96. Another 32 public engagement ideas for scrutineers to try

This is the write up from my Purposeful Public Engagement Workshop at the 2016 Centre for Public Scrutiny Annual Conference: ‘Democracy, governance and the truth’.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the event as a whole – some excellent speakers and an opportunity to take stock of the rapidly changing environment we are all working in whether in terms of devolution, democratic renewal or the need for a digital mindset.

My workshop was of a more practical nature - and a big thank you to everyone who came along and contributed.

Public engagement with scrutiny is challenging for everyone and each of the participants was certainly able to point to something that they wanted to improve.

I started with the assumption that there was plenty of good practice already in the room for people to draw - what the session could usefully do, therefore, was share it.  I’m delighted to say that this assumption was right and, by focussing on ‘what works’, we learnt about some great examples – even from the people who felt that they weren’t doing much – it turned out, in fact, that they were!

Anyhow, my suggestion at the start was that everyone should identify at least three ideas that they could take back to their organisations and try. These were captured on postcards and, before I post them pack to everyone, here is a list of those ideas.  I’ve captured some of the other good practice examples at the end as well.

I also fed in some of the ideas that we have borrowed from the National Assembly for Wales (see here and here) and some of these were also picked up by participants.

Of course not everything will work for everyone but hopefully the list will give you some inspiration for things you might want to experiment with – or even perhaps remind you about the good stuff you are already doing that you might want to do more of.

So, the ideas that participants were going to try:

1. Use third parties to engage people for you [yes, it’s the double doughnut of democracy folks] +5
2. Use existing council processes e.g. budget, planning, residents’ associations, social media, media releases, council newspaper
3. Online poll to select topic (as used by National Assembly for Wales) / provide a topic shortlist
4. Engage public in work programming
5. Involve the user / interest groups in items or working groups / Talk and listen to various user / interest groups
6. Explore the use of social media (talk to comms) / Use the comms team
7. Use committee members to get messages out about scrutiny business / Encourage the active and passionate councillors that you have to engage the public / align to engagement champions / support the especially active councillors to do more
8. Use focus groups +2
9. Get out of council meetings and talk to real people – do it more often / talk to residents associations (go to their meetings) +2
10. Press release / full page add / facebook / twitter to promote scrutiny topic
11. Hold meetings elsewhere – go out to meet people affected by the issue
12. Hold ‘ask the councillor’ sessions using twitter/facebook
13. United (corporate) approach to planning scrutiny inquiries / use contacts in the council (planning / school governors etc) to advise on engagement as well as using them as technical officers / engage with front facing staff who are already involved in the topic to plan engagement
14. Discuss topics with communities ‘off the record’ / off the record sessions before meetings that enables better questioning in later session
15. Report outcomes on twitter / use other twitter accounts to get messages out +1
16. Use social media streams to contact interested parties +2
17. Follow people / councils from this workshop
18. Use celebrities / local press to promote scrutiny work
19. Give feedback so people can see the impact of their contribution – get creative with it
20. Engage the public in pre decision scrutiny
21. Engage the public in making recommendations to Cabinet

Some other ideas that didn’t make it to the postcards but are still worth sharing:

1. Co-opt members of the public onto task groups
2. Scan the local media to pick up issues of public concern / issues the public will want to engage with
3. Web cast meetings
4. Use alternative venues
5. Web form that the public can use to suggest topics
6. Facebook live session
7. Use town / parish councils (the doughnut again...)
8. Better use of the scrutiny webpages
9. Engage via e-petitions
10. Keep people informed throughout the scrutiny process
11. Use council social media accounts

OK, off to the post box now...

95. Five more public engagement ideas for scrutiny from the National Assembly for Wales

photo credit

Here are some more great ideas that I have picked up from the National Assembly for Wales.  Thanks to the fantastic Kevin Davies for sharing these in what was a sort of unofficial fringe event we had just before GovCampCymru (by the way, big thanks to all at Satori Lab who made govcampcymru possible and to all the sponsors and supporters and to Ben and Lou from Delib who really know their public engagement stuff).

Our scrutiny team have spent time with the Assembly before talking about public engagement.  You can read about that here.

Anyhow, here are five ideas for engaging the public that scrutiny can borrow from the National Assembly.

1.  Support your scrutiny connectors

I have already blogged about this in more detail here.
Essentially the idea is that scrutiny committees could do more to support and reward the wide range of people who help them to gather evidence.  Recognition, information and networking opportunities are all simple things that could be done to strengthen the double doughnut of democracy.

2.  Involve the public in inquiry planning

Planning in depth inquiries tends to be done in house.  But why not invite the public in to co-design inquiries?  Perhaps a workshop involving some of the people most affected by the issue in question?  This should help scrutiny councillors get some really good insights about who they need to talk to and how.

3.  Delegate parts of an inquiry

One interesting suggestion was that some evidence gathering could be delegated.  This might mean asking one committee member to take responsibility for an aspect of an inquiry and report back.  It might even mean asking a interested co-optee to do something like this – a kind of special agent for scrutiny.

4.  Facebook Live

The Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee of the National Assembly for Wales used facebook live as part of asking the public what topics they should be looking at and it worked really well.  Of course it helps if you have an active facebook page that you can add this to but most councils have that right?

5.  Give the public a shortlist of topics to choose from

The other neat thing that the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee did as part of their public engagement was ask the public to pick from one of five topics that the committee had come up with.  Typically, I think, scrutiny tends to ask people an open question about what they would like scrutiny to look at and it can be difficult for people to follow what the outcome was.  This way is much cleaner I think and has a very straightforward outcome – the most popular topic gets scrutinised!

It also got some interest from the media - as you can see here.

92. Design experiments for local democracy

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The notwestminster work we have been doing is seriously great and the folks involved have achieved a lot.  There have been two brilliant events, many ideas generated and lots of new connections made.  From the stuff done so far we have settled on a set of local democracy design challenges to work on - a list of things we want to change.

While this is all good, the next step is to do something practical; to make some stuff.  We had a brilliant Maker Day in February but we need to take it up a notch.

The method I'm suggesting is design experiments.  Here are some notes and first thoughts.

Design Experiments

Recently I have been reading ‘Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think’ by Peter John and others.  A fascinating book - you should read it!  It’s primarily about techniques to encourage behaviour change (e.g. nudge, think) in areas of civic concern such as recycling or volunteering.  It is also about how you test and develop innovations in public service settings.  Specifically it looks at how randomised control trials and design experiments can be used to explore new ways of engaging with citizens.

Stoker and John describe a design experiment like this:

‘…researchers work with practitioners over a period of time to design, implement, evaluate, and redesign an innovative intervention. The group receiving treatment is compared to a comparison group. The aim is to perfect the intervention over several iterative cycles until it is the best it can be [1].

One example in the book is of a video being used to get the voices of the ‘seldom heard’ into the debates at a council's area committee meetings.  The research team asked local practitioners to produce a video that was then shown to different area committees.  Observations at each meeting led to changes to the video and, at the end of the experiment, conclusions were reached about the effectiveness of the approach and how it could be made more effective in future (turns out that the context of the meeting was as important as the video itself).

Along similar lines are some of the experiments being done by Nick Taylor.  See this simple voting machine to encourage community engagement, for example.  Again, a small intervention designed to test the idea that lowering the bar to access improves community consultations (it does).

The design experiment method comes from education where classrooms - a relatively controllable environment - serve as laboratories for experiments.

In the same way the formal process of local democracy in local councils can provide a great laboratory for democracy experiments.  It is a relatively stable and controllable environment and, where you have multiple meetings of the same type, it can support comparisons between interventions and non-interventions.

Design experiments of this type can only tell us what works (or doesn't work) in a particular context and it is important to recognise this limitation. What they can provide, however, is the starting point for experiments on a wider scale in in different settings that might point to more general conclusions.

Advantages

I think there are some real advantages to using design experiments to take forward the #notwestminster design challenges.

1.  It is a manageable approach  
Of course councils don’t have extra resources to dedicate to this type of work but, given that the experiments would be small and hopefully fit with local work that might have been done anyway, I think design experiments are a reasonable proposition.

2.  It will test our assumptions
In our design challenges we have a number of assumptions about how people will behave if different aspects of local democracy are redesigned (people would be better informed if we did this…, people would get more involved if we did that…).  Wouldn't it be great to have some evidence to back this up?  Design experiments, if done robustly, could provide evidence to support our assumptions (or force us to think again).

3.  We can make the most of our network
One of the things I love about Notwestminster is the way it brings together councillors, practitioners, academics, techies and citizens.  Design experiments are a great was to bring people together in small teams to make something new.  We can also share experiments in progress across the network getting valuable input as we go along.

4.  It will give us something to share
By reporting experiments and their outcomes we can contribute to a growing body of knowledge about civic innovations that will be of use to practitioners and researchers alike.  What’s not to like about that?

5.  We can make something worthwhile
Last, but not least, wouldn't it be great to actually make something that makes a difference to a local council and its citizens?  Wouldn't it?

Challenges

In developing the method and approach there are also some challenges to be overcome.  Sarah Cotterill and Liz Richardson [3] have highlighted some of these as they relate to working with local government and a couple are particularly relevant here:

1.  Measuring the difference
If we are serious about research we need to be clear about what ‘outcome measures’ will tell us what we need to know.  Ideally we will want ‘objective’ measures (e.g. voter turnout) but sometimes we will need to rely on people’s perceptions.  The classic concerns about validity and reliability apply.

2.  Mixed methods
If we want a rich picture about what is happening around a particular experiment we will need to invest in a range of sources of evidence.  What research techniques should be used? Do we need a 'tool kit'?

3.  Organisational commitment
Cotterill and Richardson point to organisational difficulties as a reason why many experiments in local government fail.  How can we ensure that experiments won’t get neglected when other pressures and priorities come into play?

Design experiments also require a different way of working and participants need to be clear about that at the start.  As John et al suggest:

'Design experiments favour small-scale innovation, in a relatively controlled environment, where the dialogue can take place with a small range of policy-makers and workers, all of whom have signed up to a new way of doing business and to intense researcher-practitioner interactions.' [2] 

But what should this commitment look like and how can we make sure that it sticks?

4.  Good governance
Design experiments in councils would be managed by ‘design teams’ involving councillors, practitioners, researchers, practice advisors and others.  Being clear about roles and how decisions are made will be important – but how should this look exactly? How should the different experiments be linked together and managed as a whole (if at all)?

So, some initial thoughts.  Let’s see what can be done with them.


[1] Stoker, G and John, P (2008) Design Experiments: Engaging Policy Makers in the Search for Evidence about What Works, Political Studies, Vol 57 (2).
[2] John, P et al (2013) Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think, Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour, Bloomsbury, London.
[3]  Cotterill, S and Richardson, L (2010) Expanding the Use of Experiments on Civic Behavior: Experiments with Local Government as a Research Partner, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 628

90. Use zero-to-ten scale questions to assess wellbeing

Photo Credit 

Scaling questions ask people to assess how close they are to a self-identified preferred future using a zero-to-ten scale.  The technique is used in solution focused brief therapy but I am suggesting that it can be adapted for the process of producing a well-being assessment.  The purpose of this post is to set out how.

Well-being Assessments in Wales

One of the things that local partnerships have to do to comply with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act is produce a Well-being Assessment.  Guidance here if you like the detail.

It is different from the needs assessments that have been required in the past in a couple of important aspects.

First it is based on an asset rather than a deficit model ('what’s good and how can we have more of it?' rather than 'what’s bad and how can we fix it?').

Second there is an expectation that the assessment will be linked logically to an analysis of the likely response (see my post on Driver Diagrams for an example of what this might look like).

These two points, plus the emphasis on achieving a ‘preferred future’, suggests to me a big overlap with solution focused approaches (see my previous post about this) of which scale questions are an established part.

Scale Questions 

Scale questions are not a research method nor are they a scientific tool.  What they are is a way of framing the conversation about a particular outcome and, most importantly, a way of making the link between assessment and action.

Within the therapeutic context, Ratner et al describe it like this:

A solution focused scale is a way of enabling a client to focus on the degree of progress towards their preferred future; it has nothing to do with assessing the extent of their problem. After a client has explored how they have got to where they are on the scale, they can be invited to consider what will tell them (and others) that they have moved to a point further on.  It is important to remember that the scale is the client’s subjective view of the situation.  It is not a scientific assessment! [1]

So, answering a scale question is a matter of judgement and perception not mathematical certainty.  This is of course true of any assessment particularly when a number of different sources of evidence are involved. There is no way, for example, of drawing together quantitative and qualitative research other than by an informed judgement.

In the context of a well-being assessment the appropriate point on the scale can be debated with a view to reaching a consensus.  This is no different from the assessment process that an interview panel goes through to agree a mark for a candidates question or that a tender panel goes through to assess a presentation from a perspective contractor.

The second point that can be drawn from the quote above is that the scale question technique calls for a focus on what positive things have got us to the score that we have agreed.  So, for example, we might think about the outcome; ‘Children have a good start in life’ and agree that it is a ‘5’ for the local area.  Considering what makes it a five may draw attention to excellent play schemes or Flying Start provision – assets to be developed rather than problems to be fixed.

The next step then is to ask ‘Ok, if we are a ‘5’ now, what would get us to a ‘6’?

Hence the technique moves quickly from ‘situation’ to ‘response’.

Applying the Technique to Well-being Assessments

So, what would a well-being assessment, based on scale questions look like?

The first step is to be clear about the preferred future that is being assessed.  This is likely to mean a set of outcomes, broken down into sub outcomes perhaps, that describe the future conditions you want to see.  These are set locally; as with the therapeutic context, the fact that they are 'self-determined' is really important.

The Well-being Assessment will then be structured around those outcomes providing a one-to-ten score for each based on the available quantitative and qualitative evidence.

Here is my suggestion of what each section might look like.

1. The evidence will be summarised for each outcome starting with "One a scale of zero to ten, where zero represents the worst things can be and ten the best they can be, we gave this an 'x'"
2. Next, under the heading “‘Why we gave it an ‘x’”, for each outcome the assessment will discuss “What makes it an ‘x’?”  This will highlight the assets that contribute to the score whether, physical, cultural, services, initiatives or otherwise.
3. The next question is ‘How would we know if we had got one step higher?’  Again, this is a matter of judgement to be negotiated collectively.  The answer might point to the evidence that would be required to push the score one point up the scale.
4. Finally the assessment should propose, for each outcome, “What would make it an ‘x+1’?”  This might point to an extension of existing schemes or approaches that have worked elsewhere.

Benefits of the Technique

Approaching the assessment in this way has a number of advantages:

• As a solution focused approach it places attention on assets rather than problems
• The scale questions allows us to be both ambitious about the future AND realistic – while the statement that ‘children have a good start in life’ may be a desirable if ultimately unachievable in full, the focus on ‘+1’ ensures that the conversation remains manageable and practical.
• Scale questions move us quickly from an assessment of the current situation to what the response might be
• Partnerships will be required to identify a small number of ‘well-being objectives’ and to address them within Well-being Plans.  Using scale questions provides allows progress against different outcomes to be compared (remembering that the scores represent judgements not facts).
• The scale question technique can be more widely used for research and engagement outside of the well-being assessment process - a new tool in the engagement toolbox.
• It is easy to explain and to get people engaged – it lends itself easily to public involvement – a public survey can be fed in, or conducted in parallel, for example.  Public results can be reported separately and compared to the partnerships' scores - big differences will provide an interesting topic for debate!

[1] Ratner, H, George, E and Iveson C (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy:  100 Key Points and Techniques P115.

88. Civic Starter

Councils facing increasing difficult budget decisions are looking for new ways to fund services that they simply don’t have the budget to support anymore.  They are also looking to involve the public in these design processes, partly for their ideas, but also as they want to involve those people who may well be contributing their time or making services sustainable by using them.

In the Notwestminster maker day we build a mock up of ‘civic starter’ as a way to invite people into these conversations.  Based on the principles of kick starter it invites people to pledge that they will be involved in a discussion.  Once enough people pledge then the discussion goes ahead involving all the people who have pledged by the closing date.

If not enough people pledge then the default decision goes ahead (e.g. ‘close the library’).

The council will then have a group of committed citizens that they can involve in discussions in whatever the best way is.  Obviously there should be a public document at the end of the process hopefully outlining a proposal that can then be presented to council for decision.

Those getting involved also qualify for rewards.  This provides a thank you for those taking part and an incentive to encourage a wider pool of citizens to participate. Rewards could include things like free swims or badges for example.

Each issue listed on the site comes with an updates section and a comments section so people can follow progress and instantly add views if they want.

Issues being discussed would be searchable by topic, area and closing date for example.

One challenge we didn’t resolve was how to ensure everyone was aware when issues affecting them went up on the site.  Another maker day perhaps...

80. Four ways to make council reports more digestible

This post is a further follow up from the excellent Notwestminster event.  Check out the website to see how other stuff is progressing.

Specifically this post is about the number one ‘something we need to fix’ from the User Stories for Local Democracy workshop:

As a local resident I need to see council reports in a form I can easily digest so I can understand the decisions that are being made

Here are four suggestions that we might want to work on and develop.  I would love to hear your thoughts.  I would particularly love to hear examples of people doing any of this already.

1. Use video for reports

This is a suggestion from John Popham who discusses it on video here in true ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ style.

2. A style guide for council reports

While style guides are a normal part of providing content for the web, it's less obvious that people refer to them when writing council reports.  Often we forget that we are writing for a public audience and instead have councillors and fellow professionals in our minds.

Common gripes include:

• Use of jargon (either unnecessarily or without explanation where technical terms do need to be used) -Councillor David Harrington mentioned this one.
• Acronyms (for some reason Education reports seem to particularly suffer from this)
• Saying ‘members’ instead of ‘councillors’
• An unnecessarily wordy of formal style (often people assume this is how reports should be written as it’s the way that they always have been)

There are corporate style guides that councils use but these but I'm not sure how widespread they are or how much attention people pay to them.  What’s needed, perhaps, is a consistent set of golden rules that are used when writing reports.  If these were visible then the public would be clear about what to expect.

As Sarah Lay suggests, we could build on the LocalGovDigital content standards to do this.

3. Short summaries

Linked to the idea of a style guide, a short summary at the top of every report (and agenda pack, letter etc) that explains in plain language what the report is about might help people to understand quickly and easily what is being discussed.  This was suggested by Diane Sims.

This is nothing new in terms of writing for the web but it’s not often part of council reports.

Following the Notwestminster event we have introduced summaries for all of our scrutiny publications in Swansea.  We write them all to the same format and place them at the top of the documents and on the webpage when they are published..  A couple of examples:

This is the review report by the Children, Young People and Learning Overview and Scrutiny Board about literacy in children and young people. It contains conclusions and recommendations. 

This is the agenda pack for a meeting of Schools Performance Scrutiny Inquiry Panel taking place on the 19 February 2015.  The main items are update on Casllwchwr Primary School, school categorisation, and how schools have used their Pupil Deprivation Grant. Background reports are included. 

This is a letter from the Schools Performance Scrutiny Panel to the Cabinet Member for Education following the meeting of the Panel on the 11 December 2014.  It is about Annual Education Performance.  It includes conclusions and proposals.

4.     Policy pages

Rather than simply inserting summaries into reports we could produce public summaries of entire policy areas making it easy for people to see what the issues are about and understand the decisions being made.  This was suggested by Ed Hammond from the Centre for Public Scrutiny.

This is something that gov.uk already do - you can see an example here.

The advantage of this is that we can cook up an appetising meal of reports rather than leave people to digest them one by one.

Whaddya reckon?

71. Mini Mayors

Mini mayors are local councillors with added status and recognition.  More than simply the community’s representative on the Council they are the focus for community governance.  Many councillors already act informally as mini mayors – the idea here is that this role could be formalised and given legal weight.

Mini mayor wins award for services to community governance

I was at a Welsh Government seminar this week on Reforming Local Government.  One of the questions was around the role local councillors and how it might develop. A couple of issues came out of this:

• Many back bench councillors are disillusioned and feel they cannot make a difference.  Young councillors in particular have come into local government full of expectation but find that they are excluded from council wide decision making.
• Sub local governance, in other words the patchwork of community and town councils, community regeneration partnerships, voluntary groups, school governing bodies etc etc, is, democratically speaking, a mess.  There is nothing that formally links everything.
• Councillors are in a great position to tie all this together. They are already on many of these bodies, as school governors, on management committees of community centres and involved with voluntary groups.  Many councillors already wear two hats – they serve on local authorities and on their community and town councils.

As well as their traditional councillor role this means they would automatically:

• Have a seat on the community or town council (no need to be elected)
• Be a governor on all the schools in their patch
• Sit on the management committee or board of any community initiatives in their areas

This would ensure that the local councillor not only had influence in all of these bodies but was able to join things up locally.  The presence of an elected councillor on all of these bodies would also ensure added democratic legitimacy for them.  At the same time the mini mayor would be a stronger position to represent the views of the community to the Council and there would also be more scope for mini mayors to facilitate public engagement in their areas through area forums or similar initiatives.

When people vote for their councillor now, they are electing someone to represent them on the Council and various committees.  Would it make a difference to turnout if people knew that the councillor they were electing would also be automatically be involved in a number of other community bodies?  Would it improve the accountability of those bodies if the mini mayor for the area gave them all a public and accessible face?

Couple of issues.  The first is, to make this work, there would probably need to be only single councillor wards.  Second, and most important there would need to be enough councillors to ensure that mini mayors are not spread too thin.  One the plus side, supporting a network of mini mayors could be an important counter balance to the increasing remoteness of our increasingly large local councils.

UPDATE:  A reality check from Councillor Simon Cooke and plenty more food for thought in this post.  In it Simon says:

Much though I see merit in the mini-mayor idea, it is a reminder that the 2000 Local Government Act emasculated local councillors and created the situation where many ended up flapping around wondering what their role and purpose might be.... What we need to do is give those councillors the support, access and capacity to actually do that vital job of kicking down the doors of bureaucrats to ensure that the people's voice echoes round those offices as loudly as possible.

Photo: https://flic.kr/p/eYuxeZ

61. Find the point of public interest

One the questions raised by our Scrutiny Bytes project is 'what type of digital content will the public want to share, read and respond to?'   This matters because this is exactly the content that councillors are going to want to pass on to the public.  Of course this is something that goes wider than digital content and is an important issue for public engagement more generally.  Here are some first thoughts.

The point of public interest, as illustrated by this rather impressive felt tip Venn diagram (does it make you nostalgic for OHP presentations?), is the overlap between what the council (or other government body) is doing and what the public are actually interested in.  The former is easy to work out but the latter less so.

Democratic content is different from the content produced to support service delivery.  If you are producing content for the public as customers, for your council website say, you have a lot more to work on.  You see what people are searching for and design your ‘top tasks’ to reflect this.

For democratic content, however, you are producing content for the public as citizens.  You are working on the basis of what people are entitled to know even if they are not already aware of it.  You are pushing content out from the democratic process rather than responding to customer demand.

Having had a look at some of the wisdom around the web on why people share online content, and having had some initial conversations as part of the Scrutiny Bytes project, I think that there are three questions you have to answer if you want to find this point of public interest:

1. Who is it for?

Public is much too broad a term to use of course.  You need to design and target content at a specific group or groups.  This could mean residents in a particular area, parents, young people, teachers, social workers, you get the idea...  Answering this question is important because it sets you up nicely for the next one.

2. What is the motivation?

'What the public cares about' can be broken down into a number of sub issues.  One good way to get some insight here is to put on your own citizen's hat.  We are all citizens of course so think about what would motivate you to share, read or respond.  Four suggestions here:

• It will directly affect you.  By which I mean a service is closing, a new facility is proposed for your area or a benefit is being changed.    
• It will help you.  Useful knowledge such as a better way for you help your child with their reading, an easier way to get your residents parking permit or advice on home energy efficiency.     
• It matters in your world.  Something that is newsworthy in your circle for example your neighbour's road safety campaign, a food inspection report on the local takeaway or recognition for your chess club's schools project.
• You get a reward.  This could be a 'money off' deal or entry into a prize draw.  It might be recognition as in 'we will post the three best suggestions on our website'.  It might also be something useful to download or keep. 

This motivation is the hook that will make your content leap out from someone's timeline.  There is a lot of competition for people's attention so you need to get this right.

3. What will it achieve?

Finally you need to be clear about what you hope to achieve from people sharing, reading or responding.  Is it simply raised awareness you want or perhaps you are looking for feedback?  Either way your aims will limit or extend the amount of room you have to work in when looking at the Venn diagram, above.

Finding the point of public interest, the overlap between what the public care about and what the organisation hopes to achieve is not going to be easy.  But, if we want digital democracy to be a two way conversation, getting it right matters.

50. Civic Solutions for Wicked Problems

The concept of wicked problems is both important and tricky.  Important because it refers to those intractable social and economic issues that most policy makers and practitioners are grappling with; issues like youth unemployment, childhood obesity or substance misuse.  Tricky because the concept of wicked problems is itself ‘wicked’ and subject to differences in definition and interpretation.

This post sets out some thoughts about wicked problems and how they might lead to particular types of responses that I'm calling civic solutions.

Matching Problems and Solutions

A few weeks ago Megan Mathias from Kafka Brigade UK gave a presentation to our community planning conference on ‘Solving the Wicked Problems’.  The purpose was to help inform the thinking for our city’s new Single Integrated Plan (that’s Welsh version of the community strategy). It was this presentation that got me thinking (always a good sign!). 

Megan’s central point, I think, was that we need to be clear about what type of problems we are seeking to solve as this will inform in a major way our responses to those problems.   Megan drew in particular on Keith Grint’s typology of problems and responses (see Keith Grint’s presentation here). 
Grint argues that:

• For ‘critical’ problems such as a major police incident, for example, we need a command response – one that is immediate, top down and decisive
• Tame problems such as conducting heart surgery, launching a new product or relocating a business are complex but can be addressed ‘scientifically’ and hence can be solved through  a management response
• Wicked problems, such as knife crime, for example, cannot be solved through ‘management’.  In fact they may not be completed solved at all, rather they may only be mitigated.  The response required here is one of political collaboration – in other words leadership.

Wicked Problems

Grint offers the following characteristics of wicked problems:

• Either novel or recalcitrant
• Complex rather than complicated (cannot be solved in isolation)
• Sit outside single hierarchy and across systems – ‘solution’ creates another problem
• They often have no stopping rule – thus no definition of success
• May be intransigent problems that we have to learn to live with
• Symptoms of deep divisions – contradictory certitudes
• Have no right or wrong solutions but better or worse developments
• Securing the ‘right’ answer is not as important as securing collective consent.
• Feasibility not optimality; coping rather than solving
• Uncertainty & Ambiguity inevitable – cannot be deleted through correct analysis

If you are unfamiliar with the idea of wicked problems then the Wikipedia page (should that be wickedapedia *ahem*) is a good a place to start as any.  Definitions tend to vary but they usually come in lists of characteristics - see this paper by Head and Alford (pdf) for more on this. 

For me wicked problems are best understood as symptoms of wider social and economic structures.  There is perhaps a danger that wicked problems might be thought of almost as having an existence independent from the ‘real’ world- like malevolent ghosts that have arrived from some mysterious other world. 

It is important to remember that wicked problems are of course symptoms of deeper social and economic problems.  To use a medical metaphor; they are like chronic conditions, some of which can be managed to the point that the individual leads an almost completely normal life as long as they can maintain the management regime required.  Other chronic conditions cannot be managed as easily and the individual has to accept that the symptoms will continue to be challenging.

 

There is also something a little fatalistic in saying ‘wicked problems’ can never be completely solved.  I’d rather say, like a doctor might, that these are conditions that can be managed until the cure is found.  Take the example of child labour in 19th century Britain for example.  At the start of that century it must have looked like an intractable wicked problem.  Clearly it is no longer seen that way.  Not in the UK in any case. 

It is also important to understand wicked problems as issues that affect us all to a greater or lesser extent;  whether directly as ‘victims’ or indirectly through the impact on the wider economy for example. 

In the same way I would argue that everyone shares responsibility for wicked problems.  I mean this both in the sense that we are all responsible for these issues in the first place to some extent, whether by action or inaction, but also that we are all responsible for the solution.  Grint puts it well in this report on Total Place (pdf) when he says that a wicked problem:

...requires a long term collaborative engagement by the whole community. The trick here, then, is to ask the right question. Not, ‘how do we stop knife crime?’ but how do we get the community more involved in self-policing?

Civic Solutions

Which brings me onto to this idea of civic solutions by which I mean:  Emergent strategies to tackle wicked problems that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

This is an approach that contrasts with traditional top down approaches.  As Helen Sullivan argues:

An alternative model, talked about a great deal in the literature, but rarely applied, looks at ‘whole of government’ from the bottom rather than the top, emphasizing the merit of taking decisions and being responsible for them as close to service users and citizens as possible, and of connecting to others through flexible networks rather than reconstituted hierarchies. This poses a fundamental challenge to strategic thinkers who can conceive of strategy only in top-down, centrally determined ways, as it requires thinking about strategy as emergent, generated by interactions between the different actors involved wherever they are in the system.

That’s the general idea – the next step is to map out what these civic solutions might look like in practice and, more specifically, what they might mean for whole place partnerships and their single integrated plans.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/binkley27/306107180/

47. A Design Checklist for Participatory Initiatives

As I've mentioned before, my PhD research is concerned with local government and paticipatory initiatives.  'Participatory initiatives' meaning the citizens' panels, area forums, participatory budgeting projects etc etc that aim to give the public some influence in the local policy process.  

One of the conceptual issues I face is tying down the precise characteristics of these participatory initiatives as they are all so different and are inevitably implemented in different ways.

For a broad typology I draw on Graham Smith's excellent Power Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from Around the World - a report he produced for the Power Inquiry.  You can download it here.

Smith's typology looks like this:

• Electoral innovations- aim to increase electoral turnout. Examples include postal ballots, electronic voting, positive abstention, compulsory voting, reducing voting age, universal citizenship
• Consultative innovations – aim to inform decision-makers of citizens’ views.  Examples include public meetings, focus groups, planning for real, community visioning, standing forums, standing citizens’ panels.
• Deliberative innovations – aim to bring citizens together to deliberate on policy issues, the outcomes of which may influence decision-makers. Examples include citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative opinion polling, America Speaks, national issues forums, study circles, deliberation days.
• Co-governance innovations – aim to give citizens significant influence during the process of decision-making. Examples include Chicago community policing, youth councils, participatory appraisal, participatory budgeting, Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, British Columbia.
• Direct democracy innovations – aim to give citizens final decision-making power on key issues. Examples include New England town meetings, referendum, initiative, recall, citizens’ assemblies selected by sortition.
• E-democracy innovations – aim to use ICT to engage citizens in the decision making process. Examples include e-voting, e-consultation, e-representatives, online deliberative polling, e-petitions, e-referendum, Minnesota E-Democracy, BBCiCan, HeadsUp

In order to help with a more detailed categorisation I've been collecting a list of variables that you can see in the list below.  It is specifically set in a UK local government context but could be easily adapted for other contexts.

As well as its research use it might also be handy as a checklist for councils looking to set up a participatory initiative - a set of choices that can be made at the design stage. It's very much a work in progress - all comments welcome!

Design Variables for Local Government Participatory Inititiatives

1. Formal decisions are made on behalf of council [routinely, occasionally, never]
2. Preferences or recommendations are agreed [routinely, occasionally, never]
3. Preferences or recommendations are reported directly to council or cabinet [routinely, occasionally, never]
4. The role of local ward councillors [formal, informal, none]
5. The role of executive councillors [formal, informal, none]
6. How the membership is chosen [open, restricted (e.g. geographic area, age group), selection mechanism (e.g. nomination, election)]
7. Membership monitoring (e.g. to check representativeness) [formal, informal, none]
8. Training for the membership [formal, informal, none]
9. Set up by [community, council, Other body (e.g. voluntary group)]
10. Agenda setting. [council, membership, joint]
11. Expected level of public involvement [1-30, 30-60, 60+]
12. The method of engagement [face to face, remote, mixed]
13. Involvement of community groups or other outside bodies [formal, informal, none]
14. Council wide policy role [formal, informal, none]
15. Service improvement role [formal, informal, none]
16. Budgetary role [formal, informal, none]
17. Resources and support for the initiative [dedicated (e.g. specialist team), Integrated (e.g. built into to other roles), none]

Picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_drawing_board.JPG

45. Community Participation: Five Tips from Rousseau

Today is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Jean Jacques Rousseau. To celebrate this most auspicious of days, here is my take on what Rousseau might say to anyone involved in community participation today. 

Rousseau is my favourite political philosopher and The Social Contract (250 years old this year) is my favourite political book. If you are interested you can read The Social Contract online here or enjoy a couple of Harvard lectures about Rousseau's discourse here and The Social Contract here.

Obviously I can’t do justice here to the work of the great man in a short post – I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to even given the time and space – but here is, I think, in a nutshell, the core of his political argument:

The Social Contract

Rousseau’s central contention is that, in the modern world, people can only enjoy freedom thought direct participation in politics. Furthermore, we are free only when we obey those laws that we have made ourselves. For Rousseau, the moment you let someone else decide the laws you live under, whether it be a monarch, dictator or elected representative, you become no better than a slave.

How then can you only obey your own laws and yet live in a community with others? The Social Contract presents Rousseau’s solution to the problem. It represents a voluntary political association where everyone participates in the making of laws for the community interest (also known as the general will). The key bit is that the laws apply generally, so that everyone is equally affected:

‘...as every individual gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all, it is no one’s interest to make conditions onerous for others’

Clearly, as Rousseau would also accept, the social contract is an ideal state which is unlikely to ever be seen in reality. However, it provides, I think, a fine political aspiration.

Community Participation: Five Tips from Rousseau

So, what might Rousseau say about modern community participation? Here are five lessons that I think can be drawn from the Social Contract.

1. Get everyone in the community to sign up

The social contract only works because everyone has signed up to it, it cannot be imposed. Similarly community participation needs the consent of the whole community (or an overwhelming proportion of it), whatever that community might be. It might be raised hands at a meeting or a signature on a form; what’s important is that voluntary act of association. If this cannot be achieved then maybe the community participation approach needs to be changed, or maybe community participation isn’t appropriate at all.  

2. Only consider general principles

One thing Rousseau would definitely say is that community participation should only be concerned with general issues for the community, issues that affect everyone, if not exactly the same, then in a similar way. Particular issues, such as what happens in one street, or a planning application, will draw out particular interests and lead to conflict. Instead, general issues, such as the speed limit, the acceptable noise level or even the overall balance of spending in an area should be the focus. It is for the ‘government’, whether it be the local authority or another public body to interpret the general principles and put them into practice in particular cases. Once again, if the community as a group gets involved, it can only bring conflict.

3. Only ask about what’s best for the community

Like Rousseau’s general will, the community will expresses the interest of the community as a whole. The question to be asked is not ‘what is best for you?’ or 'what do you want?’ but ‘what is in the best interests of the whole community?’ For the community will is not the ‘average’ of all individual interests but the result of a careful consideration of what is best for all. The fact that everyone is affected more or less the same is important in this context.

4. Ask people to consider the issues as individuals

For Rousseau the general will has the best chance to emerge when citizens undertake their own careful consideration and are not bound by party allegiance or swayed by those with vested interests. So with the community will it is important that party politics, pressure groups or any other type of faction are kept at bay. Citizens should be provided with information and encouraged to debate but not to campaign.

5. Get everyone to participate

For the community will to emerge everyone, or nearly everyone, in the community need to be involved. Comprehensive participation also increases the likelihood that everyone will feel happy to be bound by community laws. Rousseau’s Social Contract was concerned with small city states where face to face participation was possible. There is no reason why communities could not be defined as small enough to make this happen. Alternatively, the use of social media and web technology could make the involvement of larger groups possible.


For me, Rousseau’s political philosophy can be used to underpin a distinctive approach to community participation, an approach that might be challenging in practice but a worthwhile aspiration nevertheless.

Picture credit (portrait): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

36. Four Conjectures about Local Government and Public Participation

Jim Bulpitt once said that ’like a well-established, and well loved, music hall act, participation and local government are words often found in partnership’.

Trouble is that this has not been a particularly successful partnership, at least not in terms of participation actually influencing local policies and decisions in any meaningful way.  Despite more than 40 years of experimenting with participatory initiatives in the UK such as citizens' panels, area forums and focus groups, there has been very little evidence to suggest that there has been any real policy impact.

The interesting question for me is why this relationship hasn’t worked out as many have hoped.  If we knew why then maybe we could fix it, or, if it can’t be fixed, we could do something more productive with our time (that's probably a pretty fair summary of my PhD).
   
This is a question that has been neglected in my opinion.  Partly this is because the ‘participation’ literature has tended to be more interested in the process of getting people to participate in the initiatives or the operations of the initiatives themselves.  Partly because explanations are not in one place - you have to go out and look for them.  Aside from the local government and participation literatures you need to look in a number of places such as democratic theory, state theory and institutional theory for example. 

I want to make the business of explaining the relationship between local government and public participation more manageable.  To do this I have proposed four conjectures which are intended to cover the major possibilities.  All four are plausible, in my opinion, although they can’t all be right.

Here then are the four conjectures (I have borrowed the ‘conjectures approach’ from Klijn and Skelcher who set it out in a paper that you can find here):

Transitional
Local government is in transition between a purely representative form of local democracy and a new hybrid version enhanced by participative initiatives.  This transition is evidenced by the good practice that exists in many local councils and the proliferation in participatory initiatives sponsored by local government over recent years.  The failure to influence the policy process is simply a question of poor institutional design – we simply don’t have the right mechanisms yet with which to connect up initiatives with the policy process.  This will come in time – we should just keep on experimenting.

Incompatibility
Only elected, representative local government is appropriate for our large scale and complex nature; modern democracy is necessarily elitist.  This conjecture draws on elite democratic theory and highlights the practical problems associated with any attempt to construct a hybrid form of democracy.  Despite the good intentions of the officials that support them, the outcomes from initiatives can only be given a low value by local politicians who will see them as little more than symbolic.  Either we need to radically redesign our local democracy or we should lower our expectations significantly.

Instrumental
This conjecture draws on Marxist theory to describe the way in which local government uses participatory initiatives cynically as a means of managing the urban population.  It starts from the position that local government is an institution which administers economic and social policies on behalf of the central state.  Participatory initiatives are used as pro-active management tools used to gather information and to deal with protest.  While the prospects for achieving outcomes are nonexistent it may still be possible to use initiatives as a platform for protest. 

Resistivity
The word ‘resistivity’ is borrowed from physical science where it refers to the extent to which a material opposes the flow of an electrical current.  It draws on institutional theory and focuses on the way in which the behaviours of people in local government are shaped by entrenched (formal and informal) rules and norms.  These ‘old rules’ may work against the new ways of thinking and working that come with participatory initiatives – they tend to ensure that outcomes are resisted.  These ‘old rules’ are not fixed, however, and can be changed by individuals acting in the right way.  This is no easy task, however, and it may be better instead to work through external or new organisations, more open to new ways of doing things.

As I said these are all plausible theories – there is evidence to support each.  It is of course important to know which is (most) right - particularly if you want to see participatory initiatives influencing policy and decision making and if you have responsibility for making them work. 

The detailed version of these conjectures can be found in my article: UK Local Government and Public Participation:  Using Conjectures to Explain the Relationship – Public Administration, 2011

Update!  Thanks to the good people at Wiley Politics, the full article is FREE to download until the end of July 2012.  Thanks guys!

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfriver/416847745/

34. Evaluate the Policy Outcomes from Public Participation

If I want to describe the force of an earthquake I can use the Richter scale, if I want to describe wind speed I can use the Beaufort scale but if I want to describe the impact of public participation on local government policy and decision making (and I do – it’s what my PhD is about) what can I use?

The answer is nothing as far as I know. 

The purpose of this post, therefore, is to share the crude scale I’m using to describe the value of the outcomes from participatory initiatives on policy and decision making.  It is very much a work in progress so please feel free to suggest improvements!

My Kind of Outcomes

Public participation initiatives, such as citizens’ panels, area forums, focus groups etc, will normally consider issues, relevant to policies or decisions being considered and will produce outcomes.  By outcomes I mean opinions or proposals that might be captured formally through minutes or reports, or informally by decision makers, perhaps councillors, being present and taking conclusions away with them.  These outcomes are the policy products of participatory initiatives.    

Evaluating Public Participation Isn’t Simple

While I am only really interested in those outcomes relevant to policy and decision making there are of course a wide range of other outcomes that can be evaluated, sometimes it seems, to the exclusion of the ones I’m interested in.   

I’m not going to get into the whole thing here.  If you want to see the whole picture then Tina Nabatchi has produced a very useful ‘Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation’ that you can download here.  It gives a very good feel for the challenge of evaluating public participation, as she says:

Public participation is an inherently complex and value-laden concept. There are no widely held criteria for judging the success and failure of citizen participation efforts. Some advocates focus on the intrinsic benefits of participation and believe that its instrumental outcomes are irrelevant. Others focus on its instrumental outcomes for citizens, communities, policy, and governance. Critics often doubt both sets of claims.

Nabatchi’s guide also highlights some of the specific challenges associated with evaluating the specific type of outcomes I’m interested in:

...there are difficulties in demonstrating causal links between participation and policy outcomes, in part due to the time lag between processes and policy or public action, as well as intervening events. There is also considerable ambiguity about what would constitute a substantial impact, which means that impact must be considered in relation to the initial goals of the participatory program. Finally, scholars and practitioners are still devising methods with which to better examine the links between public participation processes and public policy changes and action.

This then, is my attempt to try and address those challenges.

A Simple Evaluation Scale

For my scale I have borrowed from this paper by Paul Burton on measuring the benefits of public participation.  In particular two of the ‘strands’ he argues need to be considered when conceptualising participation.   

The first strand is the level or scope of the decision:  Burton describes the possible range like this:

At one end of the continuum are decisions that affect everyone in a particular constituency or jurisdiction, while at the other end are those affecting only a few.

I’ve adapted this a little bit and have divided decisions between those that are strategic, affecting the whole local authority area, and those that are local, affecting one community or population group.

The second strand is what Burton calls the participatory relationship, in other words:

the relationship between those people who choose to or are invited to participate and those who retain formal responsibility for making the decision in question. At one end of the spectrum formal responsibility for taking a decision is handed to all participants, for example in a referendum, while at the other end participants are allowed only the most cursory degree of involvement and in ways that have no meaningful impact on the decision taken. 

Again, to simplify, and to place this in a local government context, I’ve distinguished between those cases where the difference made is decisive and where the initiative has been informing. 

From a councillor perspective these two categories are the flip side of two classic representations of the councillor role.  For those councillors who see themselves as trustees, in other words, elected to follow their own judgements, the informing relationship is likely to fit more comfortably.  For those that sees their role as one of delegate, closely representing the views of the public, a more decisive influence might be more likely.

Putting the two strands together generates four types of value and looks like this:

I then translate this into a four part scale as follows:

1.  High Value (Strategically decisive)
Outcomes either substantially change the intended decision / policy or bring a clear direction where the way forward was in doubt.  We would expect this to happen in connection with council, cabinet or even strategic partnership meetings.

2.  Medium Value (Locally decisive; strategically informing)
A substantial change or a clear direction is affected at a local level through say an area committee. 
Alternatively the influence is council wide and the outcome has been clearly taken into account but as one of many considerations of which others were decisive.  

3.  Low Value (Locally informing)
The outcome has been clearly taken into account by local councillors or officers acting locally but it cannot be said to be decisive.

4.  No Value (Neither decisive nor informing)
Nothing has happened as a consequence of the outcome.

I appreciate that this scale is a crude one that plays fast and loose with many subtleties and is likely to be highly subjective in its application.  No doubt it could also be improved. Nevertheless I believe it at least goes someway to describing something which has (probably) never been properly described before. 

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/playingwithpsp/2280744328/

22. The Co-productive Council

I’ve been doing some work with the excellent Prof. Tony Bovaird lately on co-production and it prompted me to think about what a co-productive council might look like.   First, however, a few words about co-production as, if you didn't know, you might have thought it was all about making movies...

 Co-production in Public Services

Co-production is an idea that is certainly gaining traction. There are probably too many definitions but a good place to start is where the phrase was first used:

The term ‘co-production’ was coined originally at the University of Indiana in the 1970s when Professor Elinor Ostrom was asked to explain to the Chicago police why the crime rate went up when the police came off the beat and into patrol cars. She used the term as a way of explaining why the police need the community as much as the community need the police.(new economics foundation, 2008: Co-production: A Manifesto for growing the core economy)

The New Economics Foundation and NESTA describe it this way:

Co-production is a new vision for public services which offers a better way to respond to the challenges we face - based on recognising the resources that citizens already have, and delivering services with rather than for service users, their families and their neighbours. Early evidence suggests that this is an effective way to deliver better outcomes, often for less money.

A great summary can be found here.  This overview by Tony Bovaird, Elke Löffler and Frankie Hine-Hughes, highlights how the concept can be broken down to apply to different aspects of the service delivery cycle such as co-planning, co managing or co-assessment.

For a really interesting example of a whole Council approach take a look at Lambeth Council.  They have recently defined themselves as a 'Cooperative Council and are seeking to underpin all of their service delivery with the principles of co-production.   A white paper was produced and a special commission set up to work through the proposals before the approach was agreed - there is plenty of material to look at.

Can Local Democracy Be Co-produced?

In many ways this sounds like restating the question about whether representative and participatory democracy can work in tandem or even be combined.  In some ways it is but in some ways, however, applying the debates around the co-production of services to the co-production of policies and decisions opens up a new perspective on some old problems.  Start thinking about politicians instead of professionals, citizens rather than service users and policy cycles rather than service cycles and I think there definitely something new to be had.

Borrowing from Bovaird et al, the benefits of co-producing democracy can be stated as follows:

• citizens know things that many politicians don’t know
• ... and can make a policy more effective by the extent to which they go along with its requirements
• ... and have time, information and financial resources that they are willing to invest to improve their own quality of life and into helping others
• … and have diverse capabilities and talents which they can share with politicians and other citizens
• … and can engage in collaborative rather than paternalistic relationships with politicians, with other citizens and with other members of the public

The Co-productive Council

Adapting the principles of the co-production of services, then, it is possible to imagine a Council that co-produces its democracy.   

Like the ideal of co-producing services, where initiatives can take place at every stage of the service delivery cycle, the co-productive council would have in place co-productive activities at every stage of the policy and decision making cycle.  So, borrowing again from  the model by Bovaird et al, it is possible to conceive of a co-productive policy making process:

Co-defintion of problems – e.g. area forums, community conferences, petitioning

Co-formulation of options – e.g. co-option of public onto scrutiny committees, community / user consultation

Co-decision making – policy juries, referenda, online deliberation

Co-implementation – (see co-production of services!)

Co-evaluation - co-option of public onto scrutiny committees, area forums

This simple framework might be the starting point for identifying gaps and looking at what areas might need to be developed if a council is to be truly co-productive.

One final thought, a co-productive council would also be one where councillors, like the Chicago Police, would get out of their metaphorical patrol cars and onto the metaphorical beat.  Although this is of course what many, if not most, councillors do already.  It seems that the foundations for a co-productive council may already be in place.

21. Collective Pledging

I was reading this piece today in the Guardian.  It's about a website called Groupon which offers discounts to subscribers on a wide range of products.  The Guardian piece summarises the way it works like this:

each morning, you open your email to discover one or two offers of steep discounts on restaurant food, or beauty treatments, or adventurous experiences: recent London deals, for example, included 54% off a kite-surfing course, tapas for two at £19 instead of £48, and six sessions of laser hair removal at a quarter of the regular price. Nominally, there's a catch – you get the deal only if it "tips", meaning that a sufficient number of people sign up – but today that almost always happens.

In other words discount deals are proposed by retailers but are only triggered if a specified number of consumers sign up for them - thereby, in theory, reducing the risk for the retailers and allowing them to manage their promotions more effectively.  The added value of the website is the extra reach that it gives to companies.  There is also an added social effect whereby people who have signed up for a deal may seek to encourage others they know to sign up so that it will 'tip'.  It's not all straightforward of course, read the article if you want to learn more about the downsides.

The interesting question for me is whether this kind of collective pledging could be applied to local politics with the local council acting as a kind of democratic groupon.  It might work like this:

• The Council would maintain an email list of interested citizens - all would be eligible but some may choose to opt out
• Proposals would be formulated by councillors as potential solutions to current policy problems
• Proposals would be sent to citizens as offers - these might be targeted to specific groups such as council tenants, businesses or people living in a particular community
• If the support of enough citizens was received the proposal would be enacted - citizens pledging to participate directly would enter into some kind of formal contract to help ensure continued involvement

Different types of proposal might include:

• Decisions that need a certain number to sign up to be validated
• New models of service delivery, such as community trusts, that require citizens to be formal stakeholders
• Voluntary community initiatives such as litter picks, walking school buses or elderly care schemes
• New services that require high levels of community support or that the council does not have the resources to enforce such as perhaps new parking or recycling schemes

Of course this could all happen without the technology but it is social media that makes this easy to organise and fun to use.  It also creates a social environment for collective pledging to take place.

So , there it is, all it needs now is a catchy brand name.  Anyone?