that end up working for the mainstream user. The way we come to create programs is based on well researched best practices (i.e., existing solutions), which inevitably leaves some users behind in the process. This approach doesn't include extreme users in the problem definition stages (or problem solving stages), so we assume that what we design is good enough, without examining all those hidden assumptions we're making. The kind of research and deeper understanding that you need to do to really empathize with service users requires time, and in a lot of our work in the policy making environment (and exponentially more in the communications space), time is (artificially) something we don't have¹.

Another challenge isn't just the process/resource barrier in government work from doing this kind of research. Even if you design a program/policy to include time for this kind of deep dive research, how do you make the case for people who you don't normally interact with to gain your trust and let you into their spaces?

What's In It For Them?

When I previously worked in an HR role for Ontario, I was one of the people responsible for the formal employee recognition program. Something we constantly struggled with was how to tap into people's intrinsic motivation for doing things. There are a lot of smarter people than me who have done research in this area, and the short answer is, "it's complicated." I was most interested in what motivates people to engage and interact with online spaces because another file I worked on was an ideas management system, and I was curious about why these kinds of systems often fail.

Something my team learned is that online engagement is limited. Taking idea generation to the next level requires an in person component that can't be replaced by online platforms (not yet, anyway). An ideas campaign, followed by observational/ethnographic research to figure out what you're missing, followed by a hackathon/jam/competition of some sort to test some theories, followed by an experiment/prototype-making stage, followed by reflections/sharing lessons to improve something, is what you need to make the campaign work through the full spectrum of engagement.

That goes back to the old constraint: who has time for this?

Online and in-person engagement

From everything we learned, online platforms simply aren't enough; some tangible, shared outcome from the ideation or consultation stage is needed in order for people to believe you're doing something for them, or else they lose faith and you lose credibility (See: Pulling the Trigger on Chekhov's Gun). Many people are happy with engaging online at the front-end - it's low-friction and easy (also less valuable to gain deeper insights); extreme users, the ones we need to take time for to understand better, need more (and so do we if we want to reach those deeper insights to design things better).

Any online or offline engagement platform not only needs to ask the question, "who needs to engage?" but "who else needs to engage who isn't already raising their hand to volunteer?" Knowing how to answer the corollary question, "how do we motivate them to?" is definitely the tougher one.

^{1. I'd say resources (people/funding) are something we have less and less of in a more real way than time; time for empathy/good design can be worked into our processes (assuming we've taken a good look at our culture and we're able to move towards changing it to include mindsets like human centered design in our work). ↩}

The Future of Online Communities

by Kent Aitken

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Within online communities, there are different types of users with different levels of engagement. These might be called "power users," "contributors," and "lurkers," and this tends to apply to everything from Wikipedia to political discussion forums to Amazon reviews.

However, within these levels of engagement (measured in edits, comments, visits, or whatever), there are also different motivations, and this should have an impact on how we consider digital communities, crowdsourcing, or engagement.

A rough divide:

Strategists

This group is largely agnostic about engagement methods. Their motivation centers on the recognition that a given community represents a means of advancing their goal: connecting to an audience, or getting the ear of key players. Strategists could be those building goodwill with communities as inbound marketing, lobbyists looking for influence avenues, or activists looking to have their voices heard.

Subject Matter Enthusiasts

These are the people for whom the community ostensibly exists. They are part of a give and take of knowledge, learning, and contributing. The health of the community strengthens their field and enables networks and relationships. There may be a degree of strategy among this group, but it's secondary to enthusiasm about the subject matter.

The Collaboration Community

It is unlikely that those Wikipedians with 100,000+ edits are either subject matter experts or economically rational time maximizers. They are instead part of the Collaboration Community, those who contribute based partially on subject matter interest but primarily on community interest (if you’ve never watched The Internet is my Religion, please do so). That is, they are interested in the network itself and want it to succeed. This happens on the Government of Canada's internal networks, as well. Regardless of the topic, alongside the subject matter experts there's always a noticeable contingent of "usual suspects".

Novelty Explorers

Novelty Explorers are the group that engages because the opportunity to engage is new and exciting. A chance to help scientists make discoveries, a way to see their name and contribution immortalized on the internet, or an opportunity to weigh in on the activities of their government. This is the logic of "Holy ___ — [large organization that I read about in the news] wants my input!"

The Attention Economy

Novelty Explorers are a particularly fascinating group, because government is increasingly asking for the time and attention of citizens at the same time everyone else is: citizen science, crowdsourcing campaigns, crowdfunding campaigns, TripAdvisor, Yelp, as well as all of the discussion forums and Usenet groups that came with the early internet days.

But now everyone wants people’s input, and asking for it isn't special anymore. This fact demands recognition and a change in tactics. People are contributing at their whim, and the novelty will wear off. Not all explorers will turn into collaborators, strategists, or experts.

So far online communities have thrived* through experimentation and a sheer volume of potential collaborators. But as demand increases and novelty doesn’t, those asking for the time, attention, and effort of online communities will need to up the ante in the years to come**. The question will move from “How can we get people to engage?” to “Who actually needs to engage, and why would they, in particular?” 

*Relative frequency of “thrived” versus “throve” since 1800:

**Blaise pointed to the concept of Evaporative Cooling in online communities before, an interesting read about how communities inexorably become less valuable to precisely those people that provide the most value to them. Which raises interesting questions about the value of such communities.