The future of citizen engagement is vinyl

by Kent Aitken

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For the last little while I've been expressing wariness about online citizen engagement, and I'd like to explain that.

Of course a lot of citizen engagement will be online. And it can be incredibly effective. The distinction between online and offline is culturally and practically fading. I've defended the idea that online platforms are no worse than in-person ones; just different, suited for different interactions. The term "online" may have a cultural shelf life itself.

So why am I wary?

Let's shift gears a little and talk about digital audio. When CDs came out, they completely sidelined vinyls and cassettes in a decade. Vinyl basically ceased to exist. Yet today we've seen seven years of double-digit growth in vinyl sales and they're now a $1B market, representing 15-18% of physical music revenues.

It's because we over-adjusted to the digital audio option. It was seen as the future, and we wanted to future-proof our collections. We wanted to virtue signal the idea that we were modern and technologically savvy. But over time, those psychological bonuses to the economic decision of audio formats subsided, and we returned to a level playing field between vinyl and digital. We could decide in a less biased way between the two options. At which point we rediscovered the virtues of vinyl - the quality, the packaging, the art, the ritual - for some situations.

Which doesn't change that digital audio is the absolute standard, and for good reason.

Back to online citizen engagement. It's seen as nearly free. It's seen as easy. But most of all it's seen as inclusive. That is, because engagement is online it's seen as fair. It's seen as plausibly reaching the entire intended audience.

More simply: online engagement gets used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for thinking through your goals, engagement design, and audience. It's seen as the future, ergo it's good.

It is sometimes. It it not always.

There are many reasons, but let's look at three:

Digital tends to be shallow. As Robin Gregory put it:

"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."

This effect is exacerbated by our current culture towards online engagement. The idea that public policy issues are complex is repeated daily, but we ask people for bullet points. Yet! It's possible to do small, deliberative working groups that get into the complexities and nuances of an issue. They may report analyses or pros and cons to a larger interested audience, who may vote or be surveyed in a lightweight way. This can all be done online. But people to tend to assume online always means open, public, easy, and everyone.

Digital lets us think we can skip design and facilitation. When you're doing in-person engagement, the level of design is incredibly involved. Session designers or participant experience designers (that's a thing - do you have one for your online engagement?) think through to the individual personalities in the room. They adjust the timing of parts down to 5-minute increments. They pull from a library of techniques for group discussion. And they actively facilitate. We're only flirting with that level of sophistication online; this is where low-fidelity MP3s started getting replaced by high quality-digital audio but we're not quite there yet. It's a little bit about the technology, but far more about how we use it.

The digital divide is real. Canada's well-connected to the internet, but if you look at the top quartile for age, or the bottom quartile for income, those reassuring 90%+ numbers drop to more like 60%. Many people have to choose between home broadband and mobile and opt for the flexibility of mobile, but there are three activities with massive transaction completion drop-off rates on mobile: banking, looking for jobs, and interacting with government. To say nothing of skills, attitudes, and cultures.

All that to say: digital citizen engagement is going to be amazing for public policy-making and for the relationship between citizens and their governments. I really believe that. And digital will be the standard. But it'll only get amazing when we learn to love the record scratch of in-person engagement, realize the shortcomings of online and therefore get better at it, and choose deliberately between the right options for the right situations.

10 Takeaways from the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum

by Nick Charney

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Last week I attended the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum (See: Defining Open Dialogue); by all accounts the event was well run, interesting and full of familiar faces. On Wednesday Kent reflected a bit of what he heard at the Forum (See: Culture and Risk) and I wanted to do the same.

1. The show of political support was impressive

There were two federal ministers and six provincial ministers from Ontario in attendance; all of whom seemed to be saying the right things.

We don't need a "fearful, cover-your-ass" culture in the public service, @scottbrison said today. #cdnpoli #ottnewshttps://t.co/tMgcSLoZE0

— CBC Ottawa (@CBCOttawa) March 31, 2016

2. Ontario has a new public engagement framework

Check it out here.

3. 'Evergreen Policy' was something that was discussed, albeit not enough

There was a lot of discussion about being open by default but far less discussion about evergreen policy; the notion that times change and with them so should our policy approaches. Today's policies may not serve tomorrows interests and we need to do more work in updating our approaches wherever they are falling behind; ideally this is a shift from reactive (we've fallen behind!) to proactive (we know the world is changing, let's get out in front of it!). This is something I've touched on previously and see it as akin to the cradle-to-cradle design (See: Now What -- circa 2010 -- and Redux: Vizualizing the Entire Treasury Board Policy Suite).

4. Corporate interests can but do not necessarily always align with the public interest

3rd party software btwn government + citizens is a key governance issue; corporate interests do not always align w/public interests #codf16

— Nicholas Charney (@nickcharney) March 31, 2016

Or at least that was my observation. My tweet got some traction so it got put to the panel, one of whom "disagreed with the premise of my question" (which wasn't really a question) and proceeded to frame a response in terms of consumer interests, to which I simply replied that I disagreed with the premise of the answer. Another panellist said that it was an old school view (which was the first time I've ever been called such). That said, on day two a corporate voice managed to frame up the discussion better than it was framed on day one and was speaking in terms of high tides raising all boats.

5. The logic of crowdsourcing and the logic of policy making are difficult to reconcile

Intuitively I think most people can see this makes sense, but this paper is probably worth a look if you want to know more.

6. The technology may be sufficiently developed to realize open government but our capacity to wield that technology, less so

We likely need to work on capacity, within government and civil society writ large.

7. Transparency and openness are deeply political issues

We need to stop pretending otherwise.

8. Public service anonymity needs a rethink in the digital era

See: On Partisanship and Anonymity in the Internet Era.

9. We are dealing with a lot of legacy issues that are built into our current institutions

If we started from scratch today, would the machinery of government look the same as it does today? Probably not. We need to be thinking hard about how to get from here to there, but maybe we should start with a discussion about what there actually looks like.

10. The technology worked well

Kudos to the Publivate team for integrating a crowdsourcing platform into a live event in a seamless way, I haven't seen it done well before and they knocked it out of the park.

Bonus: Tweetable tweet goes to ... Ailish Campbell 

Love this. "Canadians are like type-O blood, you can add us to any organization and we make things better" - @Ailish_Campbell #codf16

— Nicholas Charney (@nickcharney) April 1, 2016

Defining Open Dialogue

by Nick Charney

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There's a conference program -- the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum -- that caught my eye earlier this week. The conference is trying to answer the question How can we realize the potential of open government in today's policy making environment?

It's a good question that likely merits further reflection. How we define the potential of open government is likely in flux as the new administration continues to refine its public policy agenda and distance itself from the previous administration. Given what I can discern about the organizers, the speakers and overall agenda, the conference could offer a unique opportunity to influence that refinement; especially on anything that relates to the broad mandate letter commitment, which as Kent rightly points out all being parsed all around town right now (See: An Honest Question on Responsible Government). To wit:

We have also committed to set a higher bar for openness and transparency in government. It is time to shine more light on government to ensure it remains focused on the people it serves. Government and its information should be open by default. If we want Canadians to trust their government, we need a government that trusts Canadians. It is important that we acknowledge mistakes when we make them. Canadians do not expect us to be perfect – they expect us to be honest, open, and sincere in our efforts to serve the public interest.

Not to mention the more specific ones:

• Take a leadership role to review policies to improve the use of evidence and data in program innovation and evaluation, more open data, and a more modern approach to comptrollership
• Accelerate and expand open data initiatives and make government data available digitally, so that Canadians can easily access and use it.
• Work with the Minister of Justice to enhance the openness of government, including leading a review of the Access to Information Act to ensure that Canadians have easier access to their own personal information, that the Information Commissioner is empowered to order government information to be released and that the Act applies appropriately to the Prime Minister’s and Ministers’ Offices, as well as administrative institutions that support Parliament and the courts.

Moreover, having spoken with one of the principal organizers (a friend of mine) I can say that a lot of thought (and some enabling technology) has gone into trying to find ways to facilitate dialogue and co-creation with and among participants to bring them to ground on the conference theme. It's something that I've tried to architect in the past -- albeit with the old school technology of table guides and dedicated time for discussion and reporting out -- so I can say that it is a fairly ambitious undertaking that can produce some interesting insights and identify talent and/or expertise.

Hopefully there's room for discussions about the need for greater experimentation in policy development (See: Experimenting with Policy Development), about the relative maturity/immaturity of online tools for public engagement (See: Thinking, Fast and Slow about Online Public Engagement) and on the organizing principles of policy making in a digital era (See: On Organizing Principles: Policy or Delivery). These discussions are often too distributed to have significant impact and could benefit from catalyzing events such as these.

If you are in Ottawa on March 31/April 1 you might want to check it out.

Why Government Social Media Isn't Social

by Kent Aitken

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At a Community of Federal Regulators workshop last month, the presentation material led a handful of us in the audience to a conversation about social media and how government can get past using it as a "push" mechanism and into two-way dialogue. Which is not just a Canadian thing; Ryan Androsoff and the OECD found the same worldwide:

"[W]hile governments are increasingly using social media, many are still using it primarily as a traditional communications mechanism rather than for opening up policy processes or transforming public service delivery."

I found myself saying that "I don't think government will ever really get there," and wanted to explain that comment. It's a matter of where "there" really is, or, as Ryan put it, "What's the ideal state for social media in government?"

The ideal state

For starters, if the social media goal is something like profit, reach, or providing a supplementary channel, then interactivity and sociality may really just be means to an end. In that case, one-way messaging might work perfectly, even if it offends social media purists, and the story ends there.

But let's assume that the goal is as Ryan wrote in the above quote, to open up policy processes or transform service delivery. In this case, responsiveness and interactivity become central.

And if that's the there, I think government can get there - just in a limited and particular set of circumstances.

But first: why aren't we there yet?

The worldwide state of the practice is still one-way in government, which means that there are more barriers to genuinely interactive government social media than it may have first seemed (or that it's not as attractive a goal). It might be easy to point to common culprits: maybe it’s just culture change that hasn’t taken root yet. Maybe it’s approval processes that make it hard to be “social” and responsive - it’s hard to carry on a conversation while routing responses through half a dozen people, and the time investment smothers the engagement benefit. And so on.

But the state of practice is similar in the private sector. There’s no shortage of examples of really clever back-and-forths between companies and customers, but that's the exception, not the rule. Where companies do get social, it tends to fall under customer service: that is, just an alternative channel to calls or emails to complain, which leads to tightly and extensively scripted interactions. Anything more in-depth and the company's social media team would have to go digging for answers, which breaks the responsiveness element.

Which is more like the government reality. The Public Inquiries model is a good analogy. Questions from the public come in to a central office. That team has a solid map of the institution and they triage questions as best they can for response - in some cases to multiple teams, just in case. In some cases, the answers are a few pages long, and (reasonably) take a couple days to provide.

Government could try to ask general, light questions about broad thoughts on policy or services via social media, such that such in-depth knowledge is not needed, but it'll inevitably get to a complicated request or question. Then the only response available is "That's interesting, we'll consider that and get back to you" and suddenly the people engaging are reminded that they're not talking to the people responsible, and it breaks the spell.

The TL;DR: for this section is that people talk to people, not organizations, and it's impossible to have a conversation that hypothetically could include everything that an organization "knows." The departmental level is too big for conversation.

When and where can government social media get social?

I've been considering three axes that we can play with:

1. Length of time
2. Officialness/institutionalness
3. Source

For source, the question is to what extent the engagement is led by programs/policy/services versus communications, and for today the long story short is that you need both involved.

For the others, let's imagine a grid like this:

From left to right we have the length of time of social media interactions: point-in-time, like hour-long Twitter townhalls (that usually convene a "war room" of comms professionals and subject matter experts to support) to ongoing, like how complaints and comments can come in at any time.

At the top we have large, institutional, and official social media interactions: again, townhalls, but also announcements, senior executive corporate accounts, and the Public Inquiries clearinghouse model applied to social media. At the bottom, we have individual public servants using social media for work purposes (which happens mostly unofficially in the Government of Canada and more officially in some other counties).

How social media in government can be social:

1. It can't be institutions, they're too big to converse
2. It can't be individuals, that doesn't jibe with the public administration culture in Canada (at least now now)
3. The existing escape hatch from (1) and (2), convening war rooms for point-in-time engagements, is too niche and needs alternatives

I think government should instead look at expanding the use of models that cover the middle ground. For instance:

1. Creating governance and content partnerships between policy/program shops and social media teams for more like a week to a month, still using institutional accounts. It might be tied to a consultation or campaign, but would regardless involve posing questions - both into the ether and to identified stakeholder accounts - and getting into back-and-forth dialogue. The policy shop behind the interaction would be identified for the duration, which would put this near the middle of that grid.
2. Identifying policy and program areas whose work requires public consultation and engagement, provide public affairs training (lest I invoke Chris Hadfield), and expand the use of official community accounts, again identifying the teams behind the accounts. This would be in the middle of the grid from top-to-bottom but allow for interactions from point-in-time to ongoing.

Are there other models in use that are working well now? Any other ways to explore the middle ground?