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.

94. Support your scrutiny connectors

Scrutiny committees at the national and the local level depend on a wide range of people when gathering evidence.  Most of the time people contribute for free but should we do more to support, recognise and reward them?  This was a question asked by Kevin Davies for The Welsh Assembly Outreach Team before and after Govcampcymru.  Having reflected on Kevin's ideas as well as some handy input from Ben and Lou from Delib here are some suggestions about how we might build this into practice.

This (of course!) links back to the Double Doughnut of democracy idea I raised a couple of years ago (after Govcampcymru as well as it happens).  The key point being that government is not great at engaging directly and needs others to help it share and get feedback.

Currently engagement tends to take place on an issue by issue basis but wouldn't it be better to think about the people that contribute to scrutiny work as single group that we work in partnership with?

Of course this is a diverse group and includes:

1. Communicators such as journalists, community reports and bloggers
2. Citizens who want to share their views and opinions about the issues that affect them
3. Service users who can share their experiences
4. Representers who speak for a particular group, campaign or issue
5. Experts such as academics or leading practitioners

It's not easy coming up with a name for this disparate group (sharers? friends of? co-optees? partners? associates? engagers? nodes?!?) but I'm going to suggest 'connectors' as a starting point - people willing to connect with scrutiny and people who can connect scrutiny to others that they might not otherwise easily reach.

The idea of the 'connector' also preserves the independence of those who engage - after all they are not working for scrutiny but working with scrutiny - they need to be able to be critical when they need to be.

Here are some ideas of how the connectors can be better supported:

Recognition: Does the committee do enough to thank the connectors? How could their contribution be  better publicised?  How about inviting the connectors to a thank you event at the end of the year?  A letter of thanks? Some other token? Are they mentioned in annual report? Did you tell them?

Information:  Connectors thrive on being 'in the know' - do you ensure they have access to the information that they need?  A special email for connectors? Press releases?

Networks:  Having contacts is useful for connectors - committee members and officers can be useful contacts and this can be offered in an informal way - "let us know if we can help you with anything and we will if we can".  Events for connectors can also give them the opportunity to network with each other and this might also strengthen civic society around scrutiny.

I don't think this needs to be too formal but doing more for those that volunteer their time should be a win win for scrutiny and those who get involved.  It might also just strengthen citizenship and democracy.

89. Twitter tips for scrutiny teams

Last week we had a good old fashioned tweetchat about how scrutiny teams can make best use of twitter.  We used the #scrutinytweets hashtag if you want to check it out.

It was initially planned as an exchange between the Swansea and Birmingham teams but others joined in - all in all it was a lively and thoroughly enjoyable hour so thanks everyone who chipped in, hope you found it useful.

By the way, if you are thinking about using social media for scrutiny you might also like this piece I wrote after after the Centre for Public Scrutiny ScrutinyCamp event in 2014.

Anyhow, here are the four tips from the tweetchat that I summarised at the time:

1. Twitter is one small part of a wider approach to public engagement for scrutiny 

Yes, use twitter but it is not a panacea and not everyone uses it. However, it is relatively low cost to use so look for the things it does do well.

2. Use team accounts but also look at using individual accounts as well

Team accounts should be the default. They are good for presenting the formal face of scrutiny but there may be times when a more personal touch is required. Use the initials of the individual tweeting in tweets or cultivate 'professional' accounts for team members. As scrutiny officers we know all about being careful with what we put into the public domain - so it shouldn't be a problem right?

(There does seem to be a decline in team accounts recently by the way, it may be that they are seen as an additional cost which would be a shame if true. Even if a team account is not an option I still think that individual scrutiny officers can use twitter to add value to their practice without it being too much of a song and a dance...)

3. Tagging really helps to get stuff out there and is a 'tap on the shoulder' for people who might engage / share

While there is nothing wrong with just 'putting stuff out there'- including one or more twitter handles in a tweet makes sure that it reaches the people that it should.  People follow so many accounts they can easily blink and miss something.

Did you mention an organisation in a meeting? Tag them. Did you want an organisation to complete an online survey? Tag them.  Did you want councillors to share their scrutiny work with residents? Tag them. Did you want an evidence giver to know that the report they contributed to has been published? Tag them.

The people you tag might also be more inclined to share stuff if it is directed at them.

By the way, hat tip to the Essex Democratic Services for the 'tap on the shoulder' metaphor.

4. Scrutiny teams should make more use of twitter to share practice and possible joint projects

Finally we agreed that we all should be much better at using twitter to work together as scrutiny teams.  

Definitely!


Lets do it.

70. Cabinet and Backbench Councillor Support: Uncrossing the Streams

National and devolved governments have separate support arrangements for their executive and non executive politicians.  In local government, however, the support streams for cabinet members and backbench councillors, including scrutiny, are crossed.  Officers work for the whole council and provide the same advice regardless of which councillors they are advising.  But why can't local government have the same separation between executive and non executive support arrangements?

Best to avoid a total protonic reversal

Mirroring the National Assembly for Wales Commission, local councils could have each have a Council Commission charged with delivering support to back bench councillors, to scrutiny and to council and committee meetings.

The Councillor Commission Expert Panel Wales thought that this type of separation was a good idea, both for the independence of the scrutiny function and for the protection of resources for backbenchers.  Their recommendation was that:

Consideration should be given to introducing a legal separation of the executive and non-executive functions of the council, with separate funding streams, that would protect the central provision of members’ services. 

You can find the full argument in their report here.

This didn't happen of course.  Opponents pointed to the added complexity, bureaucracy and cost that such a system might bring.  Important arguments that are perhaps even more pertinent now.

We have, however, had steps towards a separation of powers in Wales.  The Local Government Measure (2011) introduced Democratic Services Committees and the Head of Democratic Services Officer role specifically to ensure that support for backbench councillors was properly protected.  

Arguments For

Is it now time to go one step further and debate a full legal separation between executive and non-executive functions?    Here are 6 reasons why this could be a good idea:

1. The independence of scrutiny from the executive would be more visible if scrutiny had independent support
2. The Council Commission would be mirrored by a strengthened Cabinet Office providing direct administrative and policy support to the executive 
3. Backbench councillors would be able to directly decide the best use of their own support resources
4. A separated scrutiny function would have more credibility with other public service providers who would be less likely to see it as an arm of the local authority
5. A separated scrutiny function would be a necessary prerequisite for local public administration committees (see the Centre for Public Scrutiny proposal here)
6. The introduction of council commissions and cabinet offices would bring professional alignment for local government support officers with those working national government and the devolved administrations  

Of course, as the Ghostbusters will tell you, there is one really, really significant risk of crossing the streams - total protonic reversal - best to be avoided I reckon.

Photo: https://flic.kr/p/o5j92s

68. The 15 characteristics of effective scrutiny

What exactly does effective scrutiny look like?  How would you know it when you saw it?  This is not such a simple question to answer.  However, fear not.  The good folk of the Wales Scrutiny Officers Network and the Centre for Public Scrutiny in Wales have produced 15 characteristics that answer these questions very neatly.

Scrutiny in progress

The characteristics - listed below - were refined as part of the process of producing the Wales Audit Office report 'Good Scrutiny? Good Question!' and were published as an appendix to that report.  If you want to do some evaluation of your scrutiny arrangements then these are just what you need.

By the way, the references to better outcomes, decisions and engagement in brackets reflect the three purposes of scrutiny - you could break it down into three separate sections if you want.

Characteristics for effective local government overview and scrutiny

Environment 

1. Overview and scrutiny has a clearly defined and valued role in the council's improvement and governance arrangements. [Better Outcomes]

2. Overview and scrutiny has the dedicated officer support it needs from officers who are able to undertake independent research effectively, and provides councillors with high-quality analysis, advice and training. [Better Outcomes]

3. Overview and scrutiny councillors have the training and development opportunities they need to undertake their role effectively. [Better Decisions]

4. The process receives effective support from the council’s corporate management team who ensures that information provided to overview and scrutiny is of high quality and is provided in a timely and consistent manner. [Better Decisions]

5. Overview and scrutiny is recognised by the executive and corporate management team as an important council mechanism for community engagement, and facilitates greater citizen involvement in governance. [Better Engagement]

Practice 

6. Overview and scrutiny inquiries are non-political, methodologically sound and incorporate a wide range of evidence and perspectives. [Better Outcomes]

7. Overview and scrutiny is councillor-led, takes into account the views of the public, partners and regulators, and balances the prioritisation of community concerns against issues of strategic risk and importance. [Better Decisions]

8. Overview and scrutiny meetings and activities are well-planned, chaired effectively and make best use of the resources available to it. [Better Decisions]

9. Overview and scrutiny is characterised by effective communication to raise awareness of, and encourage participation in democratic accountability. [Better Engagement]

10. Overview and scrutiny operates non-politically and deals effectively with sensitive political issues, tension and conflict. [Better Engagement]

11. Overview and scrutiny builds trust and good relationships with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders. [Better Engagement]

Impact 

12. Overview and scrutiny regularly engages in evidence based challenge of decision makers and service providers. [Better Outcomes]

13. Overview and scrutiny provides viable and well evidenced solutions to recognised problems. [Better Outcomes]

14. Decision makers give public account for themselves at overview and scrutiny committees for their portfolio responsibilities. [Better Decisions]

15. Overview and scrutiny enables the 'voice' of local people and communities across the area to be heard as part of decision and policy-making processes. [Better Engagement]

Photo:  https://flic.kr/p/o81ZdU

66. Using social media for scrutiny: 10 ideas to get started

This post shares some ideas about how those working in scrutiny can get started using social media. It also doubles as a write up of a session at the recent scrutinycamp as part of a @ldbytes discovery day. Well, my take anyway. Feel free to disagree.

Using Social Media for Scrutiny

There are 25 people sat in a circle in a room not far from the Houses of Parliament. "How many of you would like to use social media for your scrutiny work?” Nearly every hand goes up. "How many of you actually do use social media for your scrutiny work?” Nearly every raised hand goes down.

This was the most telling moment from my session at the recent scrutinycamp about how councillors can use social media for scrutiny. Instead of the discussion I thought we would have, we went down a different track and used the time to talk about the difficulties of using social media for scrutiny and, more to the point, how we could overcome them.

There were a number of things I think we agreed on:

• There are some very good reasons for using social media for scrutiny
• Social media is just one channel among many – not a solution to all engagement needs
• Using social media means working differently - not additional work
• Care needs to be taken about what you share but if anyone can operate with tact and political sensitivity then it’s a scrutiny officer!
• There are a number of councillors using social media really well, for executive and ward work for example, but not so many using social media to support their scrutiny role

People also saw a number of barriers:

• Some councils lock down social media for staff (yes really)
• Centralised council comms
• The poor public perception of councillors using social media in meetings
• Lack of knowledge / experience in teams

10 Ideas to Get Started

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, drawing on the discussion, tweets and other conversations during the day here are some initial suggestions about how scrutiny can get started with social media in places where it is not already happening. It’s mainly about officers but this is a conversation that very much needs councillor input as well.

1. Be clear – start with exactly what it is you want to social media to do. Identify the specific practical ways that social media can help your scrutiny work. Sharing details of meetings? Gathering evidence for inquiries? Live tweeting events? What?
2. Start small. You don’t need a social media strategy – you just need a pick one or two things to start with and make those work. Find out what others have done and copy shamelessly.
3. If you do have an enlightened comms / digital team – talk to them. They can offer advice on how to get things up and running.
4. If your comms team are a bit more, er… centralised then talk to them anyway about what you can do. Make use of the corporate accounts if you can – they will no doubt have a wide reach. Not everyone thinks that team twitter accounts are a good idea (although I do) – there are other ways to get things out there.
5. Find out which of your councillors are using social media and talk to them about using it more for scrutiny.
6. Make sure your content is shareable. You might not control the social media channel but you probably control your content. Councillors like @cahalburke in Kirklees tweeted that they do use social media to publicise scrutiny webpages but these pages need to be right. Talk to those who use social media about what works for them. Or check out this checklist here.
7. What about personal accounts? We talked about the blurring between professional and personal when it comes to social media - if you tweet as a ‘semi professional’ outside of work why shouldn’t you tweet the link to the latest inquiry report or meeting? We are all citizens as well.
8. Organise training and support sessions – as one councillor tweeted in: ‘the best training can be informal, as and when, from friends and colleagues’ (@fionamgordon)
9. Are you going paperless and giving councillors ipads for meetings? Well that’s a great hook you can use to hang a conversation about social media in meetings
10. Use social media to learn about how to use social media for scrutiny.

The final point is perhaps the most import. You need to be talking to your colleagues in other councils about how to do this stuff. There is no perfect set of rules and things keep changing. Social media is the best way to share and, as the best way to learn social media is to do social media, you’ll be gaining new skills at the same time. Sorted.

Start with twitter. Follow @cfpscrutiny or @ldbytes for general digital democracy tips, or even me (@localopolis). See you there!

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davemckenna/14403592001/

Thanks to Andrew from @cfpscymru for live tweeting

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

64. Treat scrutiny support as professional practice

As a scrutiny support team we have been thinking about our work as professional practice, trying to get underneath what this means and considering how we can improve what we do.  I’m not sure everyone sees scrutiny support in this way.  It suffers from being a mix of different roles and can often be mistaken as a sub set of committee support.  Now that scrutiny is coming of age, however, isn't it time to recognise that scrutiny support is a professional practice in its own right?

Competencies

In defining our professional practice we started with the list of five core competencies that came out of work on the role of the professional scrutiny officer done by the University of Warwick and the Centre for Public Scrutiny.

This is our slightly tweaked list of those five competencies:

• Research – E.g. Undertaking and coordinating research activities.  Gathering and analysing evidence from a range of sources.  Managing public engagement activities.  
• Communication – E.g. Managing meetings and facilitating communication between key individuals and groups involved in scrutiny projects.  Producing reports that clearly and succinctly reflect councillors’ views and Inquiry findings.  Sharing the work of scrutiny through social media and traditional channels.   
• Political Environment – E.g. Working within a sensitive political environment and providing advice to cross party groups of councillors.  Providing diplomatic challenge to all parties as well as knowledge of how and when to share information appropriately.  
• Project Management – E.g. Being able to scope, plan, manage, review and evaluate scrutiny projects with councillors. Working within a wider scrutiny work programme. 
• Relationship Management – E.g. Building networks and effective working relationships with councillors, officers and external stakeholders.  Sourcing and sharing relevant knowledge and information.  Acting as a public point of contact. 

These competencies, which together make up the 'meta role' of the scrutiny professional, are reflected in our job descriptions and provide the focus for 1-2-1 supervision and discussions in team meetings.

Professional Practice

While I’m not sure there is a single definition of what makes something a professional practice, there are a number of aspects of scrutiny support that make me think that it is one.  As well as a core set of competencies it is certainly a specialised field that requires a significant knowledge base and a commitment to continuous development.  Scrutiny practitioners have to gain expertise in particular topic areas as well as in the practice of scrutiny itself.

Scrutiny Officers Development Project

In Wales, the Scrutiny Officers Development Project, being delivered in conjunction with a new Post Graduate Certificate in Governance,  is an important and welcome step towards underlining the professional nature of scrutiny practice.  This pilot project, supported by the Welsh Government, is being led by the scrutiny team in Cardiff Council in partnership with the University of South Wales.  It is providing an accredited Masters level course that supports scrutiny practice and, by drawing together a group of scrutiny officers as participants that together represent the majority of Councils in Wales, it should also provide an excellent opportunity for shared learning.

Professional Values

As well as expertise and skills I would argue that there is also a core set of professional values underpinning scrutiny support even if these are not always well articulated.  These include a commitment to the democratic process, independence of thought, evidence based policy making, openness, impartiality and fairness.  It seems to me that these all operate at the heart of our professional practice.

Of course I’m not claiming that scrutiny support is a profession in the same way as nursing, planning or teaching.  While professional networks are taking shape there is no formal professional body, no Institute of Scrutiny Officers, providing accreditation or bending the ear of central government.  Indeed, the research conducted by Warwick Business School and the Centre for Public Scrutiny mentioned above found ambivalence towards the idea from practitioners although, five years later, perhaps things may have shifted a little.

One achievable step forward, however, would be to gain greater recognition from councillors and other officers in local government that scrutiny support is indeed a distinct professional occupation.  This will not only ensure increased respect for the function and the people who support it but will also help bring greater attention on the capacity and effectiveness of the scrutiny function as a whole.

Photo: @catherinefarre

62. Seven tips for writing your digital democratic content

Working in a democratic rather than a service context means that you have to write your digital content a little differently.  As a scrutiny team we have been thinking about how we can produce content on our website that councillors will want to share and engage the public with.  Here are the seven points we have come up with - some apply to all digital content, some have a democratic twist.

1.  Focus on a single point of public interest

Each post should be about one thing so that it translates easily through social media.  You can add detail at the end but don’t muddy the waters by having more that one up-front aim.

The point of public interest is something I've written about before. Successful content will be about something that people actually care about.  Think carefully about which 'public' and direct the post to them.  Is your post for all residents, for social workers, for parents, for carers?  What will motivate them to share, read or engage? What do you hope to achieve?

2.  Carefully craft the title

Turns out that most people will not read beyond the title of any content but that doesn’t mean that they won’t share it.  Using ‘you’ or the name of a group (e.g. parents, teachers) works well.   So do lists such as ‘ten ways to…’  Oh and adverbs and verbs work much better than adjectives and nouns.  A well crafted title will help with sharing through twitter and facebook.

3.  Summarise with a neat and tidy snippet

If people get beyond the title then they may not get beyond the first paragraph – what we call the snippet.  It needs to be short and it needs to deliver the main point of the post.  Have a look at these eyetracking heat maps to see why this matters so much.  This snippet might also be what people see when they come across your post through a google search.

4.  Use an engaging style

We can’t write for digital the same way as we write reports and council minutes.  The style has to be punchy, friendly and engaging.  We like the suggestions in this great post about digital style.  Check out the localgovdigital standards for other really useful tips on writing content.

Update:  Some extra things to consider from the world of press releases on making your content more engaging if you are stuck.  You don't have to do all of them!

• Highlight what is different as a result of whatever it is you are talking about
• Why is it relevant and why does it matter?
• What are the risks / consequences of not doing something?
• What is the human interest? How will it affect 'real' people
• Are there striking facts and figures that you can include? They must be relevant of course!
• Can you include a quote from someone involved?

5.  Include a picture that tells the story

A great image can add a lot to your post but a stock corporate photo can make it seem, well, a bit lame.  If you want to get your post shared on facebook then carefully consider the image. You might be able to find something good on flickr (under a creative commons license of course – and properly credited) but if you can provide your own picture of the actual thing that happened then even better.

6.  Place the content where it will be seen

If you want councillors to share content then you have to put it where they will see it.  A little time searching on google will tell you where your councillors are – we found that about half of our scrutiny councillors had social media accounts with facebook, LinkedIn and twitter being the most popular.

7.  Do the promotional work

To give your post the best chance of being shared you should probably also do a little nudging.  Facebook and twitter give you the option to target individual councillors and simply asking people to share or retweet can also make a difference.  Use email to encourage sharing and hey, if you are meeting with councillors in person why not just ask people face to face.



We have produced this checklist as part of our scrutiny bytes project - part of the rewiring local democracy strand of localgovdigital.  

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/5019111466/

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.

60. Scrutiny Bytes

Public engagement will be an increasingly important aspect of the local government scrutiny function.  Digital tools and behaviours provide a brilliant opportunity to enhance this engagement.  It sounds like a marriage made in heaven but exactly how can it work? Scrutiny Bytes is a project we are running in my council that tries to answer that question.

I've written before about the idea of democracy bytes.  Just as a byte is a unit of digital information so a democracy byte is a unit of digital democracy.  Bytes are the simple statements that together make up democratic conversations.  They might be questions, opinions, proposals, decisions or outcomes.

Scrutiny Bytes is a project about applying this idea to the scrutiny process.  Conversations typically will be held around; the performance of a service; work on policy or strategy development; the holding to account of Cabinet Members or other decision makers; or the planning that is done for the scrutiny work process.  Conversations might centre on a single meeting but more likely on a longer process such as an in depth review or inquiry.

You can see the central idea in the diagram above.  It works in five stages:

1. The scrutiny team convert what comes out of the formal scrutiny process into bytes through the Swansea Scrutiny website.  The key here is to produce content that people will want to share.  We are not expecting people to want to come to our site necessarily – content needs to go to the online places where people already are.  
2. The content is then placed where councillors can share it.  In Swansea about a third of our scrutiny councillors are active on social media in some way.  The most popular platform is facebook followed by linkedin and twitter.  It is important to underline here that the emphasis is on councillors (not officers) sharing – this is a democratic process after all.
3. The idea is that content will spark conversations between councillors and the public in which ever place it is shared.  While sharing and engaging is a fundamental part of what councillors do - doing it online is different and these new behaviours will need to be carefully worked through.
4. The results of these conversations will be harvested by the scrutiny team and summarised into reports that can be fed back into the formal scrutiny process.  As with any research method careful thought will need to be given to how this is done.  Reports will also provide a means of feeding back to the public what councillors have heard.
5. These reports can then be presented to scrutiny meetings, working groups etc. where they can influence the work that scrutiny councillors do in their more traditional and formal setting.  Of course new questions will be raised so the process can start again.

The purpose of this post has been to provide a brief outline of the thinking behind the Scrutiny Bytes project.  It’s early days but I will feedback as we make progress through the different stages.  Specifically I hope to share the outcomes of the work that we are doing:

• A checklist for producing democratic digital content
• Tips for Councillors involved in digital scrutiny conversations
• A method for analysing and reporting online scrutiny conversations

59. Three new roles for scrutiny

First posted on the Good Practice Exchange at the Wales Audit Office.

It feels like local government scrutiny is at a crossroads; becoming all grown up and trying to make its way.
The world that scrutiny was born into was very different to the one it finds itself in today and scrutiny needs to adapt.  But how should it change?  I want to point to three new roles in particular; these are the innovation, regulation and engagement roles.

Growing Up in a Changing World

The build up to what promises to be a very significant first major scrutiny conference in Wales is a good moment to think about what scrutiny could look like in future.  I like the ‘all grown up’ theme, after all, local government scrutiny, born out of the Local Government Act 2000 is now a teenager.  But let’s not forget that teenagers are not quite grown up yet; perhaps more independent and responsible in some ways, but not quite fully trusted in others.  

Scrutiny has come a long way in 13 years and there are many excellent examples of scrutiny making a difference.  However, even if scrutiny has fully matured as a function (and I am not sure that it has) then the fact that today’s world is so different from the one that scrutiny was born into should in any case be a cause for reflection.

Shrinking resources coupled with increasing demands for services are creating unprecedented challenges for local councils who will need to reinvent themselves to a large extent.  At the same time new ways of configuring services across traditional organisational boundaries are generating new puzzles for accountability and democracy.  In Wales we are waiting to hear the results of the Commission on Public Service Governance and Delivery due to report before the end of 2013.  No doubt this will change the world that scrutiny lives in even further.

What is Scrutiny For?

So, in this changing and challenging world of local government what exactly is scrutiny for?  This is not a new question of course.  Back in 2004 Ashworth and Snape identified four key roles for scrutiny from the government guidance of the time.  These were:

• holding the executive to account
• policy development and review
• best value and performance management 
• external scrutiny

The fact that many other roles were also being talked about at the time tells you something about the contested and debated nature of scrutiny that, in my opinion in any case, is still alive and well.  One of Ashworth and Snape’s key findings was that, despite government intentions, it was the policy development and review roles that councils were most comfortable with running with and that this had in practice become the main role of scrutiny.  Something they describe as ‘a salutary lesson of the triumph of local context over centrally prescribed structural solutions’.

What this history suggests is that for scrutiny to have a meaningful role, it must meet the needs, not just of governance in a general sense, but of the local councils that support it.

Three New Roles:  Innovation, Regulation and Engagement

So how should scrutiny reflect its intended purpose while building on what has gone before and meeting the needs of local government in the current context?  I want to point at three things.

Innovation

I have posted before about scrutiny being a source of innovation.  While innovation becomes increasingly necessary for local government so scrutiny is a well placed and available resource for developing new ways of doing things.  I see the innovation role as being the natural successor to the policy development role albeit with a greater imperative.

Regulation

Scrutiny has always had an important contribution to make to performance management and to performance monitoring in particular.  The logical next step is for scrutiny to be performing many of the same functions that regulators do now; raising concerns where performance is poor, highlighting good practice and making recommendations for improvement.  Sure, much of this already happens but without the same weight as is carried by an external auditor or regulator.  If scrutiny can fill this role then there are savings to be made across government – in England new forms of peer regulation are being explored partly for this reason.  However, if this is to happen then scrutiny will need the confidence of both local and national government.  It will also need a greater degree of independence than it has now.

Engagement

Public engagement has long been an important aspiration of the scrutiny process and an important aspect of scrutiny practice.  What I am suggesting here is that scrutiny can be the point of engagement for the whole council.  All strategic consultation and engagement could be done through scrutiny ensuring both a single point of coordination for these activities and, perhaps more importantly, a single, recognised point of entry for the public.  Many of the skills are already available in scrutiny support teams and, as scrutiny is a councillor led function, routing engagement through scrutiny ensures that councillors are at the heart of strategic consultation and engagement.

I have carefully said ‘strategic consultation and engagement’; I don’t want to suggest that council services stop consulting and engaging with citizens as a part of their day to day.

One more important point here is that digital and social media will have an important part in play in ensuring that engagement is both effective and efficient.


What I have tried to think about here are the ways in which scrutiny can provide the maximum utility within reconfigured local councils while ensuring that good governance is still well served.  Or, to put it another way, how scrutiny can be all grown up.    

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/99863704/ 

Reference

Ashworth, Rachel and Snape, Stephanie(2004) 'An Overview of Scrutiny: A Triumph of Context over Structure', Local Government Studies, 30: 4, 538 — 556

 

58. Don't Overlook Scrutiny if You Want to be Innovative

Necessity is certainly the mother of innovation as far as local government in the UK is concerned.  Caught in a pincer movement between increasing pressures on public services and reducing resources, Councils need to be ever more creative with what they have. 

No wonder innovation is such a hot topic at the moment. 

A lot of the debate seems to be about how we get more innovation from the frontline.  Fine.  But where are the big ideas going to come from?  The ideas that are going to bring about the major changes that are needed.  

A recent (and well worth reading) report from NLGN on this topic concludes that while councils are confident about their capacity to innovate they are nevertheless worried about the pace of change.  The report argues that 'local government is going to need a lot more support if it is going to innovate its way out of austerity'.

I'm not so sure that local government is making the most of the resources it already has.

One obvious place to look is scrutiny.  Any scrutiny function worth its salt will have all of the qualities needed to generate the ideas that local Councils are going to need.  These include:

• Experience of dealing with big and controversial topics
• Openness to asking questions
• A fundamentally evidence based approach 
• The capacity and processes to support in depth pieces of research  
• Independent mindedness and critical thinking
• A curiosity about what happens outside of the organisation
• Political and public engagement built in

What surprises me is how little scrutiny seems to feature in debates about innovation in local government.  I have even seen it described as a barrier with its emphasis on public accountability contributing a culture of risk aversion.  Well maybe there is an issue for scrutiny there and perhaps supporting a culture of innovation means being less critical and more fascinated.

Nevertheless, what we need is a culture of challenge and debate if innovation is going to genuinely flourish.  Scrutiny has the right credentials to be right at the heart of such a culture, generating the new ideas that local government is going to need.  

Surely worth thinking about?

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3815840040/

57. Four Ways to do Results Based Scrutiny

My council has been making use of Results Based Accountability.  We use it to support corporate performance work and community planning.  While it’s the Friedman version we use, other outcomes based approaches are of course available.  I'm not saying this is necessarily the best way of doing things but I do think that there are a number of nice ideas in Results Based Accountability that can be adapted to local government scrutiny.
 
Scrutiny struggles more than a little to demonstrate its impact (perhaps similar to academia in this way).  The role of scrutiny committees is to make recommendations to others, mainly local government cabinet members, on service and policy issues.  It can be tricky, therefore, to demonstrate the actual difference being made to communities as a result of individual pieces of scrutiny work.  Demonstrating the impact of the scrutiny process as a whole is even more challenging.

So here are four suggestions, inspired by my experience of Results Based Accountability, as to how scrutiny might take more of an outcomes approach.

1.  Focus on What's Measurable

Identifying population outcomes that describe the conditions we want to see for our communities is a key aspect of Result Based Accountability.  So is identifying population indicators that capture something important about those outcomes.  Scrutiny work should, wherever possible, identify the population outcomes and indicator (yes, one if possible) that the work is seeking to affect.  For the in-depth pieces of work in particular, having a high level outcome measure will provide not only focus but a potential means of evaluating the impact of the work in future.

As an example I recently supported an inquiry into affordable housing which identified the Welsh Government indicator of ‘all additional affordable housing provision by local authority area’ as a focus.

As well as population issues this applies as well to individual services.  Any in depth work should start by identifying the measure that scrutiny, by working with the service, wants to see improve.

2.  Ask Results Based Questions

Results Based Accountability sets out a small number of simple questions in order to help people achieve results both at population (e.g. partnership) level and at performance (e.g. organisation) level.

These questions can be adapted for scrutiny as the basis for a consistent results based approach to questioning.  Specifically these questions would be used as part of the ‘holding to account’ of those who are responsible for the policy or service that scrutiny is interested in.  Here is my take on what those questions might be:

Population Level Questions

• What quality of life conditions do you want for the relevant population group(s)?
• How do you describe what achieving these conditions looks like?
• How do you measure these conditions?
• How are you doing on the most important of these measures?
• Are you working with the right partners?
• What are you doing to identify what works?
• What do you propose to do in future?

Performance 

• How much did you do?
• How well did you do it?
• Is anyone better off as a result?

3.  Evaluate the Impact

Most in depth pieces of scrutiny work make recommendations to cabinet and then have a process for checking that the agreed recommendations have been implemented.  For us this means signing off the action plans that cabinet members produce in response to in-depth inquiries.  In others words; did they do what they said they would do?

A potentially better alternative that we have been talking about is to evaluate the impact instead of the action plan.  This could mean holding an event for all the people who gave evidence to the original inquiry as well as the cabinet member(s) and anyone else who might usefully be involved.  The purpose would be to see what has changed (easier if you have identified an outcome and indicator) and what influence the scrutiny proposals had.

It may well be that this is already being done in others areas and I would love to hear about it if it is.

4.  Scorecard Your Scrutiny

As well as looking at other services scrutineers should, of course, be thinking about their own practice.  Most local councils produce annual reports for their scrutiny function which seek to show how a difference has been made.  In my Council we have taken a results based score card approach to reporting what has been achieved, with indicators reported and analysed against the following questions:

• How much scrutiny did we do? (e.g. number of meetings, number of reports published)
• How well did we do it? (e.g. awareness of scrutiny, involvement of councillors, councillor rating of scrutiny support service)
• How much did scrutiny affect the business of the Council? (e.g. number of reports to Cabinet, action plans agreed, follow ups)
• What were the outcomes of scrutiny? (e.g. recommendations accepted, actions completed, perceptions of councillors and officers that scrutiny had an impact)

The main thing missing, I think, is a genuinely good measure of what the public think.  Let’s just say it’s a work in progress.

Photo:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/6935831231/ 

56. Be a Fascinated Friend Not a Critical One

The critical friend concept is one we work with a lot in scrutiny.  I think that the concept is essentially a sound one, you sign up to sharing the same aims as the person you have 'befriended' but you come with an independent eye and suggestions for how they might improve.

But it never completely worked for me.  I always picture a friend stood in the hallway, arms crossed, telling you that your picture is crooked.

I remember hearing a presentation from Sir Michael Barber a few years back about the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit.  This was the team set up in the second term of the last Labour government by Tony Blair.  If I recall right it was set up in response to criticism that government policies were not having the bite that they should and that targets were often not being met. The unit's role was to track departmental targets and intervene where needed.

The thing that has always stuck with me from this presentation was the attitude taken to missed targets.  Instead of saying 'oh crap', the unit's response was 'how fascinating'.  Their aim was to try and help analyse the problem and hopefully work with the department to solve it.

I think there are a number of corporate teams that could learn from this.  Instead of responding to a 'failure of compliance' with "you have messed up, sort it out" they might respond with "how fascinating, how can we help?"

I think the same point can be made in terms of scrutiny.  Here it is the idea of 'challenge' that sometimes underpins the critical friend role that makes me a tiny bit uncomfortable.  It's the idea that telling people they are not doing well enough will be enough to spur them on to do better. OK it is usually more constructive than that and will come with a few helpful suggestions but that tends to be the basic idea.  

An alternative approach would be to reserve judgement (and maybe suspend it entirely) until time has been taken to explore the issue fully and in a spirit of cooperation, bringing something new to the party, not just a fresh perspective (although this is important) but maybe some new resources or raised awareness or even some new allies.

This is being what we might call being a fascinated friend rather than a critical one.

Or, going back to the friend in the hallway, one with a spirit level.

Photo:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/4265794965  

51. Pop Up Local Democracy

If we can have pop up shops and pop up restaurants then why not pop up local democracy?  Actually I'm guessing this is already happening - I'd love to hear examples.

I've blogged before about the importance of weaving democracy into the urban space.  At a time when there are so many shops, houses and other buildings sitting empty why not take the opportunity to bring local politics closer to the public. 

In particular it's worth thinking about the techniques of pop up retail.  Setting something up and blitzing the immediate area with publicity, people with leaflets and sandwich boards; using traditional and social media to generate interest.

These 'events' would be temporary - quick hits. 

The kinds of things I've got in mind are:

Pop Up Scrutiny:  Take over an empty shop in the city centre for a few weeks to open public access to a scrutiny review.  As well as consultation materials why not locate scrutiny officers there so they are on hand to answer questions and record ideas.

Pop Up Consultation:  For planning or anything else.  The empty shop / house can be recreated imaginatively as an exhibition space using displays, models or whatever.  

Pop Up Councillor Surgeries:  Rather than the traditional community centre or town hall locations, groups of councillors could take over somewhere unexpected for a day to deal with casework or any other queries.  The very fact of 'popping up' somewhere unexpected might just generate some additional public interest.

One advantage would be the ability to match the location with the topic; to go to where the public are.  So, for example; a shop in the city centre for city wide issues; an empty house in a residential area for community issues.

Update:  A couple of nice tweets in response to this -thanks guys!

@gaillyk @kdcasey87 @localopolis agreed I’d love to try and do a scrutiny pop up #localgov also use the pop up to get ideas for scrutiny
— Matthew Skinner (@Skinner_M) October 27, 2012

@kdcasey87 @gaillyk read @localopolis blog post re pop up #localgov- would like to try this out on the high street localopolis.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/51-pop…
— Matthew Skinner (@Skinner_M) October 27, 2012

Photo credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marmite_pop-up_shop_in_2009.jpg

40. Six Reasons to Use Social Media for Scrutiny

In a previous post I developed the idea of social council decision making.

Here I want to make the case for using social media in my own line of work –overview and scrutiny (If you are not sure what that is - it's a bit like a local government version of parliamentary select committees – find out more here). Our scrutiny team has been blogging and tweeting for just over two years now without any problems and, as I have had a couple of people asking me about this recently, I thought it was worth sharing some of my own ideas about this. For those thinking about developing social media for scrutiny I hope this post will give some food for thought and, if needed, will help them to make the case.

There are already many great examples of scrutiny teams using social media; Kirklees, Bristol, Brighton, Harrow, recently Warwickshire all spring to mind and there are many others. The Centre for Public Scrutiny keep a list of tweeting scrutiny units that you can find on their twitter page here.

So, in no particular order, here are my six main reasons why scrutiny teams should use social media.

1. Research

Consultation and evidence gathering makes up a large part of what overview and scrutiny does. Social media tools such as blogs and twitter are great ways of supporting this. This might be directly though gathering comments, for example, or by advertising surveys and research events. Dedicated social media accounts are also great for disseminating the research that overview and scrutiny committees do. You can use twitter, for example to share findings and target relevant organisations.

2. Niche Marketing

The scrutiny function is non executive, in other words it operates independently of the Cabinet. It is, of course, not independent from the Council but it does have a distinctive role. It makes sense, therefore, for scrutiny committees to have their own distinctive channels for communication and social media can help with this. In a more general sense I fully subscribe to the idea that councils should have a wide range of twitter and other social media accounts as people can then follow their particular interests (within an overarching council brand). It is far better to reach a smaller number of people who choose to follow scrutiny than to reach a much larger group who don’t really care.

3. Public Engagement

Overview and scrutiny is intended to be a way for the public to influence decision making. Social media accounts can help this in two ways. First it allows scrutiny teams to provide a friendly and understandable running commentary on the work of the overview and scrutiny committees – through blogging in particular, but also the use of video, can help translate the inevitably jargonistic language of committee minutes, agendas and reports. Second, social media gives scrutiny teams the opportunity to answer questions and signpost information. To be honest we haven’t had a great deal of this type of engagement with the public but we live in hope! Of course any engagement of this type must take place within corporately agreed guidelines and people must know what they are doing, but this is simply the sort of professional behaviour you would expect in any case.

4. Network Building

Scrutiny teams work with a range of local organisations, think tanks, academics, other layers of government and other scrutiny teams in order to understand current issues and good practice. Social media provides a great platform for scrutiny teams to link in with current debates, ask questions and disseminate the work of their own committees which often have a wider value outside of the council in question. Relationships developed through social media can sometimes lead to people contributing to the work of scrutiny that might not have done otherwise.

5. Councillor Engagement

Unlike many other council services, scrutiny teams work directly with councillors and, as local politicians increasing make use of social media to connect with the public, so it makes sense for scrutiny teams to work through this medium as well. Providing information about what scrutiny committees are doing through social media makes it easier for the councillors sitting on those committees to share that information through their own networks.

6. Internal Engagement

One of the familiar challenges for scrutiny teams is the low levels of awareness amongst council officers about what scrutiny actually does. Even where twitter and youtube might be blocked sites, blogs and internal social media such as yammer might be used to reach an internal audience. Intranets can also be used to share social media content with staff and provide messages about what scrutiny is doing.

There are, it seems, always concerns about responsible use of social media by staff but scrutiny teams, as it happens, are used to working in a politically sensitive environment and can therefore adapt with ease to the ‘publicly sensitive’ environment of social media – and do this within the context of any overarching communications strategy.

Yes, there may be occasions when things don’t quite work as planned but the potential rewards surely far outweigh any risks – especially when you consider that the financial cost is often zero.

Finally, I want to point scrutiny folk to this post by Helen Reynolds where she argues that we should be thinking of using social media primarily in terms of the increased influence it brings:  

As far as terminology goes, 'influence' makes a bit more sense when you consider its synonym 'authority'. We are local authorities and we want our communication to have 'authority' in that it has high credibility and currency.

'High credibility and currency' - if that isn't what we want for scrutiny, then I don't know what is.

Photo credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BLW_Telegram_Table.jpg

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.