adventures in digital democracy
TRANSCRIPT
8/7/2019 Adventures in digital democracy
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Adventures in digital democracyPart 1: UK
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What I did last summer
Whilst I·d planned a 4 week road trip across the
vineyards of France . . .
Me in a vineyard
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But new gov wrecks my holiday plans
The new Coalition government decide to run 2 different
mass participation exercises over the summer.
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What the UK government wanted to do
Use the collective intelligence of the
people to solve national problems
± Your Freedom: reform unnecessary laws
± Spending Challenge: help save money
Mass / nationwide participation
New form of participative governance
Make a statement that the newgovernment was different.
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Your Freedom in detail
The Your Freedom crowd-sourcing
site allowed uses to share ideas
Add ideas
Search via tags
Read and rate ideas
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What people were saying
`
There was a mix of general popularist ideas, together
with useful niche actionable ideas.
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Your Freedom in numbers
500,000 people visited site
47,000 took part
15,000 ideas
97,000 comments
242,000 ratings
11,000 tags Upto 40 Moderators at same time
An indication of high-levels
of engagement.
Each person who took part, on average made x2
comments, x5 ratings. 1/3 added an idea.
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What happened (in stats)
On launch the site saw a massive spike in traffic on day
one, and generally high-levels of engagement.
90,000 visits on day 11/5th of all participation. High levels of
engagement
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Massive spike + high participation
Over 700,000 page views on day 1, and 4.2 million page
views across campaign.
7 00,000 page views onDay 1.
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How we generated such volumes
A mix of launch PR, social media buzz, together with
RSS content syndication across partner sites.
RSS widget
Embedded inkey sites.
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What happened in practice
Due to spikes in traffic, in the first few days the site
crashed - due to lack of server capacity.
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Spending Challenge in detail
The Spending Challenge used our Dialogue App - re-
skinned to tackle this specific issue.
Same format as Your
Freedom
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A two-part strategy
Unlike Your Freedom, the Spending Challenge was run in
two distinct parts: 1) ideas stage 2) sorting stage
1)Ideas stage
People asked to give ideasof how the governmentcould do more for less.
2) Sorting stage
People then asked to rateall ideas, to help the
government sort throughthe 10,000·s of ideas.
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What people were saying
U ses could rate
. . . comment on
. . . And tag
The most useful ideas added were niche ideas. Beyond
these there were lots of more general (and quite
political) ideas like ´Pull out of Afghanistanµ.
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Spending Challenge numbers
250,000 people visited site
20,000 took part
43,000 ideas
14,000 comments
280,000 ratings
Interestingly, participants in the Spending Challenge
added 2 ideas each, compared to 0.3 ideas per person in
the Your Freedom dialogue.
U sers added on average
x2 ideas each.
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Spending Challenge (in stats)
The Spending Challenge had even higher levels of
engagement compared to Your Freedom: over 15 page
views and over 9 minutes on the site.
Spikes related to launch
of the 2 phases
High
engagement
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What happened next
6 weeks after the end of the process, theChancellor announced which initial ideas he was
going to take forward.
3 ideas were identified: ± a more common sense approach to Criminal
Record Bureau checks for junior doctors.
± piloting an online auction site for surplus and
second hand Government equipment
± replacing the plastic National Insurance number
card with a letter reducing costs.
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. . . so what did this all cost?
£25,000 total
£0.45 per idea
£0.03 per citizenThe costs involved in running these processes was about
£25k between them (N.B. certain server and design
costs were shared)
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And what we learnt . . .
Invest in more servers! Create a compact process: define timelines
upfront, and pitch it as an *event*, rather
than ongoing process. Provide a timeline for feedback, to give the
process closure.
Make sure the question asked is specificenough to generate useful ideas.
Possibly the 2 biggest things we learnt were 1) invest in
servers 2) create a compact process.
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+ make sure it doesn·t clash with yourholiday!
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Adventures in digital democracyPart 2: US
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R ight place. R ight time.
In 2008 members of our team went off to Berlin for a
seemingly obscure e-democracy conference, which led
us to Washington DC . . .
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Creating the Dialogue App
QuickTime and adecompressor
are needed to see this picture.
In the weeks before the 2008 election, we were
commissioned by NAPA, the OMB and GSA to create the
Dialogue App as part of a pilot Dialogue around Health IT.
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R unning Obama·s first Dialogue
When Obama won power, and after his Open Gov memo,
we were then commissioned to run the White House·s
first crowd-sourcing process around Recovery.gov
2 ,000 participants from IT
Community. 52 0 ideas.
1,300 comments.
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Easy to role-out Dialogue model
XXXXXSimple templated ´app modelµ, allowing government to
quickly and easily set up their own dialogues.
Add ideas
Tag ideas
Read and rate
ideas
All content
customisable
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How the US run dialogues . . .
Specific challenges: set up specificchallenges to niche problems.
Specific communities: outreach targeting
niche communities of interest with specific
knowledge.
Event-based: these challenges are set-up as
events.
Tight timeframes: these will run for 7 to 10days.
US government take a slightly nuanced approach to
running dialogues compared to the UK.
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