DOD Notes

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DOD = Deepening Online Deliberation (Draft Notes, by Anne Carrol)

FRIDAY

<comments on ?? what was the agenda topic to which this applied? What was the question/issue being discussed?>

• Balancing vitality and credibility, general and specific
• Reporting back
• Who gets to deliberate in a deliberative democracy
• Who wants to participate, or feels welcome to do so
• Role of moderators
• Creates civil civic dialogue
• Moderates the flow, page
• Creates confidence in lack of bias in hosting entity
• Importance of going beyond the “usual suspects” in the deliberative process
• How to “close the loop” and be clear on how input is, or isn’t, used
• Engaging active citizens who “want” to make a difference
• May not be that much difference between “education” and engaging in deliberative democracy; education needs to include most of this vs. learning in a Petri dish
• Controlled representation of public opinion vs. “in the wild” of blogs, etc.
• Attitudes of politicians in response, with some situations where citizen ideas were much more appreciated than the ideas of the politicians
• Links between face-to-face processes and on line processes
• Need to better understand what is of real interest to people, which is what will draw them into the process
• Politics with natural language and text processing system to respond to peoples’ comments – and that pulled specific words from the input and responds back using those words; would help to use this to provide information about future opportunities for input and tracking interests and topics for future communications
• Bulk e-advocacy: has it overwhelmed decision makers so they don’t read it?
• Desire for “curator” of input to manage it fairly to get it to decision makers
• Use blog to answer email; leverage both questions and answers to respond; people often willing to allow their names to be used, but can easily be anonymous
• Any thought given to “gardening” the media generated by streaming video such as legislative sessions?
• When people know where to go to watch what’s going on, they will
• Local Council meetings are webcast, but no one will watch entire meeting; doing some indezing linked to agenda and with time stamps would help (Los Angeles may be doing this)
• SMIL to hypertext video
• Gold standard for trust is trial juries; for deliberative polling concerns about bias of researcher, presenter…no agreed-upon method of designing process
• “in the wild”
• deliberative polling can be used in any venue
• (when there is a deep crisis, grassroots people step in and take over)
• lots of activism has been online for decades
• Australia and New Zealand have long tradition of civic discourse that now combines face-to-face with online
• Current popular books (Wisdom of Crowds, Blink, etc.) seem to celebrate the absence of deliberative decision making
• True for things about which individuals already have lots of knowledge and experience
• Focus so much in our explicit work on “the decision” – when people get more engaged there’s lots of well-documented improvement in community perception and trust
• Important question is whether people are willing to listen or host a dialogue if there’s a good chance it will go in a very different direction than the host or recipient personally wants
• Is there a “true” form of unbiased deliberation? And does straying from that damage it?
• Opening process for alternative views helps create credibility and legitimacy
• Basic premise for online deliberation is that things will go in an unanticipated direction
• Keys are independence, diversity
• Always need perspective that knowledge is always incomplete and we may not be right; different perspectives add knowledge; need sense of the incomplete

Minnesota Examples, Steve Clift

with guests Griff Wigley, Northfield Citizens Online, and Minnesota State Representative Margaret Kelliher

• (insert links here)

• Focusing on e-politics and that environment
• Many lobbyists got online in early 90s
• May not be ahead of the curve anymore, and possibly in a rut because we’ve become so accustomed to this

Northfield Citizen’s Online (link)

• Community website with blog on left
• Soft news and hard news
• Part of the goal is to make it fun
• Give out blogs to anyone who wants to do something of “civic interest”
• Using RSS to aggregate their 4 most recent blog posts; constantly updates, so as citizen views community website they can also see what the bloggers are doing; civic leaders on top, community groups in middle, and others at the bottom
• For many years have done special events or activities such as a 2-wk focused discussion on a particular issue; try to go far out enough on an issue so that people still have an “inquiry” vs. “opinion” mindset
• Trying to create enough access to bloggers who are doing serious work, to create dialogue among blogs as well as bloggers and others
• State rep now has a blog and with forum manager is testing time-limited open link for people to comment on chosen blog posts

E-Democracy and local issues forums (link)

• Created nonprofit, nonpartisan forum almost by accident
• Website has links to guidebook, streaming video of people with stories on how issues forums have made a difference in their community
• Have reached out to underrepresented communities, and had particular success last year with this with getting much more participation around the bus strike
• Group server being used by St. Paul Issues List restricts posts to 2/24 hours because one of the things that drives people away is when individuals dominate conversations
• Includes links to lots of other electronic forums

Citizen’s League (link); involves citizens in local decision making through study groups (for 52 yrs)

• Have just launched a Community Connections Calendar for community/public affairs related events; currently have 47 groups posting
• In the next 6 months hope to launch a statewide strategy around state’s 150th anniversary in 2008 that would require a lot more technology

Techsmith.com, Camtasia, allows you to capture and present voice narration over screen display to make presentations

Mongolian government (open-government.mn??) allowing people to comment on upcoming parliamentary issues

MN House of Representatives (Rep Margaret Kelliher) (link)

• Tracks all bill content and status
• Allows individual representative to present own perspectives on issues
• Primary contact with participants is via email, and it can be overwhelming; people express opinions on issues or sometimes just have good ideas
• Online advocacy example: MN Citizens for the Arts (MCA) has done a lot of investing in their capacity to organize online via email; several years ago the then-Governor vetoed funding for an internationally known theater because he said they could get funding elsewhere and it wasn’t a statewide project; question was whether legislature would override veto; had received hundreds of cards in support of state funding; many lobbyists and activists were supporting the override; Margaret made the motion in partnership with another legislator from outside the metro area and the other party; failed the first time to get a supermajority; during the strategizing to remake the motion, a wave of email began especially organized by the MCA, that was going to legislators right on the floor, which caused enough people to change their votes and eventually to override the vote
• When we’re working on an issue, we can set up some people off the house floor who are tracking critical information to ensure accuracy about what’s being said on the floor and as appropriate to rebut misstatements
• Have also used online resources to identify urban legends that are sent around and used by legislators to influence opinion
• Online communication from constituents is a great equalizer; lets people from all over district communicate with legislators without having to drive across town to advocate (has a very wired constituency)
• Nearly all legislators rely on email system as their primary means of communication

Rocketboom daily vlog

MNSpeak aggregator of blogs

Minnesota Public Radio (www.minnesota.publicradio.com??)

• MN Budget Balancer allowed people to weigh in on how to balance the MN state budget, and showed real-time results
• Recently created a new youth-oriented radio station and used a blog for dialogue between listeners and station managers about station format and other issues
• Idea Generators: selected major public policy issues (achievement gap, the future of small towns) and people statewide weighed in with ideas and could also vote on others’ ideas they thought were good

Communitybuilders.nsw

• Lets community input get directly to decision makers

SATURDAY

Recap of and Issues Emerging from Friday’s Session

• Everything from dialogue to deliberation
• Range of local activities was great
• But what next, where does it go, loose ends? Less local toda; chance to resolve at the end of today; locals can continue working together
• MN belief in civics may be anomaly
• How to get it all to work elsewhere?
• Interesting to repeat this in other states; pull together across states (highlight best practices, especially of value to residents); establish standards to which they can aspire
• Could compare both within and between countries, states, cities, etc.
• Variations between angle and structure of activities based on source – interest groups, governments, corporations, etc.
• Federal government in US is much farther behind than in other countries
• US focuses on tools vs. pilots, projects, initiatives; would be valuable for US government to assemble tools into best practices
• Even e-democracy still focuses very much inside vs. out – and advancing the field; biggest jump came with recent collaboration with UK
• Don’t rely or depend on government – they can pull the plug anytime; volunteer associations have a long history of doing this and should continue
• Other governments (Australia, France, Canada,UK) have shown leadership and have dome some excellent work
• Some governments have particular agendas that foster such initiatives, such as strengthening national identity and trumpeting cultural resources
• EU has funded a lot of local efforts but US has less tradition of funding local resources
• US has poured millions into tools that make information available that eventually benefits individual citizens
• Focus is on tools vs. how to use them to access or change local government, so as more people at local level use and see benefit of tools and capabilities, they will push Feds harder
• Blogosphere pushes at Federal government level

Online Deliberation Tools, Bob Carlitz

• Taxonomy of Open Source, Standards-Based Software for Deliberative Democracy – see WIKI

Navigating the Tools and Options, Alexandra Samuel

• (insert graphic!)
• Useful to have a taxonomy for types of tools, and map them to clarify states and options for deliberation
• Information tools: either in or out, but generally static
• Discussion tools: allow people to chat and create communities; examples are Conversate that allows relatively easy inline conversations, and Omidyar online communities who have conversations about particular issues; web communities go beyond discussions of specific issues to create more tools and more of an online home. 43things.com
• Collaboration tools: include “social software” such as blogs, WIKIs, online social bookmarking, etc., that have some notion of having social impact; people who are interested in tools for social collaboration, but not necessarily around politics or democracy. This is an extremely motivated community and online deliberative democracy types would benefit from interconnections. (Social bookmarking such as del.icio.us that allows you to tag (attach key words to) your own bookmarks but to store them there and then see all the other social bookmarks that others have identified with the same tag)
• Conference blogs can be helpful to start things rolling before a conference as well as continue to thinking and talking after the conference
• Tagging resource: www.tagsonomy.com
• RSS resource: www.alexandrasamuel.com/rsstocracy/10steps
• Discussion
• Comment on taxonomy (graphic): conveners and information resources are about 1 to many, while participants and collaboration/discussion is about many to many; need to move to collaborative processes to create collaborations
• Need to find practical ways for people to use these tools without having to know the technical aspects and how they work
• 3 different phases of collaboration: expression, listening, deciding; we’re really good with expression, but less good for listening, and it’s very tough to do deciding (insert link to Steve’s list)

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