An Evaluation of e-Democracy Activities Initiated by Councils and ...

October 2004

‘From the Top Down’

An Evaluation of e-Democracy Activities Initiated by Councils and Government

e-Democracy – From the Top Downe-Democracy – From the Ground Up

The Local e-Democracy National Project has beenset up with £4m of funding from the ODPM tohelp Local Authorities exploit the potential of newtechnologies for democratic renewal. The projectis one of 22 National Projects, funded with £80mfrom the ODPM, which aim to bring togethercouncils, central government, the private sectorand others to define and deliver projects andnational Local e-Government solutions.

www.e-democracy.gov.uk

e-Democracy – From the Top Down

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Bristol City Council is pleased to havecommissioned this report as part of itsrole as evaluation lead for the Local e-Democracy National Project.

Outside of this role Bristol has considerableexperience of implementing council ledapproaches to e-consultation and e-democracy. This evaluation report looks atthe ways in which councils can mosteffectively use new technologies to engagewith their citizens.

The relationship between local authorities andcitizens has traditionally been driven from thetop down, with councils making decisionsabout what information to share with thepublic, and what issues to consult citizens on.

It is widely believed that by employing someof the new communication technologies thatare becoming increasingly widespreadcitizens can have a far greater say in politicaldecisions making.

The potential of these new technologies isexciting, and the idea that they mightrevitalise democracy is seductive. Howeverwe must recognise that there is more to thisprocess than simply providing a range ofelectronic tools. E-engagement entails arange of practices, techniques andtechnologies which do not comprise inherent'solutions', but must be integrated into abroader adaptation of government-citizenrelationship-building.

Kevin O’MalleyProject Manager

Stephen HiltonProject Lead

Bristol City CouncilCollege GreenBristolBS1 5TR

Tel: 0117 922 2848www.bristol-city.gov.uk/consultation

Foreword

• This report was written by:

Professor Ann Macintosh, Dr Angus Whyte and Dr Alistair Renton of the International Teledemocracy Centre, Napier University.

1 Executive Summary 5

1.1 Representation 51.2 Engagement 51.3 Transparency 61.4 Conflict and consensus 61.6 Community control 6

2 Introduction 8

2.2 Scope of the evaluation 82.3 An evaluation framework 102.4 Methods and participants 132.5 Chapter Structure 17

3 Citizen Engagement in “Ask Bristol” 18

3.1 Aims and background 183.2 The e-engagement tools and process 203.3 Experiences and Expectations of Ask Bristol 243.4 Results and Outcomes 293.5 Conclusions 31

4 e-Petitioning Kingston 33

4.1 Aims and background 334.2 The e-engagement tools and process 354.3 Actors’ experiences and expectations 424.4 Citizens of Kingston and Bristol 454.5 Results and Outcomes 544.6 Conclusions 55

5 “Micro Democracy” in Swindon 58

5.1 Aims and background 585.3 Experiences and Expectations of Micro Democracy 625.4 Results and Outcomes 685.5 Conclusions 68


3Contents

6 Democratising Cross-cutting Issues and 71Partnerships in Wolverhampton

6.1 Aims and background 716.2 The e-engagement tools and process 736.3 Actors’ roles and expectations 766.4 Results and Outcomes 816.5 Conclusions 82

7 Overall Conclusions 85

7.1 How the projects enhance democracy 857.2 Following up the evaluation 87

8 References 88

9 Annex A: Detailed Evaluation Framework 89

9.1 Democratic criteria 899.2 Key dimensions of e-democracy initiatives 909.3 E-democracy Tool Quality Criteria 919.4 Bringing the dimensions together 949.5 Detailed Evaluation Questions 95

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the officers and Members of the four councils who gave their support to theevaluation; to the people of Bristol, Kingston-upon-Thames and Wolverhampton whoparticipated, and to RBA Consulting and Community People Ltd for providing additional data.


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This report evaluates a selection of projects inWorkstream 2 of the Local e-DemocracyNational Project “Strengthening existingdemocratic practices”. The report focuses onprojects led by the local authorities in Bristol,Kingston upon Thames, Swindon andWolverhampton. These were:

• Bristol’s use of online forums tocomplement Citizens Panels in its AskBristol website.

• Kingston upon Thames’ pilot of an e-petitioning system in conjunction with Bristol.

• Swindon’s trial of a “Micro Democracy”concept targeting questionnaires atspecific sections of the public.

• Wolverhampton’s coordination throughpartner organisations of online dialoguewith citizens through the WolverhamptonPartnership site.

The main aim of the research was to developan understanding of how citizens andstakeholders perceive e-democracy and tofeedback tangible lessons to local authoritiesand their partners on how to use the tools ofe-democracy more effectively.

The evaluation found much had beenaccomplished in the 4 projects we focusedon. Over their one year lifetime project staffwere recruited, suppliers contracted,applications implemented, working practicesand processes examined and e-democracytools launched to be used by the public. Inthree of the four projects the e-democracytools had been used by hundreds of citizens,and showed early signs of impacting ondecision-making. Specifically we used“democratic criteria” to assess the projects’strengths and weaknesses as follows:

1.1 Representation

The major strength of Ask Bristol was thedevelopment of existing liaison between theconsultation team and service departments,in some cases with their direct participation inonline discussion. The e-petitioner projecthad strong support from councillors, althoughthe outcomes of e-petitions remain uncertainand there were weaknesses in the integrationwith other engagement processes. The MicroDemocracy project reported keen interestfrom councillors. The WolverhamptonPartnership project rests on a strongconsultation infrastructure, although activesupport from partners appeared focused oncollaborative working between staff. Thatprovides a strong basis for sustainable e-consultation, although current support for itappeared limited from partners andcouncillors.

1.2 Engagement

In all cases strong efforts were made toencourage public response on issues of localrelevance. The early evidence has been thatthis is forthcoming but only when the issuesare general enough to affect a broad cross-section of citizens.


51 Executive Summary

1.3 Transparency

The e-petitioner project was strongest on thispoint since it is establishing a process forpublishing decision outcomes. There ispotential in each project to enhancetransparency, but it would have beenpreferable for them to first establish whatcitizens would need or expect in terms ofenhanced transparency. This is necessarybecause “enhancing transparency” may betaken to mean either providing detailedinformation or hiding it in the name ofsimplicity. The projects each had publishedpolicies on privacy and acceptable use, withthe exception of Micro Democracy which wehad strong concerns about.

1.4 Conflict and consensus

Each of the projects provides an online forumand opportunities for divergence of opinionon the issues raised and the method forraising them, with the exception of the MicroDemocracy project. The preparation foreffective moderation of such discussions wasa strong feature of Ask Bristol and theWolverhampton Partnership projects. InBristol e-petitions are moderated by the sameteam as Ask Bristol discussions, and thesoftware supports the moderation task.However Kingston’s preparations formoderation were not extensive and shouldany controversial e-petitions stimulate heatedonline discussion there is risk officersconcerned may be unprepared to deal withany consequences.

1.5 Political equality

The projects each show strong potential forgreater inclusiveness. The web traffic andresponses to the engagement suggested theground had been laid for strong andsustainable take-up. There was evidence thatthe tools were already being actively used byhundreds of citizens in each of the localauthority areas. There was also evidence,albeit very limited, that these were mostly notpreviously “engaged” in contributing to localauthority decision making. In demographicterms there were disabled and minority ethnicusers almost in proportion to localpopulations, although they were also morelikely to be male and middle-aged. The MicroDemocracy project also had strong potentialgiven its integration of online and offlinechannels, although its take-up cannot beassessed yet.

1.6 Community control

Citizens had modest expectations that theirviews would have some impact on decision-making and strong expectations that thecouncils should in any case publish aresponse to their input. The evidence thatcitizens were satisfied with the arrangementswas limited but mostly positive for e-petitioner and Ask Bristol. TheWolverhampton Partnership showed strongpotential in terms of liaison with existingcommunity groups, although unfortunately wecould not directly assess citizen support inthe time available. Micro Democracy placedmuch emphasis on responsiveness, thoughagain citizens’ views on that were unavailable.


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The research involved citizens andstakeholders – councillors, project managersand officers involved in using the e-democracy tools and managing thedemocratic process. Various methods wereused to record and analyse their views andthe usage of e-democracy tools:

• Semi-structured interviews withstakeholders on “key dimensions” of thee-democracy projects.

• Field tests of the e-democracy tools withmembers of the public, using publicaccess computers in public libraries.

• Online discussion and usage statisticsgathered by the e-democracy tools andby the web servers they were run on.

• Online questionnaires.

• Project documentation.

There is a strong case for further evaluation.The present study was carried out over a veryshort period, the e-democracy tools werethemselves only piloted for a few months, andthe projects had mostly been unable toundertake planned evaluation. E-democracyprojects are inevitably subject to unexpectedchange in the political environment and thisunfortunately delayed the “Micro Democracy”led by Swindon Borough Council. Werecommend further evaluation of projects thatare continued, particularly to guide ongoingmonitoring and evaluation by councilsthemselves. This should include methods toidentify the value of online dialogue andmonitor the impact on decision-making.

2.1 Aims of the evaluation

This report is of work undertaken in“Workstream 4: Public and StakeholderOpinion and e-Democracy”, one of five mainworkstreams of the Local e-DemocracyNational Project. The aims of Workstream 4were:

• To develop an understanding of howcitizens and stakeholders perceive e-democracy and to feedback tangiblelessons to local authorities and theirpartners on how to use the tools of e-democracy more effectively.

• To provide an overarching evaluation of e-democracy tools that are in use or underdevelopment in England, focusingespecially but not exclusively on theoutputs of the National Project.

(Source: National Project on Local e-Democracy Workstream Four Project Initiation

Document: version 1.7 October 2004, p.8)

The report is on one of three strands ofWorkstream 4 contributing to the aims above,each of these strands being part ofWorkpackage 4.3 “overarching evaluation”.The other two strands focus on projectsaimed at young people, and projectsemphasising “ground-up” development of e-democracy by citizens and communities.

Our aims in this strand of this evaluation wereto focus specifically on public andstakeholder experiences of the Workstream 2e-democracy activities initiated by EnglishLocal Authorities and the Government, andreach conclusions about the benefits andeffectiveness of these approaches both intheir own right and in comparison to moretraditional forms of democratic engagement.

This introductory chapter sets out:

• The scope of the evaluation in terms of thegeneral approach taken and localauthorities involved.

• An evaluation framework comprising themain evaluation questions and criteria.

• Methods used and the participants sought.

• Detailed questions and the methods usedto address them.

2.2 Scope of the evaluation

The evaluation concerns Workstream 2 of theNational Project “Strengthening existingdemocratic practices”. The report considers abroadly representative slice of these “top-down” initiatives, and draws on a snapshot ofviews and experiences taken in the finalstages of selected projects comprisingWorkstream 2.

We selected the lead authority in each offour projects spanning Workpackages 2.2, 2.3and 2.4 as shown below in Table 2.11, as webelieved these would be best positioned tocommunicate what had been learned withinthe work package they were leading. Theprojects commenced in March-April 2004,and our evaluation began in December tolook at the final months of the projects,ending on March 31 2005.


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1 Workstream 2.1 (Supporting the work of councillors) was examinedby the expert evaluation team (workstream 4.1) and was thereforeexcluded from the present study.

2 Introduction

Table 2.1 Workstream 2 initiatives selectedfor evaluation

Work- Project Focus Lead authoritypackage

2.2a Panels, forums Bristol City and citizen Councilengagement

2.3a Information, Royal Borough communication of Kingston and citizenship: upon Thames“e-petitioning”

2.3b Information, Swindon communication Boroughand citizenship: Council“Micro Democracy”

2.4a Democratising Wolverhamptoncross-cutting City Councilissues and partnerships

Each of these projects also involved at leastone other local authority or public sectorpartner. Each also included an element ofevaluation coordinated by the lead partner. Inthe current study we did not seek toduplicate that work. Rather we wanted to findout what the lead authority had learned fromthe pilot, including evaluation carried outwithin it, and identify any gaps that could befilled through the authorities’ ongoingmonitoring and evaluation.

Main constraints on the evaluation

The projects in table 1 lasted one year, duringwhich project staff were recruited, supplierscontracted, applications implemented,working practices and processes examinedand e-democracy tools launched to be usedby the public. While much was accomplished

by these projects, the e-democracy toolswere typically only available to the public foraround 3–6 months. In most cases theprojects did not carry out the “internal”evaluation they had planned before theworkstream 4 evaluation reported here gotunderway. This evaluation was severely time-limited and this led to uneven coverage of thefour pilots, and a lack of involvement of keyindividuals and groups.

In one case in particular, Swindon,procurement issues delayed the project startuntil August 2004. Further delays werecaused by a change in the political leadershipof Swindon Borough Council and subsequentbudget cuts. We have included the pilot inthis report, although it was not possible toconsider the views of citizens or directevidence of benefits or effectiveness. Westrongly recommend further externalevaluation of this project if it continues.

We should also point out our involvement assuppliers for the e-petitioning project, and thedisproportionate level of detail given to theproject in this report. This reflects the greateraccess the authors had as evaluators to thekey stakeholders involved. The authors werenot directly involved in the development ofthe software and we are confident that thereport demonstrates our impartiality inreporting the “lessons learned”.

Each of the projects had envisaged anelement of internal evaluation, ie coordinated by the lead authority for theworkpackage across other local authoritiesparticipating in it. Our evaluation wasintended to build on the above work byconsidering how the results addressed ourover-arching questions, and workingcollaboratively with the lead authorities togather additional evidence where necessary.


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There was extensive internal evaluation of thee-panels and forums (Workpackage 2.2), ledby Bristol, which was undertaken in parallelwith the current study. This raised issues ofduplication and “evaluation fatigue” amongparticipants. We therefore agreed to Bristol’srequest not to re-interview individuals whohad already been interviewed by RBAResearch. We are grateful to RBA Researchfor making available summaries of interviewscarried out in Wolverhampton, where theproject on “democratising cross-cuttingissues and partnerships” (workpackage 2.4a)overlapped considerably withWolverhampton’s contribution to the e-panelsproject (2.2a). Unfortunately however the timeconstraints mean that they were unable tomake similar results available from interviewswith Members and officers involved inBristol’s e-panel project.

2.3 An evaluation framework

The main evaluation questions

The evaluation targeted citizens using (andothers not using) the e-democracy toolsdeployed in the projects, and councillors andofficers responsible for e-democracydevelopment and for the processes it wasintended to support. Some views oftechnologists involved from the localauthorities or their technology providers werealso sought.

As well as having this variety of participants,the evaluation called for multiple methods.The data and the analysis were mainlyqualitative, although we sought additionalquantitative evidence in the shape ofquestionnaire responses and usage data. Thereasons for using multiple methods were:

• To gather evidence of what people do withthe available tools, as well as what they saythey do (or intend to do).

• To strengthen the validity of theconclusions by “triangulating” the methodsused to address each of our evaluationquestions, ie by using multiple approachesto gather data.

If we start from the premise that the projectsevaluated should support and preferablyenhance democracy in some way, whataspects of those projects should weconsider? The Workstream 4 expertevaluation group outlined five main elementsof the evaluation, comprising2:

1 Relevant actors and their roles andexpectations in the adoption andimplementation of e-participationprojects.

2 The contextual bases of e-participationprojects

3 The methods and processes of e-participation

4 The outcomes of e-participation

5 Comparison between offline and onlinemethods of participation


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2 Coleman, Macintosh & Lalljee “Evaluating e-Democracy in Englishand Welsh Local Authorities”, Oct. 2004

Using these elements we can identify thefollowing main evaluation questions :

Q1 How do the actors involved understandthe initiative to benefit the relationsbetween councils, elected representatives,public, partners and Central Government,and what in their view are thedisadvantages?

Q2 How do the politicians, officials andcitizens involved in using tools developedin the initiative characterise their “addedvalue”; what methods and processescontribute that value, and whatdifferences are there between them andother public engagement approachesused?

Q3 What methods have already been used tofind out politicians’, officials’ and citizens’perspectives on the initiative? Whatoutcomes do the participating councilsreport so far?

Q4 What trade-offs have the technologistsinvolved in the initiative considered in thedesign of the software and processes,and what further changes should beconsidered?

Q5 What are the needs for guidance onappropriate ongoing evaluation methods?

The evaluation needed criteria to assesswhether the projects enhance democracy andto consider the main elements and questionsabove. We used three main sources.

A Overall criteria for enhancingdemocracy: The National Project hasagreed criteria to assess whether thatoverall aim has been met. We used themin drawing our conclusions on eachproject.

A1 Representation

A2 Engagement

A3 Transparency

A4 Conflict and consensus

A5 Political equality

A6 Community control

B Key dimensions of e-democracyinitiatives: To understand howstakeholders and the public wereinvolved in and perceived the individualprojects, we used the following “keydimensions” of e-democracy initiatives(Macintosh, 2004) to structurediscussions with them.

B1 Type of engagement

B2 Stage in decision-making

B3 Actors

B4 Technologies used

B5 Rules of engagement

B6 Duration and sustainability

B7 Accessibility

B8 Resources and Promotion

B9 Evaluation and Outcomes

B10 Critical success factors


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C Criteria for assessing e-democracytools: The “e” tools that have beenproduced and deployed in the projectmay also be judged by the emergingstandards of good practice for publicwebsites, from which we derived a list ofe-democracy tool quality criteria. Theyencompass aspects of usability,usefulness, and social and technicalacceptability (Nielsen, 1993), many ofwhich also appear in the QualityFramework for UK GovernmentWebsites3. We used the criteria below toidentify themes from field tests withcitizens who had had the opportunity touse the e-democracy tools.

Social acceptability

C1 Trust and security

C2 Relevance and legitimacy

Usefulness

C3 Accessibility

C4 Appeal

C5 Content clarity

C6 Responsiveness

Usability

C7 Navigation and organisation

C8 Efficiency and flexibility

C9 Error recovery

A more detailed version of this frameworkappears in Annex A to the report. Thisincludes definitions and descriptions of eachof the criteria mentioned above.

Bringing the dimensions together

We used the “key dimensions” and “qualitycriteria” to generate further more specificevaluation questions. There is an importantdifference between them however. The keydimensions are not evaluation criteria.Although each dimension can be related togood practice guidelines, there is no widelyaccepted set of evaluation criteria for e-engagement. For example “stage in decision-making” does not prescribe a suitable stagefor e-engagement, but suggests that thetiming of e-engagement in relation to policydevelopment is likely to have a bearing ondecision-makers’ views of the initiative’ssuccesses and failures.

The descriptive rather than prescriptivecharacter of these dimensions reflects theirrole, which was to generate concretequestions to which participants couldrespond with their understanding of theproject’s aims, the methods adopted and theirrelation to current practice, and expectationsof the outcomes, strengths and weaknesses.

Figure 2.1 brings together the variousdimensions and criteria to give an overview ofthe approach, and introduce the methodsdescribed in the next section.


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3 Quality Framework for UK Government Websites: available at: http://e-government.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/Resources/

WebGuidelines/fs/enA

Figure 2.1 Criteria and sources for e-democracy evaluation

2.4 Methods and participants

The key dimensions in Figure 2.1 are themesfor discussion with stakeholders and membersof the public that the projects have involved.In this section we identify the methods weused to gather data. First we identify who wesought to include in the evaluation.

The citizens and stakeholders included in theevaluation were in these categories:

a Citizens who have used the e-democracytools deployed (or agreed to take part in apilot).

b Citizens who have not used the tools.

c Councillors involved in the engagementprocess.

d Engagement “owners”: managers withresponsibility for aspects of theengagement process, for example servicemanagers who commission consultations.

e Project managers/ technologists, whetheremployed by the council or by suppliers.

f “Internal” users: moderators oradministrators.

In Annex A we elaborate on who among theabove categories was involved in respondingto each of the research questions, and usingwhich methods.


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Stakeholders’ aims,methods and

expectations of publicengagement

Public take-up, usageand acceptability

Tool Quality Criteria

KeyDimensions

E-engagement: enhancing democracy?

Democratic Criteria

The evaluation called for a combination ofresearch methods for a variety of reasons.Firstly, as we have argued elsewhere (Whyteand Macintosh, 2003) e-democracy evaluationencompasses questions that span social andtechnical disciplines, and evidence of whatpeople do with the available tools, as well aswhat they say they do (or intend to do)4.

Given the limited time available for datacollection and analysis we needed tomaximise its validity by “triangulating” – usinga variety of methods to address each of ourevaluation questions. The sources of dataused are shown in Table 2.4 below.

Table 2.4 Data sources used

Our aim was to use at least three sourceswith each of the participating councils. Notesfollow below on how each of the methodsapplied. The Annexes to the report also giveexamples of the materials used in each case.

Semi-structured Interviews

The “key dimensions” were used to draw upthe detailed evaluation questions described inAnnex A. Interviews were carried out face-to-face during visits to the councilsconcerned. Some additional interviews werecarried out by telephone where individualscould not be available in person. Thediscussions were audio-recorded and notestaken during them to allow selectivetranscription and speed up the analysis.Analysis involved reviewing notes andtranscripts to identify salient points, thenrelating these to the “key dimensions” and thetwo sets of criteria (democracy and toolquality) listed earlier in the chapter.

Table 2.5 Interview target groups

*Note: Some individuals are shown twice where roles overlap.


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4 Our approach draws on methodologies that consider research ascollaborative learning with participants - about what they areseeking to accomplish, how they accomplish it, how “success”should be recognised and what conditions favour it. (Checkland and Scholes, 1999; Suchman and Trigg, 1991; Pawson and Tilley, 1994).

Semi-structured 3 3 3 3interviews

Field tests of 3 3 – –e-democracy tools

Online 3 3 – –questionnaire

Internal 3 3 – 3documentation

Online discussion 3 3 – 3/responses

Web server 3 – – 3log files

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Engagement 2 2 1 1“owners”

Project 3 2 2 2managers and “technologists”

Internal user, 1* 2 1 1administrators

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Field tests of e-democracy tools

These had two parts and were conductedboth individually and with groups of citizens.The first part consisted of a brief usability testand the second a semi-structured discussion.

The usability testing involved observingmembers of the public interacting withwebsites produced in the project. The testingwas not of the citizens themselves but of theassumptions made about their expectationsand behaviour.

Usability testing is often carried out undercontrolled laboratory conditions and using anexperimental framework (see Nielsen, 1993for an overview). Often however there arepractical reasons for testing in the field, forexample where project schedules require itand where the expected users vary widely(Rowley, 1994). There are also methodological reasons for favouring aflexible “semi-structured” approach, i.e. ouraim was to explore the acceptability of thetools and the nature of usability problems thatarise in “real” conditions. We were not aimingto measure task efficiency or correlateparticular user groups with particular usabilityproblems and tasks under more controlled“laboratory” conditions.

Testing followed the typical path of providinga representative group of test participantswith a set of realistic tasks, and observingthem to identify any difficulties they encounterwhen trying to carry them out. For each tool(website) we described three tasks that weconsidered basic to effective use, for examplesigning an online petition, or registering to joina discussion forum. Participants were askedto read and follow instructions for the task,comment on any aspect they liked and seekhelp if required. Comments were noted andthe test sessions video recorded to aidanalysis of any problems described.

The testing was followed by discussion withthe participants about their experience usingthe tools and how they expected e-democracyresults to impact on decision-making. Thecomments made during the “hands-on”testing and the discussions were alsorecorded, and analysed using the same set ofcriteria and dimensions as for interviews.

The field tests were carried out in Bristol (9participants in group test, and 2 individually)and Kingston-upon-Thames (6 individuals).Swindon and Wolverhampton were unable toaccommodate field tests in their schedules.Further details of the materials used anddiscussion questions are given in Annex D.

Online questionnaires: sampling andrecruitment

Online surveying was used to explore howtypical users of the tools being piloted wereof the general population, and to gauge theirviews on questions we expected to affect toolacceptance. We return to the questions later.

Everyone served by a local Authority may beassumed to have views relevant to citizenengagement. However for the evaluation itwas only feasible to sample those membersof the local population who had alreadyshown an interest in the e-democracy tools,or other forms of citizen engagement (such ascitizens panels). This was because the e-democracy tools had not been publiclyavailable long enough for us to assume thatrandomly selected local people would orcould respond to questions about them. Webegan instead with the aim of recruiting asufficiently high response from citizensinterested in e-democracy to be able to selecta weighted sample. In this case the samplewould have been weighted to berepresentative in terms of age, gender,


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internet use, ethnicity, disability and socio-economic status. It was unfortunatelynot possible to do this, again because of thelimited time that the e-democracy tools hadbeen available the respondents were notsufficiently typical of the local population toconstruct a weighted sample.

Online questionnaire results are given assimple descriptive statistics. They cannot begeneralised in statistical terms to the localpopulation, but may indicate the likely profilesof “early adopters” and to what extent theywould otherwise have got involved in theirLocal Authority’s decision-making.

Project documentation

Project documentation was an importantsource of information on the expectations ofproject managers and those officers andMembers directly involved in agreeing theproject’s scope and content. Materials thathad been used to publicise the project, trainofficers using the tools, or directly involvecitizens in their development were alsoconsulted for that purpose.

Results of online engagement

The e-democracy tools themselves provideevidence of the breadth and depth of theiruse in the pilots. The breadth of use, or take-up, was measurable in terms of numbers of:

• Registered users

• Responses to questionnaires

• Messages posted to discussion fora

• Petitions raised

• Names added to petitions

Although easily quantifiable, the significanceof these measures of take-up depends to alarge extent on the expectations of the projectmanagers, which we report where applicable.

Web server log files

Web metrics are measures of user activity ona website. As the Quality Guidelines for UKGovernment Websites acknowledge, webmetrics can support the analysis of take-upand usage patterns, providing evidence of therelative appeal of specific parts of a site andindications of potential problems. Commonlyused metrics used in this study were:

• Numbers of visits to the home page forthe tool in question

• Numbers of page requests

• Numbers of unique visitors

The use of web metrics for governmentwebsites is less well developed than forcommerce. For e-commerce purposes users’behaviour can be tied to whether or not theycomplete an online purchase. By contrast e-democracy websites have a more complexrelation between user behaviour, itsoutcomes, and the value that is placed onboth by citizens and stakeholders.

We wanted nevertheless to apply one of themore widely used e-commerce metrics to testits value. This is the “browse-to-buy ratio” or“browse-to-act ratio”, which measures theappeal of an item by dividing the number ofactions taken by the number of visits to theitem (Grant, 2003). This measure can inprinciple be applied to e-democracy sites thatare meant to enable e-participation, since thistypically involves citizens accessing a website and choosing or not to perform an action(contribute to a forum, sign a petition,complete a questionnaire).


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2.5 Chapter Structure

Chapters 3 to 6 of the report portray each ofthe projects involved in the evaluation usingthe following structure:

Aims and background

This sets the scene for the project’s leadcouncil becoming involved in the NationalProject. The focus here is on the experiencesand understandings of the project managers,in terms of the rationale for choosing aparticular e-democracy approach, and theuse of other methods of citizen engagement.This section also describes how softwaretools were selected and the approach takento implementing them.

The e-engagement tools and process

Here we describe the tools piloted and outlinewhat processes have been developed to pilottheir deployment. This section again takes amanagerial view. That is the tools andprocesses are depicted according to theproject managers view of how they wouldsupport engagement when put into operation.This is based on analysis of interviews andproject documentation.

Actors’ roles and expectations

This chapter section describes experiencesof the tools and process according to theviews of stakeholders (Members, servicemanagers) and users (citizens and internalusers). The focus is on themes drawn frominterview summaries, online questionnairesand field test observations, supplemented by results of evaluations carried out withinthe project concerned, for example ofusability and accessibility.

Results and outcomes

Here we summarise the engagement results,ie what was done to engage the public andthe breadth and depth of their responses. Wealso describe the outcomes, ie the council’sresponse to the engagement as far as thiscould be ascertained given the short durationof the pilot periods.

Conclusions

This chapter section reflects on the evaluationresults and, using the “democratic criteria”described earlier provides conclusions onwhat difference the project has made.


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3.1 Aims and background

The e-panel project led by Bristol City Councilhad these broad aims:

• To demonstrate that the democraticpotential of citizens’ panels can beenhanced through the increased use ofe-democracy tools.

• To produce detailed guidance for LocalAuthorities and case studiesdemonstrating how e-panel approaches,suitable for a variety of environments andbudgets, can be implementedsuccessfully.

• To strengthen links between authoritieswho are engaged in on-line consultation.

The project also involved St Albans DistrictCouncil, Wolverhampton City Council, and theBlack Country Knowledge Society, and drewon the previous experience of onlineconsultation in London Boroughs. Part of theproject involved developing a trainingprogramme on the moderation and hostingof discussion forums. We have not includedthis programme in our evaluation, exceptindirectly in so far as it influenced theconsultation approach and process.

The e-engagement context in Bristol

Bristol City Council like many local authoritiesconsults its citizens through a Citizens Panel.Set up in 1998, Bristol’s Citizens Panelcomprises a demographically representativesample of over 2000 residents who areregularly surveyed, occasionallysupplemented by focus group discussion andworkshops with a Citizens Jury format. ThePanel has become established in the authorityas a cost-effective means to gatherstatistically representative views from citizens.

It is widely regarded in the council as aneffective way to:

• Monitor performance of the council as awhole and of individual departments.

• Strengthen and supplement Best Valuereviews, the work of scrutinycommissions and of the cabinet andexecutive members.

• Develop public relations and improvecommunication.

• Encourage greater understanding ofdecision making in the council.

• Contribute to democratic renewal andencourage participation.

Council departments are now routinelyjoined by partner organisations such as theNHS and Police among the bodiescommissioning consultations with theCitizens Panel, which is managed by theCorporate Consultation team.

So why change? The rationale for “e-panels”was to build on the success of the Citizen’sPanel format. Bristol had experimented withmoderated online discussions, i.e. messageboard forums that operate according toagreed “fair play” rules and with theoccasional intervention of an onlinefacilitator to steer the discussion. But thismet with some cultural resistance within thecouncil to the idea that citizens should beallowed to dictate website content. So as Corporate Consultation managerStephen Hilton explains:

“We had the “Citizen’s Panel”, which hadgained the respect of Bristol’s citizens, sowe transferred this online. The citizen’spanel was top-down, with the councildetermining the issues discussed. We


183 Citizen engagement in

“Ask Bristol”

moved it online to see whether it could bemade as a bottom-up method ofparticipation, and to see whether it changedthe nature of consultation.”

As well as encouraging “bottom-up”identification of issues, a key aim of thismove was to meet the growing interestamong citizens in contributing to the Panel.The need for the panel membership to becontrolled so as to reflect demographiccharacteristics of the local population has ledto a long waiting list of people wanting to beconsulted. The “e-panel” approach istherefore intended to widen access toconsultation.

A further aim is to promote informeddiscussion among citizens of the issues thatthe council or partners want to consult about.Public participation is not universally regardedas necessarily a “good thing” and has metwith resistance from professional groups whoregard it as an encroachment on theirexpertise. A perceived weakness of theCitizens Panel approach is its reliance on“misinformed” public opinion. Stephen Hiltonagain: “…if we allow citizens time to becomeinformed on issues and to discuss them priorto being consulted, we hope to get aroundthis”.

Ask Bristol has been developed against abackground of work on e-consultations andfrom the development of the council’sconsultation strategy in 2001. This highlighteda need for better coordination ofconsultations. The Corporate Consultationteam developed a “Consultation Finder”;initially with the council’s web team. This wasused across the Authority to publish recordsof who was being consulting on what. Thekey decision was to present this in the publicdomain, having recognised the democraticpotential for letting interested parties search

consultations for information on what wasdone or planned. Placing it in the publicdomain put pressure on the council toprogress this work.

Other Authorities became interested in“Consultation Finder” and the council becameknown as a leader in this particular field.Online publication of this led to a demandfrom those consulted to contribute toconsultations online. This began with e-mailresponses, and then progressed to onlineforums and surveys, which were taken up byservice departments. Stephen Hilton again:

“We’re also interested in interactivevoting technology – we’ve conducted quitea few sessions with groups discussing andvoting upon issues”.

This has been piloted in conference on“options assessment” for public housing, andin a session with young people using newhandsets that can also send text messages toappear on a large screen.

E-petitioning, described in section 3 of thischapter, has also been piloted in Bristol andbuilds on the procedures in place for handlingpaper petitions.


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3.2 The e-engagement tools andprocess

Main e-panel functions for citizen users

The Ask Bristol site integrates various formsof e-engagement, offering any visitor theoption to contribute without necessarilyjoining the “e-panel”. Ask Bristol isdistinguished from the main Bristol CityCouncil site with its own domain(www.askbristol.com) and a different pagedesign. The page shows the currentconsultation themes and main option which are:

• “Find out more” provides a FrequentlyAsked Questions page, these questionsbeing on the aims of the site and the firststeps visitors can take to give their views.

• “Current issues” presents thoseconsultations that are ongoing or haverecently been concluded as shown inFigure 3.1 below. It includes a multiple-choice question that visitors can “vote”on as a means of encouraging furtherparticipation, eg “What do you think isthe best Bristol website?”

• “Have your say” first invites visitors toregister or log in. The registration formrequests name, contact anddemographic details plus questions oninternet use and personal interests.

• “More ways to have your say” providesthe Consultation Finder database of otherconsultations being conducted by thecouncil or partner organisations, plus a link to the e-petitioner site (see chapter 3).

A discussion forum is presented after loggingin, and is themed by consultation topic eachwith a forum which is then subdivided intotopics. Other methods trialled have includedonline “talk to the experts” chat rooms and a simple “deliberative polling” tool called “You Decide”.

Each forum/ consultation has an Introductionpage which is displayed when selecting itfrom Current Issues. This is a short (severalparagraph) summary of why the theme hasbeen selected, and may include links to otherdocuments the consultation “owner” thinksrelevant to informing the online discussion.For example in the current “Your Vision ofBristol” theme there are links to a summary ofthe previous discussion on “best and worstthings about Bristol”, and previous CitizensPanel reports.

Figures 3.2 and 3.3 illustrate the forumpages, showing the top level first followed bya forum in threaded format.

Figure 3.1 Current Issues in Ask Bristol


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Figure 3.2 Ask Bristol forum top level

Figure 3.3 Ask Bristol forum withdiscussion threads

Developing the e-panel engagement process

Work in Bristol to set up the e-panel began inJune 2004 with efforts to involve stakeholdersin service departments and outside thecouncil, for example the health authority.Project manager Carol Hayward recalls:

“There was a lot of interest in what wewere doing … we were able to get a widerange of input from these representatives.”

This task was helped by the consultationteam’s previous work on “ConsultationFinder” and the establishment of a council“Consultation Group” with a representativefrom each department.

Implementing and promoting Ask Bristol

The first steps were to document the softwarerequirements and approach suppliers. Themain requirements were listed as:

• Individual profiles for e-panel members.

• Tool for searching panel membership toidentify others with similar interests.

• Real time discussions or chat roomfacility.

• Discussion forums or notice boards for e-panellists.

• E-panel members to be able to suggestsubjects for discussion.

• Email alert system for specified subjectsof interest.

• Ability to send SMS alerts to mobilephones and Personal Digital Assistants(PDAs).

• Means of viewing results of past deliberations.

• On-line completion of questionnaires withauto data capture and on-line reporting.

• File-sharing with ability to make directamendments to documents.

• Access to videophone/conferencing orvideo on the internet an optional extra.


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Bristol identified four possible suppliers.Three agreed to become involved: thePractical e-Democracy project in London(PeDiL), Community People and iNovem. Afourth identified software provider BMG feltunable to participate in an assessment at thisstage. A shortlist of three products was drawnup and each assessed for its costs, usabilityand accessibility in August 2004. All threesoftware providers were given a copy of theirassessments and asked to reply to the pointsmade, highlighting improvements that hadalready been implemented to their softwareand plans for future amendments.

The usability assessment was carried out ondemonstration versions of the three softwarepackages, by an external consultant and bythe Bristol team. The external consultant’sevaluation used a “cognitive walkthrough”approach and included an assessment of thetext provided in the demonstration version.

The cognitive walkthrough is described in theevaluation report as involving “measuring theamount of thinking the user has to do at everystep of the way to completion of a desiredgoal or task”. The methodology was appliedby selecting “general day-to-day tasks thatare common to most websites and specificcommunity based tasks” and carrying themout. The tasks were:

• Registering as a user.

• Login.

• Accessing the help option.

• Contacting the service provider.

• Retrieving a forgotten password.

• Replying to a new thread on the forum.

• Completing a questionnaire.

The report suggested improvements andexamples of best practice for each package,to which each of the suppliers was invited torespond. A further test was carried out ofhow easy to comprehend the “help” text ineach package was, using the Flesch ReadingEase score.

In addition the Bristol team tested usabilityby asking 42 residents recruited from Bristol, and through the Black CountryKnowledge Society, to try one of thepackages and complete a questionnaire. The questions addressed:

• How far did the systems meetexpectations and bring satisfaction?

• How simple, efficient and quick to usewas the software?

• Was the system easy to learn with good,clear help functions and error messages?

• Was the information easy to find,comprehensible, clear and wellorganised?

• Was the system comfortable to use witha pleasant interface?

All of the applications were consideredacceptable on these criteria, albeit withdifferent strengths and weaknesses, anddiscussions with the other councilsparticipating in the e-panel project led to eachselecting a different package. Bristol adopted“eConsult” and engaged its suppliersCommunity People Ltd to develop the AskBristol application.


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Community People were also commissionedto develop training5, in conjunction with theConsultation Institute. The training needswere established for the main user groups:

Managers, Facilitators and councillorswho were thought likely to have concernsranging from legal to operational aspects.councillors with direct involvement also needed some insight into the role of the moderator.

Moderators or online facilitators wereinstructed in the roles of preparation,setting up a debate, and managing it, withthe latter focusing on encouraging peopleto join in, ensuring “fair play” according todocumented policy and an escalationprocedure in the case of conflict, writing an“editorial steer” for the debate, engagingwith members of the public on line, andmaintaining records of the results.

Participants and/or Panellists trainingsought to motivate and encourage membersof e-panels and develop their confidence inthe use of e-consultation tools.

The consultation team and the relevantservice departments seeking public inputdecided the duration of the onlinediscussion and the materials to be used.Each consultation theme selected for AskBristol requires a range of backgroundinformation to be put in place. The firstconsultations included one on the control ofBristol’s growing seagull population. Projectmanager Carol Hayward:

“I pulled together the information onurban gulls from a report carried out for thepest control team on the local gullpopulation, by talking to the RSPB and bysearching the internet for other backgroundinformation. Cyclists are an issue thatpeople seem keen to discuss as it cametop of a recent vote for the nextconsultation subject, and I have engagedthe council’s Cycling Team for input.”

Ask Bristol was promoted extensively offlinethrough posters, local press advertising,articles in several local newspapers, beermatsand bookmarks. Online promotion includedlinks from the council website home page,local website “thisisbristol.com”, and directemails from the council.

The analysis of results is a still-developingpart of the process. Hayward says:

“We provide an analysis of the debate by summarising the key points made, and then pass these results to thedepartments for feedback. We are stillworking on the procedure but as theanalysis is done manually at present it isquite time consuming.”


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5 This training provision was the focus of workpackage 2.2b and wehave not sought to evaluate the training materials.

3.3 Experiences and Expectationsof Ask Bristol

The evaluation planned to include interviewswith councillors involved in the project butunfortunately this was not possible for the reasons given in the Introduction to this report.

Consultation managers

The e-panel development has facedchallenges in devising the right methods toencourage participation, and choosingappropriate issues to seed the onlinediscussion. From their experience of AskBristol to date, the Corporate Consultationteam are confident they are finding the rightbalance. The other balance to be drawn isbetween online and offline approaches.Consultation manager Stephen Hilton sharedhis experiences and expectations on thesethree themes.

• Encouraging participation –step-by-step methods

A major challenge has been to work out themost effective way to combine the variousconsultation technologies that might be used.Stephen Hilton recalls:

“It took the council a year, maybe longerto get the panel going – but really, we’vegot something in a relatively short time.There was the difficulty in knowing how tocombine several distinct technologies in alogical sequence – know how to use themtogether rather than separately. By now, wehave a feeling about how to use the variousoff-line methodologies but this has not yethappened with online ones. But we want toprovide a range of opportunities for peopleto engage at different levels. For example,someone does not want to start off bycontributing to a discussion, but is happy to

take part in a simple poll. This leads totaking part in an ‘e-decide’ session andthence to ‘e-consult’. This pattern appearsto be the case. Smaller numbers take partin higher-level activities.”

• Finding appropriate issues to initiate the process

A range of practical concerns surrounded thechoice of issues to get the ball rolling. As inoffline consultation, the results would need anowner – a department or other agencysufficiently concerned with the consultationtopic to find the results useful, and preparedto accept and approve of gathering publicinput on it. What made this more sensitivethan usual was the openness of this publicscrutiny. Unlike the existing panel, anyonecould register and express an opinion. Unlikea survey, the results would be expressed inwhatever terms citizens chose to use,moderation permitted. Unlike a focus group,the discussion would be there for all to see:Stephen Hilton again:

“We were…uncertain about which issuesto use as consultation topics, or who could give approval for launching theconsultation. We had plenty of ideas butuncertain about whom would want theresults. Also we were cautious aboutchoosing a topic that would get out of handand thereby jeopardise future consultations,so it took a fair while to choose the issue...the public nature of AskBristol would meanthat the entire project could backfire if theparticular consultation went awry.”

• Online versus offline: understandingand balancing the differences

As we have already mentioned the onlineapproach of Ask Bristol complements theexisting Citizens Panel. It seeks to widencitizens’ access to consultation, promote


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informed discussion of the issues beingconsulted, and encourage citizens asindividuals or civic groups to identifyissues. Any trade-offs between these aimsremains to be seen as the projectprogresses, as do the relative strengths andweaknesses of offline and onlineapproaches. Two of the likely differences andimplications feature strongly in the CorporateConsultation team’s expectations.

One implicit difference is in therepresentative nature of the participants –the offline Citizens Panel approachemphasises random statistical sampling oflocal residents; the online panel emphasisesequality of access – introducing statisticalbias in terms of the participants demographiccharacteristics. In the medium term it may befeasible to have online discussions among ademographically representative sample ofparticipants. But equality of access is noguarantee of equality of participation, or thatall who take part in an online discussion areequally informed. Moreover, beingrepresentative in demographic terms does notnecessarily mean that participants are typicalin terms of their life experience, or theirinterest in taking part. As Hilton puts it:

“…we require the panel to be arepresentative selection – a balanced panel.However, we must recognise that, forinstance, the young people we recruit arenot typical of all young people – typically,people cannot be bothered to sit on panels– so there will be biases. Yet beingrepresentative confers credibility andengenders trust. So we were proactive ingetting people to come forward, but werealso interested in people to opt in toAskBristol. Is it possible to have a self-selected group that is demographicallyrepresentative? It will probably take a yearto find out how representative it will be. Sofar, recruitment suggests that it is balanced,

but whether or not they become active ornot is another question.”

A second major difference lies in the more“bottom up” nature of the issues raised fordiscussion. The scope and success of thisremains an open question. Consultation hasconventionally involved the authorityidentifying the topic. However that decisionalso partly depends on the nature of the topicand the mechanisms for engaging with thecommunities affected by it. “In the context ofthings we do, it is top-down. In terms of“equality” and “tenants” issues it is bottom-up…specific groups drawn from a particularneighbourhood or demographic community,for example. We tackle city-wide issues, so itis a struggle to find bottom-up issues. Youhave to have people suggest things”.

Ask Bristol, by inviting participants to suggestthe topics, potentially extends the range ofpeople with a say in what gets discussed andintroduces an element of transparency to thechoice, which ultimately remains with theconsultation managers. What remains to beseen is whether the new way of gatheringsuggestions, combined with the establishedpractice of selecting topics with the supportof stakeholders groups, yields results that canbe reliably said to satisfy those concerned.

The outcomes may depend on what the e-panel participants are willing to divulge aboutthemselves, both privately to the Consultationteam and publicly to each other. Theregistration process asks for wide-rangingdemographic details, and invites the recruitedparticipants to state their interests in a profile.Again this extends and amplifies a practicethat is seen as adding value to the offlineCitizens Panel. “councillors often say thatthey do not know who these citizens’ panelsare, so we started including biographies ofthe members of these panels”, says StephenHilton. Some of these biographies are


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featured on the Citizens Panel pages on thecouncil website. Ask Bristol’s “membersprofiles” are a mechanism for any registereduser to create a similar profile, and allowothers to read it if they choose.

• Developing “online community”aspects

As mentioned above registered users of AskBristol can choose to share their profiles withother users. The consultation team anticipatethat citizens will use this mechanism to shareviews and experiences. Registered usersmight be encouraged to develop theirbiographical sketches, and identifiable groupsmay be invited to join selected discussions.

This is seen as a way of developing the siteas an “online community” in parallel with real-world community activities. For examplecommunication might be facilitated betweenpeople who take part in activities such asschool board membership, or members ofcommunity associations. This would needfurther consideration of data protectionissues, but also of the role of Ask Bristol inthe community.

• Involvement of councillors

This has varied over the lifespan of theCitizens Panel, as Hilton says:

“councillors are not allowed to bemembers of the panel; rather they are therecipients of the products of that panel. Butcouncillors are involved in the issues thatget presented to the panel. There is a case of a citizen’s panellist becoming acouncillor, so there are links between the two.”

The expectation is that councillors will beappreciative of the Ask Bristol results “this is giving them something they could not get otherwise”.

• Links to decision-making

When an Ask Bristol discussion is closed asummary of the points raised are reported tothe relevant committees, following the patternestablished for Citizens Panel reports6

Decisions by committees or the relevantdepartments are also published on thecouncil website. A link from any particularconsultation report to a specific decision isdifficult to establish, given that there may bemany other considerations taken into account in reaching the decision. StephenHilton noted:

“We’re not making decisions by panel,but aiming to inform the major decisionswithin the council. So always the publicopinion is available to the council onmatters of importance. However, thecouncil has other things to weigh-in whenreaching a decision that is separate frompublic opinion. The thing is to be able toconvey to the public how their views havehad an impact. It has to be recognised that‘popular’ opinion is not necessarily the best opinion.”

Forum managers and moderators

Moderation of Ask Bristol has beencoordinated by project manager CarolHayward, although to date moderation hasnot needed much intervention in the forumdiscussions:

“Askbristol is managing itself very nicelyso there has been very little moderationneeded; there is some, involving movingcomments around, but it is all low-key andthere has not been any abusive posts.”


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6 Citizens Panel reports are available at:http://www.bristol-city.gov.uk/Fuguri/frame.html?A+AMM07100+BG+F+AMM00105+AMM01702

The moderation and administration of theforums needed a variety of tools that thesuppliers were developing to meetexpectations of how the role, and Ask Bristolitself, would further develop. Ongoing issues include:

• Barring users contravening the Conditions of Use.

Given the lack of any “abusive” postings todate so far, moderation has not neededdecisions to be taken about barring anyonefrom a forum although the mechanism existsto do so. Another less drastic possibility is touse a “profanity” filter, which automaticallysends a message to the offender saying thattheir language is objectionable.

• Generating reports on the forum usage

The Ask Bristol tools provide reports on useractivity, and moderator activity. These havebeen little used so far, but the consultationteam expect their use of such reports tofurther develop. For example they expect tocompare fora on the number of users, and thenumbers who “read” as opposed to thosewho “write”, to provide an indication of thestrength of feeling on the topics discussed.

• Maintaining the relationship with panel members

As Ask Bristol develops, a key task of theConsultation Team’s moderators is to seekthe ongoing participation of members. Whenappropriate they reply to specific pointsraised in the discussion forum. They alsosend email bulletins to registered membersevery few weeks.

• Evaluation Metrics and Analysis

This was considered an emerging need thathas so far not been met because of theresource implications and uncertainty overwhich of the many possible metrics are

significant. The team are aware of variousways of grading the forum posts, for exampleon to what extent they are “pro” or “con” aconsultation proposal. Also important werethe quantitative data on numbers ofcomments posted and how many times thesehave been read, and the range ofdemographic groups involved in consultation.Where there is under-representation, it couldindicate a problem that requires furtherinvestigation.

Citizens’ experiences and expectations

Citizens’ views were considered early in theproject through the assessment of usabilitymentioned earlier. For the current evaluationwe draw on that assessment and on fieldtests carried out in Bristol on the pilotedversion of the software, with 11 participants.Ask Bristol’s registered users were alsoinvited to take part in an online survey frommid-January to mid-March, which received 34 usable responses.

We begin by considering the survey sampleand results, then summarise the viewsreceived from all the above sources on:

• Accessibility issues

• E-panel usability

• Trust and security issues

• Relevance of the e-panel andexpectations of outcomes

• Reaching the disengaged?

The online survey’s 34 responses may not bestatistically representative of the 698registered Ask Bristol users or the 141 whologged in during the pilot. But despite thesampling limitations the online surveyprovided some evidence of who has beenmost inclined to participate and their views onAsk Bristol.


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In particular we were interested in whether e-democracy tools attracted the interest ofpeople who were not previously “engaged”. Arecent study of the extent of civicengagement for the Office of NationalStatistics, based on results of the GeneralHousehold Survey (Coulthard et al, 2002)showed that a majority (56%) believed that“by working together, people in theirneighbourhood can influence decisions thataffect the neighbourhood”. For the purposesof the evaluation we can take this question asan indicator of individual inclination to civicengagement. However in Coulthard et al’sstudy only a small minority (27%) had takenany action to solve a local problem in the lastthree years “such as writing to a newspaperor contacting a local councillor, though one inten people had thought about taking action”.(ibid. pp.6).

There is therefore a gap between inclinationand action that e-democracy tools such asAsk Bristol may be filling. Our surveyrespondents were more inclined towardscivic engagement than the national figureswould suggest, as 70% agreed that “byworking together, people in myneighbourhood can influence decisions thataffect our neighbourhood and the city”. Alarge minority 44% had held responsibilities ina local organisation, but a similar number saidthey had never participated in a consultationby writing to the council or taking part in apublic meeting.

Despite their apparent motivation to take partin Ask Bristol only a minority (41%) agreedthat “what people say on Ask Bristol willinfluence decisions that the council makes onthe issues raised”. The remainder werepresumably either sceptical or had othermotivations for taking part which should beexplored further. Interestingly this parallel’ssurvey findings of the Citizens Panel, which

recently showed that members 43%–58% ofthe panel felt their views would “have someinfluence” (answers varied according tospecific consultations)7.

The online survey respondents were alsomore likely to be white (97%), male (68%) andaged 45–59 (41%) than the local population.This is broadly in keeping with theirrepresentation among self-registered users,who gave demographic information whenregistering (discussed under Results below)and may indicate a need for more targetedpromotion to women, young people and theover 60’s.

Of the promotional methods used, a largemajority (76%) said they had heard about AskBristol through online promotion methods,with most of the rest accounted for by wordof mouth, and street interviews carried out bya market research company (both 9%). Thissuggests that most of those registered by themarket research company (around half of allthose registered) have yet to use the system.


The eConsult software did not meet WAI “Level A” compliance when tested inNovember 2004. However the reportindicated that this was due to easily rectifiederrors in the HTML code, and the suppliershave stated they are committed to achievingcompliance.

Accessibility issues were raised by two of ourfield test participants – both of whom found itdifficult to read the text displayed. Neitherwas aware of how to increase text size, and itwould be helpful to enable this by providing itas a menu option.


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7 Bristol City Council “Feedback: Bristol Citizen’s PanelNewsletter” Issue 14, March 2005

• E-panel usability

The usability assessment carried out byBristol when short-listing the softwarehighlighted a number of issues with thenavigation and help options which appearedto have been addressed.

Field testers highlighted difficulties innavigation that have also since beenaddressed, including difficulty finding the sitefrom the main Bristol City Council site.Several testers had serious difficulty with:

• Finding where to suggest newconsultation themes and understandingthe difference between these anddiscussion topics within a forum.

• Finding the registration page.

There were also comments on these aspects,although none prevented the users inquestion from completing their task:

• Lack of a search facility

• The clarity of the text; too much use ofthe passive voice.


There were no issues highlighted about theuse of data or expectations of misuse.However a fairly large minority (21%) of onlinesurvey respondents agreed that “comparedwith other ways of having a say I feel lessconfident about how a name and address Igive on Ask Bristol might be used”.

• Relevance of the e-panel andexpectations of outcomes

The field testers were also asked to commenton their expectations of Ask Bristol. Thesewere quite modest, with general support forthe view that “It is better that it is there thannot”. However there was a high level of

cynicism that Bristol City Council werecapable of acting on the results, and someconcern that Ask Bristol was “windowdressing”; that the efforts the council wasmaking to engage the public throughconsultation were not matched by effectivedecision-making.

There was a consensus that the site neededmore specific and regularly updatedinformation on how the council wasresponding to issues raised. Our testers feltthis might improve its appeal to people notalready politically motivated.

3.4 Results and Outcomes

Responses to discussion topics

There were 698 registered users by the end ofthe pilot period, and the pilot brought a totalof 495 comments in the 10 week periodfollowing its January launch. There were 1017logins from 141 of the people registered,showing the site was visited repeatedly bysome of them.

The most active topic was the first onelaunched; on the City Centre and its future, toconsult on the council’s draft city centrestrategy between January and February 2005.57 people took part in that discussion and257 messages were posted. The other mostactive topics were Cyclists: saints andsinners; Improving Ask Bristol; and Bristol’svision and priorities. In some cases a topicmay get few responses in the form ofcomments but more substantial responses to“votes” or “polls”. This was the case with theseagulls debate, which had 116 people votingfor or against the proposed introduction ofcontrol measures, even though there wereonly 22 comments posted in the discussion of them.


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It is too early to report any response from thecouncil to the pilot consultations; but the AskBristol site includes a commitment to publishthe outcomes.

Who has registered?

The registration details given by people whohave “signed up” to Ask Bristol so far help toassess how demographically representativethey are of the local population. Of the 698registered users demographic data isavailable for approximately half of these. Inpreparation for the launch a market researchcompany was contracted to recruit usersthrough street interviews, and these represent307 of those registered. The Ask Bristolregistration page initially did not ask fordemographic data, and data is only availablefor 60 people who had registered since thiswas introduced. Table 2.6 below comparesthe available data against populationestimates from the Office of NationalStatistics and other sources8.

The age bands used in the Ask Bristolregistration procedure are consistent withthose used for the Citizens Panel butunfortunately differ from those used by themarket research company, neither of whichare consistent with the Office of NationalStatistics age bands. The various age bandsare shown against the nearest ONS bands.

Table 2.6 Demographics of registered Ask Bristol users

Self- Recruited Local registered by Market population

users Research estimatesCompany

Age

17 or 4% – 8% (15–19)under

18–35 37% – 32% (20–34)

36–50 40% – 17% (35–44)

51–65 18% – 25% (45–64)

66 or 2% – 17% (65+)over

16–20 – 21% 8% (15–19)

21–24 – 14% 12% (20–24)

25–34 – 27% 20% (25–34)

45–54 – 21% 14% (45–54)

55–64 – 11% 11% (55–64)

65+ – 6% 17% (65+)

Gender

Male 75% 51% 49%

Female 25% 49% 51%

Disability

Yes 15% Not available 19%

No 85% – 81%

Ethnic origin

White 94% 91% 92%

BME 6% 9% 8%


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8 The sources of local population figures are: -

• Age, gender: Office of National Statistics Population estimates 2003.

• Ethnicity: Office of National Statistics from census returns.

• Disability Rights Commission DRC Disability Briefing: February2003 (Table 8 EMPLOYMENT RATES BY GOVERNMENT OFFICEREGION estimates from the most recent Labour Force Survey (Summer 2002 - Great Britain).

The figures in Table 2.6 suggest that:

Age: Ask Bristol has gained interest amongpeople of all age groups, mostly those agedin their 40’s who are disproportionatelyrepresented, and much less so for olderpeople (65+). Young people aged 16–20 wereover-represented in those recruited by themarket research company. It is not possibleto tell from these figures whether youngpeople are self-registering in proportion to thelocal population.

Gender: those self-registering areoverwhelmingly male.

Disability: people who self-identify asdisabled9 are registering almost in proportionto the local population.

Ethnic origin: People of black or minorityethnic origin are registering almost inproportion to the local population.

3.5 Conclusions

Representation

The Ask Bristol project has strongconnections with the council’s consultationmechanisms. councillors are involved asusers of consultation results and have beeninvolved in supporting the e-panel’sestablishment. Online discussions have not todate had their active involvement but this isanticipated, and would demonstrate to e-panel participants that councillors areinterested in responding to their views.

Engagement

The variety of engagement mechanisms used(online chats, forums, deliberative polling) andthe attention given to presenting these in acoherent sequence is a strength of AskBristol. Further study is needed to assesswhether and how the ongoing engagement ofcitizens in encouraged by this sequencing.

Transparency

In any consultation process it is difficult totrace a direct link from results to subsequentpolicy-making or service changes, given thatelected representatives take a range of otherfactors into account. The Ask Bristol processis intended to lead to publication of theminutes of relevant meetings by way offeedback to participants. This should providean acceptable level of transparency,although its acceptability to citizens shouldbe assessed through ongoing monitoring ofthe outcomes.

Conflict and consensus

As an online forum, Ask Bristol providesopportunities for citizens to form a consensuswith their fellow participants or dissent fromtheir views and the proposals put forward.Those opportunities are realised througheffective facilitation, to actively stimulate andsteer the debate, as well as effectivemoderation of it according to published“conditions of use” and mechanisms forenforcing them. The council’s capacity to dothis has been underpinned by extensiveonline training materials.

The scope of the evaluation and the pilot didnot allow an assessment of the quality of thediscussion. Online forum results are a seriesof interweaving messages that may or maynot be topical, informative, considered, andresponsive to each other or the consultation


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9 The registration form uses the definition of the DisabilityDiscrimination Act 1995 as follows: "A physical or mental impairmentwhich has a substantial or long-term adverse effect on ability to carryout normal day-to-day activities".

question. In offline consultation events, e.g. apublic meeting or focus group discussion, it isnot difficult for those present to form animpression about how well informed adiscussion is or how controversial it turnedout to be, but rarely practical to capture thediscussion and analyse it. Online, thediscussion is already “captured” and manyaspects of it can be analysed. Compared withsurvey analysis there is very little tool supportor advice available to councils, and researchis needed on how best to meet the needs forit. Assessing the quality of results was seenas a likely development in the ongoingmonitoring of Ask Bristol.

Political equality

There was some evidence that Ask Bristol hasattracted participation from citizens who areinclined to civic engagement but have notpreviously been actively engaged.Demographically it appears from the data onthose who have already registered that AskBristol is successfully attracting the interest ofdisabled people and people of Black orMinority Ethnic origin.

Citizens’ panels are conventionally geared toseeking representative responses from surveysamples. This often conflicts with the aim ofpromoting equality of access to engagementprocesses. Bristol’s approach appears to beeffectively combining these aims, althoughany such combination has a potential toexacerbate conflicts between those whofavour one approach or the other.

Community control

The project’s “online community” aspects,encouraging the registered users to add toa profile of their interests and share thesewith their peers, may help generateconfidence among users that their input isvalued. It may also encourage consensusaround shared aims that are independent ofthe council’s consultation aims, reflectingthe “real world” mechanisms for formingcommunities of interest. These are aspectsfor ongoing evaluation as is the aim ofenhancing the “bottom-up” generation ofconsultation topics.


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E-petitioning involved two local authorities,Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames wholed the project, and Bristol City Council. Inthis chapter our emphasis is on Kingston’sexperience although we include relevantmaterial to point out the similarities anddifferences in Bristol.

The e-petitioning project was part of workpackage 2.3 “Information, communication andcitizenship”. According to the Project InitiationDocument10 this is:

“…concerned with improving thedemocratic information and means ofcommunication available to citizens. It willexplore ways in which information andconsultation can be made more relevant toindividual concerns, and ways in whichcitizens can be enabled to raise their ownconcerns within the formal processes of thelocal authority.” (p.40)

Both Kingston and Bristol saw the project’semphasis as being on strengthening anexisting practice. The practice of petitioningis centuries old. The EncyclopaediaBritannica defines it as “a written instrumentdirected to some individual, official,legislative body, or court in order to redress agrievance or to request the granting of afavour”11. Petitioning is long established inEnglish law as a means for parliament toassert rights against the crown. In Kingston,as in other local authorities, any citizen withan interest in the Borough has traditionallyhad a right to raise a petition at a publicmeeting of the council, whether personally orthrough their elected representative.

The development of an online channel forpetitioning in the National Project stemmedfrom the experience of the ScottishParliament, which formally launched its

e-petitioning system in February 2004 after a4 year pilot. The e-petitioning tool wasdeveloped by the International TeledemocracyCentre (ITC) at Napier University to supportthe newly instituted Parliament’s aim ofenhancing participation in democraticdecision-making12.

For the Royal Borough of Kingston uponThames and Bristol City Councils therationale was similar, to broaden access tothe process by providing a new channel tocomplement paper. The tool would providesimilar functions to that of the ScottishParliament, allowing visitors to a website toraise a petition, to read petitions underwayand sign them if they wished; to readbackground information provided by theperson raising a petition (“principalpetitioner”); and to exchange commentsabout the petition in a discussion forum.

The ITC were therefore contracted to workalongside the councils’ e-democracy projectmanagers to localise the e-petitioner tool andembed it in their processes for handlingpetitions, while ensuring it remainedsufficiently generic to be easily adapted to theneeds of other councils. In Kingston this workwas coordinated through the IT Department,and in Bristol through the CorporateConsultation team. As well as deploying thesystem and developing procedures to handlee-petitions, the councils’ role includedpromoting the tool internally (to councilofficers/councillors) and externally (to members of the public).


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10 National Project on Local e-Democracy Project Initiation Documentversion 3.0 January 200411 Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, Available at:http://www.britannica.com12 Macintosh et.al. 2002

4 e-Petitioning Kingston

The e-engagement context in Kingston

The e-petitioning project was one of threeLocal e-Democracy National Project initiativesin Kingston. E-Democracy Project ManagerHolly Robertson explains:

“Kingston has made available a range ofprojects, such as e-petitioner, the work withBBC iCan and online surgeries for youngpeople. E-petitioning and the onlinesurgeries are working with existing services– existing democratic processes – andstrengthening those. Then we are alsousing technology to strengthen access forparticular groups, particularly the onlinesurgeries project for young people. Andthen iCan is more community driven beinginformation and networking based”.

The online initiatives are intended tocomplement Kingston’s existing proceduresfor involving the public in its decision-making.In 2002 Kingston moved to an Executive andScrutiny decision-making structure, alongwith most other English Local Authoritiesfollowing the Local Government Act 2000.The Executive is appointed by the full counciland its decisions are subject to scrutiny by anumber of Overview Panels.

Less typically, Kingston has a system ofNeighbourhood Committees who can makedecisions for their Neighbourhood and alsoscrutinise the Executive’s decisions wherethey affect Neighbourhoods. NeighbourhoodCommittees are also subject to scrutiny bythe Overview Panels. As part of the“modernisation” process the council also putin place a “call-in” mechanism. The OverviewPanels have the power to “call-in” a decisionwhich has been made by the Executive or aNeighbourhood Committee but has yet to beimplemented. This “call-in” power allows theOverview Panel to consider whether adecision is appropriate and recommend that itbe reconsidered.

From the date of the Minutes beingpublished, there are five working days inwhich any decision may be called-in, ifrequested by three (or more) councillors, theChair of an Overview Panel, the Chair of aNeighbourhood Committee affected by aproposal, or by 100 local people who mayraise a petition. So although citizens havetraditionally had the right to present a petitionat a council meeting through their councillor,petitions raised through the “call-in”mechanism in Kingston have significantlyadded weight.

Kingston also has consultation processes,including those that apply under the statutory provisions of Planning, Budgetingand Licensing. These are complemented by a Citizen’s Panel of 1000 residents who are regarded as a “sounding board” for the council.

Bristol’s support for e-petitioning

Chapter 3 on Ask Bristol has alreadyconsidered the general context for e-engagement by Bristol City Council. LikeAsk Bristol, the e-petitioner project there ismanaged by the Corporate Consultationteam’s e-democracy project manager CarolHayward and team manager Stephen Hilton.Hilton recalls:

“Kingston were looking for anotherAuthority, and it caught my interest. There isa petition system in place so it was quiteeasy to put it online. Conceptually, it is easyto put across to people. Bringing it onlinemeans that it gets online virtues, forinstance the ‘discussion’ and ‘tell a friend’features. Also for traditional forms of petitionit is possible that people never know theoutcome of the petition they signed,whereas e-petitions have the strength ofbeing able to display the results.”


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The project has also been enthusiasticallysupported by the council’s Head of LegalServices, Stephen McNamara, who says:

“It can provide another way for people toraise matters with the council if they wantto … it’s a matter of extending choice ... Isee two main benefits – one practical andthe other a possible benefit. The practicalbenefit is it shows that we are doing it, thatBristol City Council has this system thatperhaps other councils do not have and isusing it to meet the targets, as part of thethrust from central government towardsusing online systems to involve citizens.The possible benefit is to have more andmore people engaging with the council, andto avoid the criticisms that we would getfrom very articulate groups if we did not doit ... I’d expect developments like this tobecome more and more important over thenext few years.”

4.2 The e-engagement tools andprocess

Main e-petitioner functions for citizen users

The site was hosted by the developer ITC, but presented as an integral part of the mainRoyal Borough of Kingston site, with linksfrom the home page and the site’s “quicklinks” menu, as well as in the pagesdedicated to Democratic Processes(www.kingston.gov.uk/petitions). The e-petitioner tool presents the followingfunctions, each corresponding to a page orsection of the e-petitioner site:

About e-petitions: This is intended to guideprospective e-petitioners on the proceduresneeded to raise an e-petition and how theserelate to the wider petitioning process.

List of e-petitions: This is a table listing e-petitions, followed by paper petitions, and foreach one a descriptive “subject” or title forthe petition, the “principal petitioner” whoraised it, the closing date beyond whichnames can no longer be added, and it’sstatus (detailed later in this section).

Conditions of Use: This page describes the“rules of engagement”, in terms of the kindscomments that may be removed from thediscussion forum attached to each petition(“offensive and disruptive” ones), and thekinds of promotional activity that arediscouraged (ie spamming).

Petitions Guidance: This page describes thepetitioning process using a “frequently askedquestion” format covering the basic of raisinga petition and the council’s role in acting on it.The page is part of the main council site, andincludes a privacy statement.

Viewing and signing an e-petition

By selecting a hyperlink from a petition listedin the table on the List Petitions page, avisitor to the site can view a further set ofoptions for that petition. The menu changesto provide functions to read and (optionally)“sign” the petition, view the names andneighbourhood/ward of those who havesigned, or join an online discussion. There isan option to view the progress of a petition, interms of the council’s official response once ithas been considered by the committee orofficials it has been sent to. Users may alsoforward the petition to an acquaintance byemail with a “tell a friend” facility.

Visitors to the e-petitioner site who choose toadd their name to a petition are presentedwith an “exit” questionnaire. This allowsusers’ comments and perceptions of theacceptability of the site to be monitored. Theresults of this questionnaire are given later inthis section.


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The Figures 4.1 and 4.2 below show the “ListPetitions” and “Read/Sign Petition” pagesrespectively Figure 4.2 shows the latter withthe screen scrolled down to the “progress page”.

Figure 4.1 E-petitioner page listing currente-petitions

Figure 4.2 E-petitioner page showingprogress of an e-petition

The e-petitioner tool also comprises a set ofadministration functions that in Kingston wereused by Democratic Services officers and inBristol by the Corporate Consultation team.The functions are accessible only toauthenticated users. They include functions tocreate and edit e-petitions and also tomoderate the online discussion and view “exitquestionnaire” responses.


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Developing the e-petition process in Kingston

The e-petitioning project changed thepetitioning process, formalising it to a greaterdegree. As we noted earlier, petitions are anestablished mechanism for citizens to raiseconcerns within the formal decision-makingprocess. So what was new?

Developing the e-petitioning process entaileda need to publish guidelines for the first time,and to put in place a mechanism formanaging new e-petitions ie contacting theprinciple petitioner and the key councilofficers responsible for the matter raised, aswell as updating the site and publishing thecouncil’s formal response to each petition.The addition of a new “channel” forpetitioning and the associated need to guidewebsite visitors on how they might use it, aneed evident from good practice in websiteusability, established the case for publishingGuidelines on petitioning in general (drawingon the precedent of the Scottish Parliamentwhich has similar guidelines).

The revisions to the petitioning processbrought a sharper distinction between thosepetitions that warrant consideration bycouncil committees and those submitted bymembers of the public directly to servicedepartments (such as Housing). Current plansare to limit the process to the former. Asproject manager Holly Robertson explainsthese petitions “are obviously deemedimportant enough for people to go andpresent them – I think its more important toget that process right before trying to tackle amuch larger process.”

From the launch of the pilot in September2004 until early in 2005 the process wasmanaged by her in conjunction with the Headof Democratic Services, who checks each e-petition received is inline with the published

Guidance. With the release of the “admin”tools in December 2004 the staff ofDemocratic Services became more activelyinvolved in the process. As well as enteringthe petition details into the system, their role is to:

1 Lias with the “principal petitioner”, theperson who has raised the petition.

2 Contact the key council officer responsiblefor the subject of the e-petition.

3 Confirm which committee meeting the e-petition will be presented at, and whatagency the e-petition will be referred to.

4 Monitor and moderate the discussionforum linked to each e-petition, to ensurethat comments abide by the Conditions of Use.

5 When the e-petition reaches its closingdate, prepare a “brief” to decision-makerson the e-petition and the support gainedfor it online.

6 If the e-petition is being presented at ameeting, send a copy of the report to thePrincipal Petitioner and remind them thatthey can attend the meeting. Or if the e-petition is referred directly to an officer,send the contact details of the officer

7 Update the “progress” page givingfeedback on any decisions taken about the e-petition.

The process is illustrated in Figures 4.3, 4.4and 4.5 below.


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38

Democratic Servicesnotify the Principle

Petitioner by email thate-petition is live and

advise on what actionwill happen after it closes

Democratic Servicesenter e-petition details

into site’s admin system.

Also enter “feedback”about what will happenafter e-petition closes.

(RBK site – Admin)

e-petition is live andavailable for collection

signatures

(RBK site)

These details includePetition titlePrincipal Petitioner’sdetailsFull petition textClosing dateAdditional informationStarting comment.

Also emailed to e-democracy projectmanager.

E-democracy projectmanager on hand tosupport.

* If phone numberincorrect/ email notprovided, a letter mustbe sent to addressrequesting confirmation.

Figure 4.3 Initiating an e-petition inKingston

Figure 4.4 Maintaining an e-petition inKingston

Notes:

• People can run paper petitions and e-petitions on thesame topic at the same time.

• Multiple petitions on the same topic are discouraged.If e-petitions are submitted on the same topic at thesame time, a joint petition should be suggested. If it isa campaign issue that the council supports (eg PostOffices), the council could support the e-petition.

Democratic Servicescontact the key council

officer responsible for thesubject of the e-petition

Confirm if e-petition willbe presented at ameeting and what

agency the e-petition willbe referred to.

Democratic Servicesphone/email* the

Principle Petitioner toconfirm details.

Also discuss the e-petition contents if it

does not meet guidancerequirements

Democratic Servicesreview the petition

contents in line withpublished guidance

Form is emailed toDemocratic Services

Principle Petitionerenters petition details in

online form

Target timeframe forpublishing petition:

3 days

(RBK site)

An e-petition will need to be maintained if:

• An extension to the closing date is requested by thePrincipal Petitioner.

• Additional information relating is requested to beposted by the Principal Petitioner.

• Referral (‘feedback’) details have changed for the e-petition.

• Inappropriate comments need to be removed fromthe discussion forum.

Democratic services will use the site’s administrationarea to:

• Extend the closing date of a e-petition (through EditPetitions).

• Add/change information to the e-petition’s‘background information’ field (through EditPetitions).

• Add/change information to the e-petition’s‘feedback’ field (through Edit Petitions).

• Delete inappropriate comments (through Discussion).

E-petition is live on siteand available for

collection of signatures(RBK site)

Principle Petitionermakes request for

changes to e-petition

or

Democratic Servicesteam become aware of

change to how the e-petition will be

referred/presented

Democratic Serviceslocate e-petition in admin

site and make/saverequired changes

(RBK site admin)

Changes to e-petitionare live and on site

(RBK site)

Bristol’s e-petitioning process

In most of its detail the process in Bristolfollows the pattern established in Kingston.There are some important differenceshowever. E-petitioning has been managed bythe Corporate Consultation Team, rather thanthe Cabinet Support Team whose performsimilar duties to Kingston’s DemocraticServices. Corporate Consultation havedeployed e-petitioning on the basis that asuccessful pilot may be handed over toCabinet Support.

The process of initiating an e-petition issimilar, and the e-Democracy ProjectManager has been responsible for liaisingwith principle petitioners and routing the e-petition to an appropriate office. In addition,the relevant councillors have been notified in Bristol.

When necessary e-petitions have beenreferred to the Legal Services department toensure they comply with the publishedGuidance, which (like Kingston) wasformulated as a response to the e-petitioningproject. Head of Legal Services StephenMcNamara explains:

“The role of Legal Services is to act as afilter, for example if a petition uses racistlanguage or is defamatory. It’s not really anadvisory role as far as the petitioners areconcerned, though we do advise on moregeneral issues – for example we have justbeen discussing what should happenduring election time because petitions canbe political and it affects what the councilcan do constitutionally, but we decided that petitions should not be considered part of that – it is the council facilitating apublic process.”


39Figure 4.5 Closure of an e-petition in

Kingston

e-petition’s closing datepasses

e-petition automaticallyno longer collecting

signatures and statuschanges to

“To Be Submitted”

Democratic Servicesenter in updated details

about outcome of e-petition(s) on site

Democratic Servicesemail or post

Principle Petitionerdetails of closure:

If e-petition is beingpresented at a meeting,

send a copy of the reportto the Principal Petitioner

and remind them thatthey can attend the

meeting

orIf the e-petition is

referred directly to anofficer, send the contact

details of the officer

ITC prepare e-petitionbrief and extract

signatures list

Send list to DemocraticServices

This process will need to be completed byDemocratic Servicesover time.

Implementing and promoting e-petitioner

The e-petitioner site is, as we have said, a“localised” version of a system alreadyoperational on the website of the ScottishParliament (and also hosted by ITC). This wasnot however simply a matter of the pagelayout or the descriptive text and instructions.The main effort lay in meeting the need forthe administration functions, in meetingaccessibility requirements, and in providing amore modular architecture suited to the needfor the software to be tailored to the varyingneeds of local authorities.

The Scottish Parliament e-petitioner system ismaintained by ITC as a “managed service”,an arrangement that could not meet theneeds of the National Project tools to besustainable beyond the life of the project.Kingston and Bristol required facilities for theirown officers to administer their respectivesystems. These facilities needed to be usableby officers without any necessity for them tohave skills in web page maintenance.Implementation was made more complex bythe conflicting demands of localising thesoftware to the (occasionally differing) needsof Kingston and Bristol councils, and ensuringthat it remained sufficiently generic to beeasily adapted to other authorities at the endof the National Project.

The public site was launched in mid-September 2004, with the administrativefacilities following in mid-December.Accessibility was among the mainrequirements of Kingston and Bristol. Prior toits launch, the automated accessibilitychecker “Bobby” (http://bobby.watchfire.com)was used to check e-petitioner forcompliance with international webaccessibility standards.

To promote the site, Kingston commissionedleaflets and posters bearing a quote fromnovelist Gunther Grass “The job of a citizen isto keep his mouth open”. These weredistributed around public libraries and othercouncil sites. The e-petitioner publicity wasalso used in BBC iCan networking events.Bristol’s promotion of e-petitions similarlyincluded leaflets, and advertising in localnewspapers and freesheets. The project alsoreceived national and local press coverage inboth Kingston and Bristol. councillors in eachauthority were informed about the servicethrough e-mails and presentations.

Briefing decision-makers on the results

The written formalisation of petitionprocedures extends to the presentation of e-petitions to Council Members at committeemeetings. Petitions may be presented at ameeting on paper complete with theaccompanying names, and recorded in theminutes. Normally however they are notconsidered by Members until a subsequentmeeting when they are presented as anagenda item rather than in their entirety.

The need for a Briefing report detailing an e-petition and the support gained for it duringits time collecting signatures on the website,stems in part from the day-to-day formalitiesof committee meetings and their servicing(i.e. paper documents rather than web pagesare circulated to individuals who refer tothem during meetings). The format of thereport was proposed by ITC, drawing ontheir experience in producing similar reportsto the Public Petitions Committee of theScottish Parliament.

An example of the Brief is reproduced belowin Figure 4.6. (The address of the principalpetitioner has been omitted for the purpose of this report).


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41

Date Prepared: 18th February 2005

E-petition summary details

Title:Extension of Consultation on Creating Capacity withinKingston Special SchoolsPetitioners:The e-petition was raised by: Mary Macan on behalf ofMAPS (Parents/carers of children with specialneeds/disabilities), Carers' Support Worker, KingstonCarers Network, KingstonDates e-petition opened and closed:The e-petition was raised on 2nd February 2005 andwas closed for signatures on 18th February 2005, afterrunning for a period of 16 days.Statistical overview of signatures:A total of 41 signatories signed this e-petition; all ofwhom were within the Royal Borough of Kingston uponThames area.The distribution of the petitioners by area was:

Kingston Town Neighbourhood 7Surbiton Neighbourhood 18Maldens and Coombe Neighbourhood 9South of the Borough Neighbourhood 5Other – Kingston 2

Validity of signatures:41 names were entered into the e-petition database,and none of these names had to be removed from thelist of signatures.

Full e-petition text

1) Many parents of children with special educationalneeds who are, will, or could be affected by theproposals have not been informed about theconsultation process or invited to take part.

2) Inadequate notice for the consultation meetings atBedelsford, Dysart and St. Philips (e.g. parents atBedelsford were given less than one weeks notice).

3) Too short a time period allowed for responding tothe consultation document.

We request that a fuller consultation be carried out withall parents of special needs children in the borough,including those on the disabilities and SEN registers, andthat the consultation period is extended.

Additional information provided bythose raising the e-petition

The Royal Borough of Kingston is reviewing itsprovision for children and young people with SpecialEducational Needs and is carrying out a consultationwith key stakeholders.The proposals laid down in thedocument will have far reaching consequences for manySEN children and young people in and out of theborough.We are concerned that there is inadequateconsultation of parents with Special Educational Needspupils.For a copy of the consultation document, visitwww.kingston.gov.uk/education/creating_capacity_within_kingston_special_schools.htm

Synopsis of comments to the site

This section normally provides an analysis of thecomments entered into the integrated discussion forumduring the collection of signatures. However for thispetition only one comment was posted, and is given infull here:Mary Macan 02/02/2005 10:17 The proposals laiddown in "Creating Capacity Within Kingston SpecialSchools" will have far reaching consequences for manychildren with special educational needs.We believe thatthat everyone concerned with, or interested in, specialeducational needs should be able to participate in theconsultation, and to be able to do so within a reasonabletime frame.

E-petition Brief for Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames Council

4.3 Actors’ experiences andexpectations

This section summarises interviews, fieldtests and online questionnaire responses thatdescribe the experiences and expectations ofthe various actors in e-petitioning. Theseinclude the councillors and service managersinvolved in e-petitioning, the system’sadministrators, and citizens.

Citizen’s experiences and perspectives arediscussed first, beginning with principalpetitioners, then the responses of othercitizens on the usability, usefulness andacceptability of the tool and key dimensionsof the petitioning process.

Principal petitioners

Two principal petitioners were interviewed forthe evaluation, one from Kingston and theother from Bristol. One petition concerned aschool crossing and the other a plannedtelecoms mast. Neither of these petitions wasassociated with any existing organised group,rather the petitioners were individual citizenswith concerns they wanted to raise throughthe petitioning process13.

We summarise what these e-petitioners hadto say regarding:

• Background to the e-petition

• Reasons for favouring e-petitioning over paper

• Publicising the e-petition

• Involvement of councillors

• Clarity of the guidelines

• Responsiveness of the Council

• Expectations of petition impact

Background to the petition

Kingston resident Maria Samuels decided tostart her petition after receiving informationfrom a telecom company that they wereapplying for permission to erect a mobilephone mast in her neighbourhood. Her firstinclination had been to get more informationfrom the planning department, but onsearching the website she could not find anycontact names. However, she did find the e-petition system, and received help from e-democracy project manager HollyRobertson on setting it up.

Bristol school pupil Rosie Harding wanted todraw attention to the dangers of a roadcrossing, after she had been hit by a car onher way home from school. Her mother Maryhad supported the petition and wasinterviewed by us:

“Petitions are covered in various subjectsin school, so she had been thinking about apetition when e-petitions launched, andthought that they would be a good way ofdoing it… It was not difficult to set up,Rosie is thirteen and set it up herself.”

Reasons for favouring e-petitioning over paper

Both e-petitioners saw the advantage assimplicity and convenience compared withpetitioning on paper. For Maria Samuels thepossibility to petition the council online madethe difference between doing it and not doingit: “If you are in full-time work, and if you havea small child, e-petitioning makes it easier toget involved in the local community. It gives avoice to those in such a position, who wouldotherwise be silent on local politics”.

Similarly for Harding “my daughter possiblywould not have done it otherwise. It waspurely because she thought that e-petitioning


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13 The names used here are pseudonyms.

would be an easy way to go about it.” Thisinitial enthusiasm was however tempered bythe effort needed to publicise the petition.

Publicising e-petitions

In both cases the e-petitioners quicklyappreciated the necessity to draw attention totheir petitions. “It is a good tool, but it needsadvertisement” says Samuels who initiallyrelied on word of mouth among friends, butwent on to produce a leaflet and distribute itlocally. This appeared to generate furtherinterest in signing her petition.

In the Hardings’ experience the demands ofpublicising an e-petition had made themambivalent about its benefits:

“That is one of the disappointing aspectsof e-petitions. With a paper petition, it iseasier to get signatures by asking people toread the petition and let them decidewhether they would like to sign or not. Withan e-petition, you have the problem ofdirecting them to a website in order to sign.This can lead to people simply forgettingabout it. For instance, my sister’s childrengo or are about to go to the school; I askedher frequently to sign the e-petition, but shedid not get around to it. If it had been apaper petition, they all would have signed.So you lose some of the immediacy of thepetition by doing it online.”

This was despite efforts to publicise the location of the petition on the e-petitioner site:

“The web address was included on aschool newsletter, but there is a tendencyfor parents to read only those bits that arerelevant to their children and then put it toone side. You would have to be extremelyinterested in order to go back to it to findthe web address. Then, the address is long

and complicated and not immediatelyobvious – it would help to have a simplerweb address. The fact that a paper petitioncan support e-petitions should be mademore obvious. If there were a facility toprint-off petition forms that could be usedas a paper petition it would make it easierfor people to collect signatures.”

The system’s capability to “tell a friend” was used but was limited to known emailacquaintances:

“We used it to tell my family and peoplewith children at the school, and Rosie usedit to ask her school friends. The people wecontacted in that way did sign. This isanother contrast with paper petitions,where you approach people you don’t knowbut think will sign; with e-petitions you onlyhave access to those you know really well.”

There were also some comments on thecouncils’ efforts to publicise the e-petitionersystem. Samuels and Harding had bothbecome aware of the system through theseefforts; Samuels through promotion onKingston’s home page, Harding through afeature in the Bristol Evening Post. Accordingto Samuels:

“E-petition needs to have its profileraised, though this will possibly increase the number of eccentric petitions that get submitted.”

In her view e-petitions should be a channel used;

“as a last resort … otherwise there will betoo many e-petitions on the systemresulting in a drain on the council’sresources and a diminishing of theimportance of petitions if used too freely.They should be on issues that concern alarge number of the local population.”


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Involvement of councillors

Neither of the e-petitioners had had anycontact with their local councillor regardingtheir petition. Their expectations of thebenefits of this were modest. Kingston’sMaria Samuels had “no strong feelings” but felt that:

“Individuals and council should work together. Councillors should beautomatically notified when someone intheir neighbourhood raises a petition. Itwould be good if councillors becameinvolved in the discussion section”.

Bristol e-petitioner Mary Harding had lowerexpectations, framed by a perception thatthere was little to be gained from contactingBristol councillors.

“One of the problems of Bristol CityCouncil running e-petitions is that peopleare generally so negative about them.People do not consider approaching thecouncil as being a good first port of call –rather more as a last resort”.

The e-petitioner system makes it easier inprinciple for a citizen to raise a petition andhave it presented without having any directcontact with councillors at all. If it is good forlocal democracy for councillors and theirconstituents to discuss their petitions there isa need for effective protocols for suchdiscussions to take place. Where a council orits Members have acquired a poor reputation,deserved or not, this may be perpetuated inthe absence of a proactive follow-up by councillors.

Clarity of the guidelines

Both e-petitioners were satisfied that theguidance given setting up an e-petition waseasy to follow, but would have appreciatedmore specific guidance on what they couldexpect by way of a response from servicedepartments. There was also lack of clarityover the significance or otherwise of thenumber of signatures raised and what bearingthis would have on the councils’ response.

Kingston’s e-petitioner was unaware of therole of Democratic Services in responding topetitions, intending instead to pursue thematter with the Planning department. Shewas uncertain about their role and believedthere was a need for clearer guidance on howdepartments would respond.

Responsiveness of the Council

In Kingston, the help Maria Samuels receivedin setting up her e-petition wasovershadowed by uncertainty over whatwould happen after its submission to thecouncil for consideration. Her petition was ona subject covered by a planning application,but she was unaware of its relationship toplanning procedures or its likely impact on theoutcome (at this point she had had nocontact with planning officers).

“It would be helpful if there were somefollow-up for those signing (via e-mail) sothat they know where the petition is goingand how it is doing. This would create theimpression that petitioning works, andwould thereby encourage people to use thesystem. Presently, there is a perception thepetition disappears into the ether.”


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Bristol’s Mary Harding thought principalpetitioners should be given clearer guidance on when and how the petitionwould be presented.

“This is possibly where it all falls down.After the closing date had passed, the nextstep was to present the petition, but it allseemed a bit vague…we still haven’t gotaround to making that decision. It is just leftthere lying. It needs effective advice uponwhat to do after the petition has closed.”

The e-petitioning process requires clarity onwhether the onus lies on the principlepetitioners to “push” their petition through thesystem or on the council to proactively guidethem through the next steps.

Expectations of petition impact

Both Kingston’s Maria Samuels and Bristol’sMary Harding had modest hopes for theirpetitions. Samuels asks:

“It is difficult to say how effective it isbefore learning what impact it has had onthe planning application. It has attractedfifty signatures, but will that be sufficient?”

And Harding says:

“I would expect the council to consider it,and advise upon the result of the outcome.I’m not particularly hopeful…but at leastthey could advise us on the outcome of thepetition’s presentation… The more waysthat people can access the council thebetter, but it won’t mean anything if thecouncil don’t publish any results; it justbolsters their negative image. Unlesspeople can see what the outcome of theiractions is, then I don’t think they will beparticularly confident in it.”

4.4 Citizens of Kingston andBristol

Citizens’ perspectives were obtained fromfield tests and interviews in both Kingstonand Bristol, and from “exit questionnaires”completed by people after signing an onlinepetition. Conversely, the field test participantshad mostly not used e-petitioner.

We begin by considering how representativethe participants were (and of what), beforesummarising their views in terms of:


• Clarity of the guidance and instruction

• E-petitioner usability


• Relevance of e-petitioning andexpectations of outcomes

Field test and questionnaire participation

Citizens participated in field tests and in an“exit questionnaire” that was made availableon the site for internal evaluation. We haveincluded demographic details of the exitquestionnaire respondents so that these canbe compared with those of the localpopulations (Kingston-upon-Thames 148,000;Bristol 381,000).

There were 6 field test participants inKingston and 12 in Bristol. This is not ofcourse sufficient to be representative of thelocal populations, but these tests aimed toexplore the nature of the issues citizens foundrelevant rather than to quantify them instatistically generalisable terms.Characteristics of the field test participantswere as shown in table 4.1 below:


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Table 4.1 Field test participants

Kingston Bristol

Age

16–29 0 2

30–44 2 4

45–59 1 5

60–74 3 0

75+ 0 1

Gender

Male 2 9

Female 4 3

Disability

Yes 0 4

No 6 8

Ethnic origin

White 6 11

BME 0 1

Also important is the level of experience thatthe participants had of the Internet, and ofpetitioning and other forms of civicengagement:

Kingston

• 5 of the 6 said they used the Internet more than once a week, the other aboutonce a week.

• None had signed an e-petition, and twohad signed a paper petition “once or twice” previously.

• None had held responsibilities in a localorganisation, such as being a committeemember, raising funds, organising events ordoing clerical work.

Bristol

• 10 of the 12 said they used the Internetmore than once a week, the other 2 aboutonce a week.

• 1 had signed an e-petition, 7 had neversigned a paper petition, 4 “once or twice”and 1 “many times previously.”

• 6 had held responsibilities in a localorganisation, such as being a committeemember, raising funds, organising events or doing clerical work.

The differences between the two sites reflectsthe way the participants were recruited. InKingston, tests were carried out in a publiclibrary with library users who wereapproached as they exited the library. TheBristol tests were carried out with a pre-invited group drawn mostly from the council’sdatabase of volunteer website testers, two ofwhom also happened to be registered usersof Ask Bristol and one a member of theCitizens Panel. One person was recruitedfrom those the e-petition signers who hadindicated they would be willing to becontacted.

The exit questionnaire was completed by 478of the 890 e-petition signers in Bristol and100 of 173 signers in Kingston. These resultsare therefore likely to be representative ofthose people who visited the site and signedan e-petition. The results will not of courseinclude any site users who visited but founde-petitioner uninteresting, or who found it toodifficult to use, since they will not have signedan e-petition. These results are therefore likelyto under-report usability issues.


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Table 4.2 Demographic characteristics ofe-petition signers14

Age

Under 25 9 23 13 23(16–29) (16–29)

25–50 66 23 63 23(30–44) (30–44)

Over 50 25 35 24 35

(45+) (45+)

Gender

Male 48 50 62 49

Female 52 50 38 51

Disability

Yes 9 17 4 19

No 89 83 94 81

Ethnic origin

White 86 85 86 92

BME 7 15 6 8

The age divisions used in the exitquestionnaire are unfortunately not consistentwith those used in ONS survey returns, butallow a crude comparison to be drawn. It isclear from the responses that people whosigned e-petitions during the pilot period wererelatively more likely to be aged 25–50, andless likely to be disabled. In Bristol they wereslightly more likely to be male. The responserate from members of Black or Minority Ethnicgroups appears to be proportionate to thelocal population, although it is difficult to beconclusive since 7% of the respondents inboth sites declined to answer questions on ethnicity.

The limited life of the pilot makes anycomparison of e-petitioners with thepopulation as a whole rather difficult. Thecharacteristics of e-petition signers are likelyto reflect the nature of the petitions. But giventhe relatively small number of these raised inthe pilot period we cannot assume they arerepresentative of local concerns.

Relevance of e-petitioning and expected impact

The e-petitioner system’s appeal in the moregeneral sense is likely to depend on whethercitizens find the petitioning process a relevantway to raise their concerns. We thereforeasked the field test participants about theirexperiences and expectations. The viewsexpressed about e-petitioner were almost allpositive, while expectations of the petitioningprocess having a positive outcome rangedfrom mildly hopeful to highly sceptical.

All field testers replied to questions abouttheir expectations by referring to the ability tosee results published in the Progress page –not just as a means to follow up the progressof petitions they supported but as a “guide towhat might happen”. This suggests that thecredibility of the system will depend on theclarity of the outcomes and the effectivenessof tracking and publishing these outcomes.


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14 The sources of local population figures are:

Age, gender: Office of National Statistics Population estimates 2002.The figures shown are an average of those for Bristol City and Kingston-upon-Thames (which only differ by a few percentage points).

Ethnicity: Office of National Statistics from census returns.

Disability Rights Commission DRC Disability Briefing: February 2003 (Table 8 EMPLOYMENT RATES BY GOVERNMENT OFFICE REGIONestimates from the most recent Labour Force Survey (Summer 2002 - Great Britain).

E-p

etition

Local

Po

pulatio

n

E-p

etition

Local

Po

pulatio

n

Kingston % Bristol %

Expectations of the petitioning process wereinevitably bound up with local politics andviews regarding the competence of thecouncils. We found that expectations werelower among the Bristol field testers, wherethere was a consensus that the council didnot “get things done” quickly enough.

Outcomes aside, field testers saw thebenefits of e-petitioner in terms ofconvenience. The majority of participantsapplied this to raising petitions and signingthem. For some the added convenienceextended to the discussion facility:

“If comments are easily available onlineyou’ve got a clear record of what peopleare thinking or saying. The usual system isto get a leaflet through the door saying I’mworried about ‘X’, can you come to ameeting about ‘X’. And If I can’t bebothered going to the meeting I’m notgoing to find out about it, but at least if I’vegot it here [on e-petitioner] I can find outabout it in my own time and at my ownconvenience, and maybe engage in somediscussion about it without leaving myhouse.. because I might have a vagueinterest in it but I’d think oh God I can’t bebothered at this time of night because it’snot that important to me this issue. Buthaving it online that’s very convenient isn’t it?

The information included in e-petitioner aboutthe issues raised and about the principalpetitioner was seen as an advantage overpaper by some participants. However the e-petitions available during the evaluationprovided limited examples of this, promptingtwo of the Bristol participants to commentthat face-to-face discussion was an easierway to become interested in and informedabout the petition issue.

Participants typically saw the beneficiaries as“the computer literate” and disabled people“who cannot get out and about”.

In keeping with the experiences of principalpetitioners, field testers saw publicity as themain drawback compared with paper and in-person campaigning. They expected tohear about petitions through door-to-door or street campaigning. As one Kingstonparticipant commented:

“…distributing a petition by hand is a lotmore likely to get more signatures. Becauseyou can actually see it.. and the urgency.They tell you it’s happening now and it isurgent to sign it whereas on the Internetmaybe people will not go to check it every day.”

Accessibility issues

Accessibility testing was carried out using the“Bobby” automated test against the WebAccessibility Initiative “AA” standard.However disabilities do not conform tostandards and so no such testing canguarantee that everyone will find a siteaccessible. We were interested therefore inwhether disabled users experienceddifficulties.

The exit questionnaire showed that disabledpeople were less likely to be among thoseresponding than would be expected if e-petitioner signers were representative of thelocal population. This may indicateaccessibility problems, although few wereactually mentioned – either in thequestionnaire respondents or by the field testparticipants with disabilities. The need for thedesign to maximise accessibility wasmentioned by one exit-questionnairerespondent. One more specific commentswas made by a Bristol field-test participantwho said there was insufficient contrastbetween text and the page background.


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Clarity of the guidance and instructions

All field testers were asked whether thepetitions guidance and the e-petitioninstructions, were clear enough. The testersmostly experienced no major problemsunderstanding them, but three issues werehighlighted:

• Meaning of the e-petitions status.

• Unfamiliarity of the location options.

• Too formal language in the petitions guidance.

Taking these in turn:

Meaning of the e-petition status:

The List Petitions page shows the currentstatus of each e-petition. Field testers wereoften observed to misinterpret what the statusmeant. The petition guidance defines thevarious statuses, however the definitions arenot apparent unless a user refers to that page.There should be clearer linking of the two.

Unfamiliarity of location options:

When signing an e-petition people are askedto state their “location” by selecting from adrop-down list on the Read/Sign page. Theoptions were not thought by Bristolparticipants to sufficiently reflect locationsthat people would know or recognise (inBristol council ward names are used, and inKingston neighbourhoods). It was alsonoticeable in Kingston field tests that usersfrequently hesitated before selecting aneighbourhood. Similarly all testers entered“Surrey” in the optional County field, althoughKingston is no longer part of this county inpolitical terms. It seems likely that, as oneparticipant said; many users will simply selectthe first option on this list. If accuracy ishighly valued here it would be preferable to

omit the field and automatically matchaddresses or postcodes against known datarelating these to wards.

Too formal language:

In Bristol the petitions guidance was felt bysome field testers and questionnairerespondents to be too formal and lacking in“plain English”. Several participants suggestedrevising the headings to make it clearer whatquestions they were aiming to answer.

Usability issues

The main usability issue arising from the fieldtests and the exit questionnaire was thediscuss petition function, which was notreadily recognisable. This was the onlyserious issue within e-petitioner (i.e. the onlyone where the participants could notcomplete a task without assistance). Minorissues were found with the List Petition andProgress pages. However finding e-petitionerwas also a serious problem on the Bristol CityCouncil site.

The discuss petition function is a main menuoption, appearing at the top of the ViewPetition page. However only one of the fieldtesters recognised that “discuss petition” wasa facility to comment on the petition shownon the page and read other people’scomments. Unless a user recognises thisfunction immediately they are unlikely to doso at all since to read the petition text meansscrolling down the page, when the main menubecomes hidden from view.


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Position of e-petitioner in relation to other e-engagement sites:

Most field testers had severe difficulty findinge-petitioner in the Bristol City Council site.Some also commented that there should be alink from the “Ask Bristol” e-consultation siteto e-petitioner. This has now been addressedand a link put in place.

Order of petitions:

Several Bristol field testers commented that itwould be useful to be able to sort the ListPetitions page in alphabetical order, or byissue or location.

Progress page:

Some users appeared disoriented whenfollowing links to “check the progress page”,as this is not in fact a page but a section atthe foot of the View Petition page.

Trust and security issues:

No major concerns were voiced aboutsecurity of the data entered or trust in itsproper handling, although one participant said that paper petitions felt “more private”than e-petitions.

The encouragement given to children to signe-petitions should be considered in light ofthe possibility that under-13 year olds arebeing prompted to divulge contact detailsonline. We recommend that children are onlyencouraged to do so under adult supervision,and with the context and purpose fullyexplained, such as in a school or communitygroup setting.

Schools should be given specific guidelineson e-petitioning. As Cllr Ian McDonaldpointed out there is a risk of e-governmentsites being “spoofed” (fake sites set up tomimic the original) which in this case mightinvolve e-petitioner sites being set up togather contact details for nefarious purposes.

Councillors’ involvement and expectations

councillors support for and involvement in e-petitioning was clear in both Kingston uponThames and Bristol. In Kingston, councillorswere “principal petitioner” of 3 of 6 e-petitionsin the 6 month pilot period, and presented (onbehalf of residents) 4 of the 9 paper petitionspresented at meetings raised in the sameperiod. Similarly in Bristol, councillors puttheir name to 3 of the 9 e-petitions and 17 of22 paper petitions.

However the nature of this support is notquite as clear as these figures suggest.According to the officers concerned manypetitions that councillors present at meetings,and are recorded as having been submittedby them, were not initiated by them. Ratherthe councillors present them on behalf of theindividuals who raise them.

The views of councillors were sought toexplore the nature of their support forpetitioning and views on e-petitioning. On therecommendation of the project managers weinterviewed Kingston councillors IanMcDonald (Liberal Democrat) and Kevin Davis(Conservative), and in Bristol councillor SueO’Donnell (Liberal Democrat). The themessummarised below are drawn from bothpilots, although we identify differencesbetween Bristol and Kingston in the text.

Why councillors support petitions

Councillors occupy a dual role. As KingstonCllr Ian McDonald reminded us they may beconsidered both as representatives of thecouncil (Executive or Scrutiny) to the people,and as representatives of the people to thecouncil. The councillors we interviewedregarded supporting their constituents’petitions as an important element of the latter role.


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For Cllr McDonald the councillor’s role in petitioning is also as an actively engaged citizen.

“In general, often those who raisepetitions are those already involved inpolitics or who have a concern for the localcommunity and some may becomerecruited into politics that way. Eventually,you find that in any given ward, those whogo around collecting petitions, or servingthe community, are often involved in one ofthe political parties…From a communitypartnership perspective, if I had an issuewith some particular group (e.g. disabled,elderly, youth) should I leave it to them toorganise petitions? Often they will come tous with an issue they want us to adopt andso petitions may be precluded bycommunities working together…”

Petitions are often raised in the name of acouncillor, when approached by a constituentaiming to raise public support for theirposition on a local issue. Supporting apetition is for councillors a means todemonstrate that they are “in touch” withlocal concerns. A petition is a means ofrepresenting local interests, joining thecouncillors role as firstly an advocate of thepeople to the council and secondly of thecouncil’s executive (or scrutiny) to the people.This “balancing act” extends to the finaldecisions taken on a petition issue. CllrMcDonald again:

“A petition has to be more than a list ofnames; it is an indicator to those ingovernment that an issue has to be lookedat and legislation has to be examined. Thenumber of signatures does not necessarilyindicate the strength of feeling in an area.Quite often people will sign a petition if it isthrust under their noses, sign it and forgetabout it, and even sign it again later.Conversely, you could have a petition with

just five names, served by a small group,which could have more far-reachingconsequences. A petition is a way ofgrabbing your attention, but the number ofsignatures should not necessarily make thatpetition more valid than another one. Onthe council, we reckon that ten signaturesare sufficient to indicate a valid case – wemay even look into the issue before thepetition is presented. You do get situationswhere, after considerable consultation alarge majority of the population support aparticular policy, a small group raises apetition to fight this policy, no matter howmany signatures they get from that group, itshould not affect the going-ahead of thepolicy that is in the interests of the majority.The petition might cause you to re-jig thepolicy slightly to compensate that group,but not abandon it.”

The discuss petition online forum was seen as a vital part of the tool by councillors, andone that should be complemented by face-to-face discussion between petitioners andpublic, preferably including their councillor.For Cllr Kevin Davis the online opportunitieswere more limited:

“The petition only carries a narrowdefinition of the issue, and you get a clearer understanding of why people wouldsign through talking with them – which islost with an e-petition. Conducting a paper petition gets to a wider range ofpeople’s issues.”

It is tempting to think of a petition as simply acontainer for “an issue”, or perhaps a positionon an issue, with the contents sealed whenthe petition is raised, and names then addedbefore delivery to the local authority forprocessing. Framing e-petitions in this waywould underestimate the extent to which apetition is used by its advocates to elaborateand re-present issues that the petition raises.


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That is, by relating the text to other concernsraised through discussion with potentialsupporters and enemies, the “principalpetitioner” or councillor may gain anunderstanding of why the petition is important to others, and potentially make a better case for it.

Benefits of paper and e-petitions

Effective publicity and discussion were seenas strengths of paper, and convenience themain strength of e-petitions. Paper wasconsidered preferable for the more localisedpetitions. Cllr McDonald:

“E-petitioning in many respects is notappropriate at that level. Petitions arequicker to organise and set up, just a bit ofpaper going from door to door. The othertypes of petition we get are those affectinga larger area, for example when there arechanges to a bus route”. Wider issuesaffecting the whole borough and those thatare wider still are where e-petitions “comeinto their own.”

The councillors emphasised the need for theonline and offline methods to be used tocomplement each other. Cllr Davis suggestedthat principal petitioners should beautomatically offered a printable version oftheir e-petition from a template (a point alsosuggested by one of the principal petitioners).This twin-track approach was also neededbecause of limitations on access. Bristol Cllr Sue O’Donnell summarised this point:

“One of the roles of the councillor is toprovide help, and mine is an ethnicallydiverse ward and there are certain groupsand organisations – ethnic and religious –that find it difficult to get accurate,adequate representation. And as they getaccess to technology, this presents achance to give them that representation – itis much more inclusive.”

Overall expectations

The potential of e-petitioning was seen bycouncillors in terms of their councils wideningaccess, and beginning an ongoing dialoguewith citizens who have signed petitions andgiven consent to be kept informed. Cllr Davis drew parallels with the planningprocess, where objectors to proposals arekept informed of decisions, and stressed the opportunity for interaction withcouncillors. councillors also stressed the need for complementary approaches, andthat petitioning should not replace proactive action by the council to learn aboutlocal issues.

Cllr McDonald also highlighted potentialtechnical pitfalls:

“Petition titles have key words that arepicked up by people’s ‘Spam’ detectors. So no-one will receive petitions about ‘Sex shops’, or a drug-related issue (e.g. pharmacy opening hours), as theSpam detector would filter these out. Thereis also a problem with mimicking the e-petitioner source, and most councillors andMPs have had their e-mails hijacked. Thesesources then get added to the list ofpeople’s barred contacts, so any petitioninformation sent to them would be banned.”

Democratic and Legal Services: Managersand Administrators

The petitioning process is monitored inKingston by the Head of Democratic Servicesand in Bristol by the Head of Legal Services.Both were interviewed for the evaluation andsaw added value in e-petitioning fromconvenience to citizens and the potential to be more responsive to issues they raise. They also highlighted risks that should be monitored.


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Kingston’s Andrew Bessant:

“It is an exciting thing to do, and to be atthe forefront of these things. But it requiresadjustment and reviewing as you go – youcannot expect to get it right first time.”

E-petitioner may enhance responsivenessbecause of the greater visibility of petitionswithin the council:

“You can see from the web site that apetition is raising an issue that you hadn’trealised was a problem; one reaction mightbe to wait for the petition to be submitted,but it might be that you want to tackle theissue straightaway.”

Both heads of departments’ monitoring role is to act as a filter, judging when apetition is inappropriately worded for thecouncil to respond to, for example if it isracist or defamatory.

It was thought possible that e-petitioningcould result in a potentially greater volume of work managing petitions which, if dramatic, might test the departments’capacity to respond effectively. For Kingston’spetitioning administrators it was too soon tobe able to predict the impact on their work,but they thought it likely that recent licensinglegislation could stimulate more petitions as would the forthcoming local and general elections.

Service departments’ involvement andexpectations

We approached officers in servicedepartments on the recommendation of theproject managers. These were departmentswith a history of handling paper petitions;Housing in Kingston, and Planning andEnvironmental Services in both Kingston and Bristol.

In each case the e-petitioner project wasviewed as a positive development in terms ofconvenience, provided that paper continuedto be an alternative. For Housing, the majorityof petitions were mostly on issues affecting alimited number of households, and handledas correspondence. For council tenantsaccess was a key issue since they werethought unlikely to be willing or able to affordit, especially to council sites. The moreplausible scenario was to make accessavailable in housing offices.

Officers from Planning and EnvironmentalServices were supportive of e-petitioning butconcerned over lack of integration with theexisting processes – both for handlingpetitions and for consulting on planningapplications. This risked inconsistency in theresponse, since officers handling e-petitionscentrally were unlikely to be familiar with theplanning process or aware of whichdepartmental officers to route the petitions to.This could affect the outcomes given the timelimits laid down for objections.

The location and scope of e-petitions andtheir signatures was an important factor – theanalysis of signatures by neighbourhoodwould be necessary and sometimes even bystreet. There was also a potential for abuse,since pressure groups could seek signaturesfrom outside the neighbourhood. Otherabuses such as multiple signatures alsoaffected paper.


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The pilot period brought 7 e-petitions toKingston and 9 paper petitions werepresented to the council in the same period(to 17 March 2005). In Bristol there were 9 e-petitions and 22 on paper. The total numberof e-petition signatures was 173 in Kingstonand 890 in Bristol. We have not described theoutcomes, i.e. the council’s response to thepetitions because of the short duration of thepilot periods.

The larger take-up in Bristol is worthcommenting on, especially as there werestrenuous efforts to promote the site, ifanything more so in Kingston. The reasonsmay lie in the nature of the e-petitions and the number of people affected, and in thesocio-economic differences between Kingstonand Bristol. Bristol has more than double thepopulation of the London Borough. Also whileKingston has a relatively affluent population,Bristol has more areas of deprivation and arecent history of economic change. It seemslikely that such socio-economic factors affectthe take-up of e-petitioning, given that it is achannel for individuals and communities toredress complaints.

What site visitors did

The visits to e-petitioner recorded in the site’slog files indicate whether those people whoaccessed the site found the e-petitionsappealing enough to sign. Web server logdata for Bristol provides the overall level ofsite visits and page requests and allows us tomeasure the “browse-to-act” ratio for variousparts of the site. This shows that:

• There were 4269 visits to Bristol e-petitioner in the 4 months from midNovember 2004 to mid March 2005,resulting in 12,351 page requests.

• There were 4427 requests to the ViewPetition page, and 1387 to the ListPetitions page. This indicates that mostvisitors followed direct links to specific e-petitions from other websites publicisingthem, rather than by browsing the list of e-petitions and following the links to them.Since there were more requests to view apetition than there were visits (which bydefinition involve consecutive pagerequests from the same internet address),many people who did this then left the sitewithout signing the petition.

• The “sign petition” function was used 756times in this period, giving a browse-to-actratio of 4427/756 or 5.8, i.e. on average ane-petition was viewed almost 6 times foreach time it was signed. Note that thisincludes people viewing an e-petition morethan once before signing it, as well asthose who viewed but did not sign.

• The “discuss petition” page was viewed 759times, i.e. as many times as e-petitions weresigned. The “view comment” function wasused 736 times. As most of the e-petitionshad only one comment, added by theprincipal petitioner when setting up the e-petition, this may mean that almost all ofthose who used “discuss petition” got as faras viewing that comment. However the“send comment” function was used only 23times, giving a browse-to-act ratio of 736/23or 32. This may suggest a need to make thissection of the site more appealing.

The level of traffic to the e-petitioner siteseems reasonable for a pilot, but the ratio ofvisits to subsequent “signatures” or onlinediscussion activity suggests that more couldbe done to make the site visually appealing orthat these functions are not usable enough.This is particularly so because we wouldexpect visitors to be predisposed to support


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the e-petitions if they are following linksplaced in support of them on external sites.

The ratio of e-petition page requests tosignatures may be useful if applied toindividual e-petitions. It may be a bettermeasure of the extent of active support thansignatures alone, since it would take account of people who have read the petitionbut chosen not to sign it, as well as thosewho have.

Web metrics for Kingston were unfortunatelynot available because of an error in the log files.

4.6 Conclusions

Representation

Citizens, officers and Members who took partin the evaluation were almost unanimously infavour of e-petitioning. It has enjoyed strongsupport from councillors in both Kingston andBristol, particularly Kingston, and from thedepartments who are directly involved in the day-to-day servicing of representativegovernment.

There was support for the view that e-petitioning enhances the councillor’s role bymaking it more visible, and by offering greaterconvenience and choice to citizens who wishto raise concerns through the formalprocesses of their council. Citizens can set upe-petitions by completing an online form or byemail. They are then managed by officers withidentified responsibilities for this task. InKingston these are officers servingcommittees that consider petitions, and whonormally receive paper petitions after theyhave been presented at an Executive orNeighbourhood committee meeting.

This raises a potential drawback, in that for e-petitions the first point of contact betweencitizen and council may be more likely to be a“neutral” officer than a councillor. Councillorsmay be better positioned to offer advice onthe issue and the likely effectiveness ofpetitioning. This potential gap is addressed inBristol by automatically notifying the relevantcouncillor when a constituent raises an onlinepetition, and this would be a worthwhileaddition to Kingston’s procedure.

Engagement

There was some evidence that e-petitioningreinforces “civic mindedness” as it has so farlargely been used by people who believe thatcommunity action can influence decision-making but have not previously taken suchaction themselves. Citizens who took part infield tests felt that a higher proportion of e-petition “signatures” are likely to be fromthose genuinely concerned about the topicraised. Conversely many felt that e-petitioningis less effective than paper for gatheringsignatures on highly localised issues, whichare best addressed by adopting the traditional door-to-door and street methods of campaigning that are associated withpaper petitioning.

E-petitions were raised on issues affecting a range of geographic and culturalcommunities, and drew attention to widerdemocratic processes including policyconsultation and the planning process. E-petitions were raised on very localisedissues, typical examples being road crossingsand telecoms masts, as well as those moreclearly applicable across the borough such asPost Office closures, and others focused onthe needs of ethnic minorities, for exampleHalal food stall certification (in Bristol).However citizens thought it more likely thatthey would be made aware of a petition that


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interested them through being approached inperson than from visiting the e-petitions pageon a council website. Some thought itessential for e-petitioning to provide an alertfeature, so they could be notified by emailwhen an e-petition was raised matching atopic they had “signed up” to.

Transparency

The e-petitioning pilot has increasedtransparency in part by formalising theprocess for handling petitions for the first time.The publication of the site and its associatedguidelines on petitioning makes both theprocess and the petition outcomes morevisible. The added visibility applies to paper aswell as e-petitions, since paper petitions thatare presented at council meetings are alsolisted on the e-petitioner page.

E-petitions include a “progress” page, to beupdated by the responsible officers withinformation on the petition’s outcome afterconsideration by the relevant committee ordepartment. All participants considered this akey advantage of the system.

Work is ongoing to integrate e-petitioning withprocedures for tracking the outcomes, and toprovide timely information to petitioners onany relevant constraints imposed by thecommittee cycle or the planning process. Inboth Kingston and Bristol we observed somerisks from inconsistent handling of paper ande-petitions, which should be addressed asprocedures for tracking petitions aredeveloped further. Some petitions raise issuesthat service departments may resolve withoutreference to the committee process. In suchcases it is especially important that e-petitions are routed to the relevant membersand officers, and integrated with wellestablished departmental practices forhandling paper petitions. It would be helpful

to include in the guidelines some reference toservice departments active in petitioning,particularly in the Planning process.


The e-petitioner system incorporates anonline forum where visitors to the site canexchange comments about the issues raised,with the principal petitioner and others. Thisfacility is regarded as highly important bycouncillors. Improvements are needed to its“signposting”, since our field tests showedthe feature was not apparent to users.

In comparison with the traditional method e-petitioning seems likely to offer moreconstrained opportunities to debate the issueconcerned, because of the constraints of themedium and difficulties targeting those mostinterested or affected, but a freer debate tothose willing and able to make the effort. Theopportunities are maximised by combining e-petitioning (preferably with online alerts) withpaper and in-person campaigning.

Political equality

It was evident that e-petitioning has improvedinclusiveness for some; since e-petitions havebeen raised and signed by people who toldus they would not otherwise have done so.There was some evidence that Black andMinority Ethnic groups are representedamong e-petition signatories in proportion tothe local population, although it is too early tobe conclusive. Some councillors, officers andcitizens pointed to the inequality of access tocomputers, with the occasional concern thate-petitioning represents little more thananother channel for those already activelyengaged to raise their voice.

There were some concerns about theformality of the guidance published byKingston and Bristol about the petitioning


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process, and there is a need for simplerclearer language both in that guidance and onthe site itself. The guidance would also beimproved by highlighting the councils’translation and interpretation services. In thelonger term some participants felt e-petitionershould offer translation of the guidance andon-screen dialogue into minority languages.

Community control

This last criterion is in principle e-petitionersmain strength. The issues raised through e-petitioning are unarguably issues that areimportant to citizens, and are evidentlyaddressed through local authority decision-making. For principal petitioners and citizensthe success of the system depends on thecouncils publishing details of the petitionsprogress, for the whole community to see,as much as on individual’s concerns being addressed.

Few e-petitions have progressed to a finalcouncil response in either Kingston or Bristoland it is too early to draw conclusions on theimpact on decision-making. This reflects thetimescales for decision-making and the recent“handover” of the system to the officersresponsible. Progress details will no doubt beadded in due course. However werecommend a formally defined time limit forthe authority to respond to petitions that havebeen received, even if this response is merelyto give the date of the committee at which itwill be considered. The date of each updateshould also be included in the progress page.

There is a potential for e-petitioning toimprove responsiveness in two ways. Firstlyofficers may hear about issues that concerntheir work some weeks or months in advance,since e-petitions are published when they areraised rather than when they are finallysubmitted for consideration. Secondly, the

ease and speed with which e-petitions can beraised potentially offers citizens an advantageover paper, since some procedures limit thetime citizens have to respond. This includesthe Planning and Licensing Applicationprocedures where objections are weightedaccording to where the objector resides.

One potential risk of e-petitioning on thiscriterion is that different perceptions of thesystems role may make it a victim of its ownsuccess. Despite their positive view of thesystem it was regarded by many of thecitizens we spoke to as a “last resort” forrighting wrongs, rather than as a first step incivic engagement. This raises the interestingpossibility that any increase in the number ofpetitions received could be seen both as asuccess in terms of councils’ citizenengagement strategies, and a failing bythose citizens who would regard a list ofpetitions as a litany of complaints. Avoidingthis risk is again probably a matter ofensuring that the system demonstrates atrack record for redressing complaints andaddressing concerns.


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The Micro Democracy project led by SwindonBorough Council is part of Work package 2.3“Information, communication and citizenship”.The project is described in the ProjectInitiation Document for the National Local e-Democracy Project as aiming to:

• Explore ways in which information andconsultation can be made more relevantto individual concerns.

• Pilot and evaluate a highly personalisedand localised “micro-democracy”process for informing and consultingcitizens, using elements of CRM(Customer Relationship Management)and knowledge management.

The Micro Democracy Project InitiationDocument, credited to Swindon BoroughCouncil”s strategic partner Idessa UK Ltd,outlines these more specific aims of the project:

• More efficient and effective consultation:in terms of a reduced cost per consultationundertaken and improved response rate.

• Personal engagement about issues that matter to the individual. This isdescribed as:

“Micro democracy looks to help developthe relationship between citizen andauthority by focusing on the immediate andlocal concerns of the citizen. People areused to being treated like individuals bycompanies and shops. They are beginningto grow used to being treated as individualsby authorities in matters relating to servicedelivery. Micro democracy looks to extendthat to issues of policy and engagement.”15

• Multi-threaded approach: The MicroDemocracy approach is not anticipated to be used as the sole method of e-engagement but would complement and be integrated with other online andoffline approaches.

The project has been led by the council’sElectoral Registrations Officer and alsoinvolved the Principle Policy and ResearchOfficer, who is the main user of consultations.

The e-engagement context in Swindon

Swindon Borough Council’s currentconsultation methods include the citizens’panel Swindon People’s Voice, comprising asample of over 2000 residents of theBorough, which is surveyed several timesannually. This is complemented by qualitativeconsultation using focus groups. Typically aqualitative approach is used first to get publicfeedback on policy options, followed byquantitative consultation with the Citizens’Panel. Recently the authority has trialledonline questionnaires to augment the Citizens’Panel and ad-hoc consultations with thepublic and internally with staff. These wereplaced on the council website and intranet(respectively), attracting a self-selectedsample in contrast to the controlled sampleused for paper-based surveys.

The council aims to consult throughout policydevelopment. Currently the timing ofconsultation varies; corporately, a consultationis done on an annual basis for constitutionalreasons – a strategic review. Servicedepartments also consult as the need arises.

The council recently adopted aLeader/Cabinet structure, and in 2004initiated a long-term “community strategy”under the aegis of the Swindon Partnership.These developments both place an emphasison increasing community consultation, andmembers of the Partnership including thePolice and Health Authority are alreadyinvolved in the Citizens Panel.


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15 Idessa UK Ltd ‘Micro Democracy’ Project Initiation Document

5 “Micro Democracy” in Swindon

5.2 The Micro DemocracyConcept

“Personalising” Democracy

The Micro Democracy project emerged fromwork with the council’s strategic partnersIdessa UK and the Athena Consortium on anumber of projects over the last three years,including the May 2003 e-voting pilots. It wasconceived by John Ellis, who heads bothcompanies, on the basis of his experiences ine-government implementation with variouslocal authorities and awareness ofconsultations being duplicated by other localagencies consulting the public “onecommunity at a time”.

The project is premised on the idea that “allcitizens belong to a wide range of very local,or micro, communities; some by choice andsome by nature of where we live and ourpersonal circumstances. These can includeschool catchment areas, refuse collectionroutes, bus routes and proximity to localamenities. Many other communities, large andsmall, exist such as carers, parents withyoung children and the independent elderly”.

On that basis, Micro Democracy extends theprinciple of personalisation underlying CRMto e-democracy. The tool comprises “acommunity tracking and management suitethat draws on both geospatial and otherinformation in order to map citizens who wantto engage into the appropriate communities”.This draws on the results of otherconsultation activities eg:

“…customer satisfaction surveys throughpolicy consultations to statutory notices forplanning applications. Micro democracydraws from a military intelligence toolsetcalled CCIRM (Collection Co-ordination andInformation Requirements Management) todraw all of these activities into a co-ordinated structure to ensure coherence,avoid repetition and manage costs.”

Main features of the tool

The tool is not a publicly available website,but a web-based tool that users within thecouncil may use to generate questionnaires.The project distinguishes these “users”from citizens, who are termed“respondents” as in survey methodology.The user (consultation administrator) isprovided with a web page similar to anonline form. The page also presents themain functions of the tool. These comprise:

• Identifying members of “communities”from other sources.

• Question design.

• Re-using “cases”: questions andresponses.

• Scheduling the mailing of questions torespondents..

• Mailing the questions: Integration withpaper surveying.

• Providing background information on thesurvey questions.

• Publishing the survey results and aresponse.

Identifying members of “communities” fromother sources

The “multi-threaded” or multi-method basis ofthe approach is central to the Micro-democracy concept in another sense. Thetool depends on integration with data setsfrom other applications, for example fromCRM applications that recordcommunications with individual citizens andfrom “geocoded” data identifying residentialaddresses. This can be obtained from theauthority’s GIS (Geographical InformationSystems), and from Local Land and PropertyGazetteer (LLPG) data such as the UPRN(Unique Property Reference Number).


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(Project Initiation Document. P2).

Question design

The tool allows various question formats.These are currently limited to the simplestsingle and multiple response formats.

Re-using “cases”: questions and responses

A “case” in the project terminology is theapplication of a question to a set ofrespondents (or “community”). A keyassumption here is that questions can readilybe re-applied to different sets of respondents.Since the Micro Democracy tool has thecapability to search for matching questions,its users can search to find out whether aquestion they want to ask has already beenasked, within a particular period or forrespondents with particular characteristics (eg “bus users living in the city centre with nochildren”). This may save consultation effortsince the responses to those questions maybe relevant, if the same set of respondentshave already been asked the question.

Case review

The tool provides for a review processwhereby a “case” or set of questions must beapproved by another person designated withthis role, before it can be scheduled formailing to respondents.

Scheduling the mailing of questions torespondents

The tool is designed on the presumption thatmany “micro” consultations may be beingconducted at the same time, possibly onbehalf of many users. Rather than mail outsets of questions as soon as they are enteredinto the system, they can be scheduled to besent (or produced in the case of paper) atparticular times. This allows the council to setup controls so that consultation may be doneperiodically as required, so that respondentsdo not see questionnaires appearing withapparently ad-hoc timing.

The scheduling also allows the user tospecify the duration of the consultation, ie the time given for the recipients of thequestions to respond.

Mailing the questions: Integration with papersurveying

A significant feature of the tool is the ability toconduct surveys by email and paper at thesame time. When an individual respondentreceives an invitation to take part and a set ofquestions, this will be by email or on paperdepending on their previously statedpreference. In either case it is coded with areference number (email) or barcode (paper).When paper questionnaires are returned, theconsultation administrator can scan thebarcode to automatically associate theresponse with the personal data recorded forthe individual respondent. The responses areautomatically integrated with those receivedthrough email responses.

Providing background information on thesurvey questions

There is no specific provision in the MicroDemocracy tool for providing respondentswith background information, but this canoptionally be included in the message sent torespondents, in the form of a hyperlink to anywebpage giving this information.

Publishing the survey results and a response

The Micro Democracy tool compiles resultsfrom the responses (ie “56% agreed trafficcongestion is a major problem”) andprovides the user with the option to mailthese results to all those who responded.Similarly a message can be compiled andmailed to the respondents to inform themabout any decisions related to theconsultation survey results. A target of 2–4weeks has been proposed for publishing anappropriate response.


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Implementing Micro Democracy andRecruiting Citizens

The project began work in August 2004, afterdelays in the procurement process. Therehave also been other unexpected delays tothe project. E-democracy projects areinevitably subject to unexpected change inthe political environment and in this case achange in political control in the 2004 localelections resulted in large scale budgetchanges, which affected the availability of keypersonnel and resources for the project.

The project delays meant that no evaluationwas carried out within the project, and thetool functionality was reduced to the coreneeded to realise the concept.

Development approach

The project has combined the PRINCE 2project management methodology16, and itsstandard sequence of documented steps tocontrol project resources, with the flexibility ofthe “Agile” approach to software design17.Agile design methods stress the need to havea prototype of the software running as quicklyas possible, to allow rapid feedback from theintended users and evolution of the softwarefunctions to meet their needs. Collaborationbetween developers and users orstakeholders is emphasised in the approach,over extensive planning and documentation.

Recruitment

Citizens have been recruited through theannual electoral roll canvas. With this, a letterwas mailed to 10% of the households on theelectoral roll under the heading “DemocracyStarts at Home”. The text of this letter isreproduced in Figure 5.1 below.


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Dear Householder

Democracy Starts at Home

You pay Council tax and expect us to spend it wiselyon your behalf.That needs good decisions. Gooddecision making needs good advice.The best peopleto advise on local issues are the people most closelyaffected. People like you.

We would like to invite you to take part in anexciting new opportunity to have your say on localissues that you care about, for example planningissues, bus routes, refuse collection or local schools.This is the very first time anyone in the UK has beenoffered such a chance by their local council and wewant you to be part of it.

If you, or anyone who lives at your address, wouldlike to be involved please complete the form on theother side of this letter and return it with yourelectoral registration form.We will then send you amonthly email or letter about only those things thatwe think are important to you and ask for your input.We will also send you a reply about the questions youanswer and what we intend to do about it.We knowyou are busy so we promise only to ask you aboutthings that we think will be of interest to you.

Remember, you must also return you ElectoralRegistration form otherwise you and any othermembers of the your household will not be registeredas electors and you will be unable to vote. If youwould like any further information about this excitingopportunity, please call 01793 463702 or [email protected].

Yours sincerely

Stephen P TaylorDirector of Law and Corporate GovernanceAugust 2004

16 More information on PRINCE 2 is available at:http://www.ogc.gov.uk/prince2

17 Further information in Agile development is available at:http://www.agilealliance.org

Figure 5.1 Invitation to participate in Micro Democracy

On the reverse of this letter a form (headedwith the warning “If you do not wish toparticipate please do not complete or returnthis form”) asks the householder to enter thenames of anyone who would like toparticipate, and indicate whether they wouldlike to take part by post, or to provide theparticipants’ email addresses. This brought aresponse rate of 26%.

The first iteration

Several trial iterations of Micro Democracysurveys/consultations were planned and at thetime of our evaluation the first iteration wasunderway. This was part of a consultation toinform the council’s Transport Plan. This casecomprised 7 questions, each with a multiplechoice/ single response format:

• How far (approximately) do you have totravel to go to work/college?

• How far (approximately) do you have totravel for shopping to purchase food/household goods.

• What is your regular means of transportto get to work/ college?

• What is your regular means of transportfor shopping?

• Do you think that air and noise pollutionfrom transport is a problem in your area?

• Do you think that traffic congestion inyour area is: a very big problem/ smallproblem (etc.)

• Do you think that motorists comply withspeed limits in your local area?

The questions were intended to be sent to1025 people, with 55% in paper format and45% by email. The response rate to the paperquestionnaires was a 70%, with 60% ofrespondents returning them in the first 5 days.

This is a very high response rate for a survey.Recurrent problems in getting the MicroDemocracy tool to work with the council’semail server delayed the email distributionuntil after our visit (4 March) and unfortunatelymeant the response rate by email could notbe established.

5.3 Experiences and Expectationsof Micro Democracy

Our interviews involved Swindon’s e-government champion Cllr Dale Heenan (by phone), project manager and ElectoralRegistration Officer Alan Winchcombe, thesupplier and instigator of the project JohnEllis, and the potential “senior user” SophieDuncan, Principle Policy and ResearchOfficer. The summary of our discussionsfocuses on the anticipated benefits andpotential risks of the Micro Democracyproject, based on the stakeholders’experiences and expectations.

In each case we included the data protection implications of Micro Democracy inour questions, as we saw these as animportant facet of the personalisation aspectsof the concept.

It was unfortunately not possible to contactcitizens unconnected with the project team,or to carry out an online survey of those whohad agreed to participate in the MicroDemocracy project.

The e-Government Champion’sPerspective

Cllr Dale Heenan recently became e-government champion, the Memberresponsible for the council’s e-governmentdevelopments, and was an enthusiasticsupporter of the project although he had noprevious experiences of consultation tocompare the approach with.


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Anticipated benefits and risks

Cllr Heenan expect the project to result inmore people getting involved in deliveringfeedback to the council, and seeing that whatthey say is acted on. The system would alsoallow more efficient use of time. This and theapproach’s preference for keepingquestionnaires short would appeal tocouncillors and the public alike:

“Traditionally, a questionnaire will take anhour of your time with ten to twelve pagesof questions. With this you will have ten orfifteen questions and it will take you fiveminutes at most. So you will get morepeople involved in it that way.”

Support for the council to communicate itsresponse to the citizen’s input was a keyfeature.

“When we looked at the system last, youcould have a box at the end of eachquestion in which you could indicatewhether or not you wanted to receivefeedback on the consultation. Then the nexttime a questionnaire is delivered to you, itprovides the outcome. Gives you anumerical value of who responded, andsays this is what we are doing about it. Sopeople can see things are improving ratherthan there being nothing done about it. Itmakes the residents the centre of it ratherthan the council.”

Cllr Heenan was keen to seek additionalfunding for the project, and foresaw it beingadopted by other councils. He also reportedthat it was supported by all councillors, whowould be able to consult on issues specificto their ward. Planning applications were acase in point, particularly given the timelimits involved. There was, for example,some controversy in his own ward over aplanning application:

“… a planning application dispute over aWomen’s shelter, and people misunderstoodthe issues surrounding it. So we could sendout two communications: one to say whatthe situation is and what the residents thinkabout it, and one next month to say whathas resulted from it. It is a good form ofcommunication in that respect.”

The system’s integration of paper andelectronic communications also had benefitsof making it accessible to almost everyone.The email communication was compatiblewith screen readers used by the visuallyimpaired. Also the review process would allowchecks to be carried out to make surequestions avoided jargon.

No specific risks were foreseen, and CllrHeenan believed that all data protectionissues had been ironed out.

The Project Manager and Supplier’sPerspectives

Idessa UK’s John Ellis, who conceived theMicro Democracy system, remains highlyoptimistic about its prospects despite thesetbacks caused by external delays anddiversion of resources. So does AlanWinchcombe who, as project manager andElectoral Registration Officer, has played akey role in deploying the system and securingthe participation of residents.

We begin with the project manager’sexperiences and expectations. Winchcombeoutlined his role:

“I’m directly responsible for the electoralprocess so was involved with the prior e-voting exercise – and micro democracy is afurther development from that. So my rolehas been to push it through within theorganisation. I dealt with the leader of thecouncil to get him signed up to it, and hewas happy to do so, and I passed it on to


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Dale [Heenan]. So I have been liaising andoverseeing the relations between Idessa andSophie’s team, the IT department to makesure the whole thing fits together and keepit on target, and with the e-governmentagenda…. there are online consultationneeds for the education, planning andtransport departments. They want e-enabledconsultation tools urgently to meet their e-government targets…this is a foundationblock to build upon to meet other targets inthe democratic renewal strategy.”

Anticipated benefits

The most important was to re-involve theelectorate:

“When doing the e-voting project, wesurveyed non-voters on why they did notvote and they said, “what”s the point? Weonly see and hear from the politicians whenthey want us to vote for them.” So microdemocracy provided an easy, quick, cost-effective way of getting people to re-engage in the democratic process.People have told us that if they felt moreengaged in the process they wouldconsider voting. Turnout dropped from 44%(1990) to 25% (1995) at its lowest. But weput in a huge amount of work at getting theturnout higher – now at 35% – and this isjust another extension to get the electoratesigned-up and engaged in the process. Weneed to make people think that their viewsare important between elections.”

The system still needed extensive testing andmonitoring of the public’s response. Therewas also a need to put in place the internalcontrols: “we don’t want people bombardedwith questionnaires willy-nilly…we need tokeep the questions to a consistent form andquality.” This required a system administratorto monitor the use of the system and approvethe questions.

“To a certain extent, we will have to dothat with the politicians as well. Eachpolitical group has a political assistant whowill play a role here, getting their groupmembers to feed their questions throughthem. We have to make sure that thepoliticians don’t use it for politicalpurposes.”

One of the unfortunate consequences of thedelays caused by the council’s annual budgetsetting was to postpone usability testing.

“We have been desperate to getsomething delivered within the time scalesof the project plan – which we’ve achieved– so no time for thorough usability testing.The next phase is to make it user friendlyand do all the user testing. The projectboard will use people in-house to check it.We could also use the pilot community –could use another questionnaire to gaintheir views on the system.

…We are keen to make it as accessibleas possible – part of council policy. Fortesting, we have groups and organisationsthat we used when we were testing the e-voting systems for accessibility, so we’llconsult them again. We have a group oforganisations that we contact on thesematters. If we have to change it to meettheir needs then I’m sure we probablywill…. We offer translations of everythingwe do into 22 foreign languages, all theEuropean Union languages for instance;also Braille, audio, and signing on CDs,translation via phone line. But there is verylittle call for it. The non-English populationof Swindon is relatively small, and more EUnon-English speakers than non-EU – alsosome Japanese due to the Honda carfactory. That is not to say we don’t haveproblems, because we do. So we offerthese translation facilities and will do so for


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micro democracy… we have the option ofan audio track on the e-voting system thatspeaks the details of the ballot paper – thiscould be done for micro democracy systemboth for the paper versions and online too.”

Achieving the benefits would also depend onthe council’s responsiveness to citizens’input:

“Our undertaking was not only to showwhat the responses were, but what wasdecided to be done about them. This is thekey to the success of this project.”

The Supplier’s Role and Expectations

John Ellis has worked for a number of yearswith the council as a strategic partner and isIdessa’s Head of Operations. In formulatingthe Micro Democracy concept he drew fromhis military experience as well as his periodas e-champion with other authorities inEngland and Scotland, writing IEG forms and looking at their strategic direction interms of e-government.

Ellis realised that CRM (Customer RelationsManagement) has become essential incommerce – personalisation is seen as asuccessful way of doing business. If thecitizen is to be regarded as a consumer, thenit seems logical that CRM should be used inrelationships with the citizen. The otherinfluence behind the micro democracy ideacame from the realisation that anuncoordinated consultation process can leadto inefficiencies; for instance, the samequestions being asked of citizens at differenttimes by different departments. This called fora capability to merge those questions into aprioritised, authorised list of “cases” thatwould be sent only to those people who wereinterested and who would have somethinguseful to say.

Such a capability will, Ellis believes, havesignificant savings and benefits for councilsfrom the elimination of redundant questionsand the re-use of questions that have beenasked, the responses and the respondentsthemselves. The key to this is the idea ofpeople belonging to different, overlapping,“micro-communities” for example of bus-route users, or parents with children attendinglocal schools, as well as geographical andpolitically-bounded communities such ascouncil wards.

Ellis attributes the origins of the MicroDemocracy concept to a “military toolset”called CCIRM (Collection, Co-ordination andInformation Requirements Management).Having presented the ideas to AlanWinchcombe and others, Swindon agreed theconcept was worth taking forward, and Ellistook the proposal to the National e-democracy project board with which he hadbeen involved for some time, and they agreedto support it.

The benefits will, he recognises, be achieved through a longer period than the National Project:

“We will deliver what has been set-out inthe objectives, but it as been cut to thebone. The long-term benefits of theseprojects – e-panels, e-petitions – will comein one to two years rather than sooner, forwe are dealing with a paradigm shift in howpeople engage with their Authority. Itcannot be turned on and off like a switch,even with a technologically savvypopulation like Swindon. It is worth notingthat 25% in May 03 voted electronically(Internet or telephone), so there is evidencethat people are disposed to usetechnology. Swindon has a goodinfrastructure for e-democracy.”


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A key principle of CRM John Ellis wants toinstill in the approach is a focus on the citizenas customer, and on providing the serviceprovider with the tools to be responsive.“From the respondent’s point of view, theysee the responses from the previous period,so people feel that their response is valued.”The customer/citizen focus extends tomeeting people’s preferences for online oroffline channels “not everyone will have, orwant to use, Internet access… the systemhas to suit both in order not to disenfranchiseanyone”.

The flexibility of the technical team’s designapproach should allow the Micro Democracysystem to rapidly evolve. Inevitably somefeatures had to be postponed because of theexternal pressures on the availability ofSophie Duncan, Principle Policy andResearch Officer, whose role as “senior user”is essential to the project. The immediatefuture will bring:

“…changes to the layout of the screeninformation, RNIB/W3C Access guidelines,general prettiness, all of which are laid outin the project plan. And the ability to addfree text. This last facility is going to bedifficult to incorporate into the paper-basedside of the system – could invest incharacter recognition technology, but thisnot going to happen – though straight-forward for the website. Time has been animportant issue, having lost five months.We’re prototyping a pilot on the firstiteration. Because of the delay with theprocurement process, when Sophie wasfree in October/November we weren’t andwhen Sophie was at her busiest – for thebudget consultation – we were ready withoperation testing. Also the slashed budgetdid not help, we could not bring in long-term evaluation from e-champions and soforth. But we’ll make it – the results so farhave been extremely promising.”

The very high response to the initial paperquestionnaire was for Ellis an indication thatone of the key aims is realisable; improvingconsultation efficiency: “Local Authorities canget a better return on their questionnaires, bylowering the costs per result.” This savingdoes not take into account much of theconventional surveying expenses, since some steps are excluded from the MicroDemocracy approach:

“Traditional surveys were expensiveexercises since they consist of stages: first,identifying the target audience and ensurethat it is statistically relevant – ethnically,demographically, economically and so forth.Often a marketing company would bebrought in to identify that community. Thenbuilding and reviewing the questionnaire,and then distribution. This process wouldbe expected to last between 3–6 months.”

In Micro Democracy the first step is normallyexcluded and the rest are largely automated.

Ellis acknowledges some conventional surveycosts may still need to be incurred, if MicroDemocracy is used to complementapproaches such as the Citizens Panel, whichuses a statistically representative sample. Ahybrid between the qualitative andquantitative approaches may be necessary,as had been the case in Swindon:

“Sophie [Duncan] comes from a statisticalbackground, and I come from a qualitativeone; I was talking about e-democracy andengaging people; but Sophie was sayingyou couldn’t do that for you need arepresentative sample. Then we realised thatthese approaches should work in parallel.Micro democracy is a qualitative tool, and afull consultation is a quantitative tool.”


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Data protection issues had been consideredbut were not regarded as problematic, eitherfor “schedule 2” (personal data) or “schedule3” (sensitive personal data on for examplepolitical opinions):

“Data protection is not a problem; forschedule 2 the authority is entitled to holdthat and if someone answers a questionthen they are giving the authority explicitpermission to hold information on thatquestion; additionally, no-one is forced totake part in this. Their registering andanswering is an acknowledgement thatthey are happy for the authority to havethat information. Also the invitation toregister makes it explicit that they can optout of any particular community and evenopt out of the project… Furthermore on thereverse of the letter is a place for signatureof householder. If you were going to be apurist you would have the signature ofeach householder. No-one is forced torespond to any question. The onlyinformation we hold to begin with is thename and address – and we don’t needextra permission under DPA to hold this. Allfurther information is volunteered.”

The main challenge for the Micro Democracyapproach lay mainly in accepting thechanges in practice: for some councils itwould mean a step change in howconsultation is approached:

“The biggest pitfall is that it is such aparadigm shift in the way people doconsultation; understanding that you are amember of several different communities.The questions are filtered through amechanism and cross-referenced to avoidduplication; all these components togetherrepresent a change from the wayconsultation is traditionally done. There is adanger that local Authorities are dividedinternally by those capable of making this

shift and those who don’t. Citizens areindifferent to this change in approach – allthey see is a questionnaire that is tailoredto them. They’re happy, for people tell themwhat they are doing and ask them aboutthings that matter locally. From the council’spoint of view, it is the change in approachthat is dramatic.

The Principle Policy and Research Officer’s Perspective

Sophie Duncan is the council’s PrinciplePolicy and Research Officer and was invitedto become involved as the officer leading thecouncils work on public consultation, and asa potential senior user. The major drivers forher were an interest in using more effectiveonline consultation methods in tandem withtraditional ones, and the contribution theproject would make to meeting centralgovernment requirements for online ways ofdealing with consultation and complaints.

Before the Micro Democracy project, onlinesurveys to complement the active paper-based Citizen’s Panel had been quitesuccessful. To date, online sampling had beencompletely self-selected and her strategy forimproving e-consultation would mean movingto a more controlled random samplingapproach. However Micro Democracy iscurrently seen more as a qualitative approachto complement the quantitative methods usedwith the Citizens Panel. In principle MicroDemocracy works in a similar way, i.e. atargeted and signed-up panel, and could beused with a randomly generated subset of theindividuals recruited. The Micro Democracyconcept would need further evaluation, andthe system would be assessed alongsideother available software.

Micro Democracy would need centralcoordination, in keeping with traditionalconsultation approaches.


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“Part of my job is to assess the need ofconsultation across the council by servicearea. There is a need for a centralconsultation group to co-ordinate currentefforts. With Micro Democracy there wouldbe a need to co-ordinate who receives whatwithin sub-communities. Like the Citizen’sPanel, we coordinate questions from theservice departments and moderate them; thisalso allows for consistency of approach.”

Anticipated benefits

Duncan saw the immediacy of the system asits potential strength, and the more“personalised” nature of the system mightencourage response rates. The maindifference with Micro Democracy was in thetargeting of the respondents:

“The difference lies in that it generatescommunities of interest on specific issues;Citizen’s Panels are generally used forcorporate issues. The possible advantageof this system is that it allows targeting ofpeople who might not be covered by thePanel.”

Some of the benefits sought for MicroDemocracy would need time to be assessed,for example the anticipated time savings fromre-using questions and sharing them acrossdepartments, since it is unusual for twoservice departments to ask the samequestions. Also the identification of a sub-population group within the larger communitycan be done geographically with GIS at themoment:“…but if you want to know whetherthey had children, for instance, we would haveto have a dialogue with them to allocate themto a particular community.” This would requirepopulating the database to enable the systemto identify the relevant sub-community.

Potential risks

Major pitfalls had not been assessed in detailyet as the testing phase had not beencompleted owing to ongoing technical issuesaffecting the email distribution. Once thesehad been resolved and testing completed the

Research and Consultation team wouldpresent the project board with their evaluationof the concept and software. Detailedappraisal of the potential benefits and risks ofthe system would need to take place. Theresources required to maintain the systemwould be a particular focus.

On the subject of data protection we askedhow the respondents would know that thequestions were personalised to them. Duncanpointed out that the first iteration had notfocused on personalisation, but it would beimportant to see how the product evolves andessential to inform participants on how datawould be used and why their views werebeing sought.

The Principle Policy and Research Officer wasalso aware that some data protectionimplications might become evident as thesystem evolved and would need furtherassessment:

“We are currently aware that we have toinform people how their responses will beused. We would not share personal data.We are also aware that with the smallnumbers we are using it might be possibleto identify people, so we will have tomonitor the situation.”

Regarding the future development of thesystem Sophie Duncan said there was still alot of further developments required from thesystem that she had been advised would beintroduced in the second phase.

5.4 Results and OutcomesThe Micro Democracy system has been usedto distribute paper questionnaires to the 55%of a sample of 1025 addresses who hadopted to receive them in that form, with a70% response rate. Email questionnaires tothe remaining 45% would follow as soon astechnical issues with distribution had beenresolved. It is too soon to report anyoutcomes regarding the council’s response tothe questionnaire results, or their influence onthe Transport Plan.


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5.5 ConclusionsOur conclusions are tentative given that therehas been insufficient time for the MicroDemocracy concept to be fully piloted andlimited evidence to evaluate it on.Nevertheless we can identify strengths andweaknesses, in terms of its prospects forenhancing democracy according to thecriteria given (in Chapter 1 and Annex A).

We saw particular strengths in terms of thelikely impact on representation and politicalequality. There were both strengths andweaknesses in terms of transparency. Themain weaknesses we considered were on theengagement, conflict and consensus, andcommunity control criteria.

Representation

The strengths were the capability to consultonline according to specific geographic andsocial criteria rather simply on a self-selectedbasis. This has the potential to strengthen theability of representatives to assess the level ofsupport for proposals among those likely tobe most affected, given that the impacts ofpolicy rarely abide by council wardboundaries. The capability was reported tohave generated strong interest fromcouncillors and departments.

Political equality

The tight integration of paper and onlineconsultation channels addresses the potential“digital divides” of online consultationapproaches. The need for such integration isoften asserted but it is unusual to see it metas convincingly. The system also haspotential to be highly accessible throughfurther integration with Swindon’s in-housetranslation services, although this potentialhas yet to be met. The current system doesnot appear to present any major accessibilityissues since it uses email for the publicinterface and the web interface for internaluse is very simple.

Transparency

There were both strengths and weaknesseson this aspect. The strength is the tool’ssupport for publishing a response and theevident commitment to doing this. Theweakness is in the transparency of theprocess for identifying respondents. Therewas lack of transparency in how respondentsare chosen and therefore how theirmembership of a “community” is madeknown to them, a point we return to under“community control” below.

Transparency has not yet been established inthe procedures for managing the process. Weunderstand this to be due to the diversion ofkey people from the project for unavoidablereasons. There was a high awareness of theneed, but there were no published proceduresfor assuring privacy, nor any acceptable usepolicy to prevent political abuse of thesystem. An acceptable use policy may bechallenging to get agreement on, since usesthat might be considered manipulative bysome would be fair play to others.

In response to a draft of these conclusions,John Ellis asked that we mention hisacceptance of this point and commitment toaddress it in partnership with Swindon.

Engagement

The Micro Democracy system may be asophisticated approach to survey-basedconsultation, but in the e-democracy literature(ie Coleman and Gøtze, 2001) survey-basedapproaches are not considered to have highinfluence on decision-making. Nor do theyfacilitate a high level of dialogue, since theresponses are to pre-identified questions thatparticipants (respondents) have no say in, andthey cannot engage in online discussion of thequestions put to them. It may be feasible toinclude more deliberative features in thesystem, although there were no plans to do so.

This criterion is also about e-democracysupporting local identity and helpingindividuals understand and link in to the wider


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democratic processes that are part of theircommunity. In that respect Micro Democracyat first appears promising, since the term“micro-democracy” has been used before bypolitical scientists and others to describe thepolitics of individual relationships and of“grassroots” action. For example according topolitical scientist Nelly Stromquist, the “micro-democracy” concept “…shifts attention fromthe means by which the powerful maintainideological control to the forms by which thepowerless produce a new culture”(Stromquist, 2003). One need not agree withthat way of expressing the concept ofcommunity action to appreciate that MicroDemocracy in its current shape has little to dowith these previous uses of the term “micro-democracy”.


Since the system does not allow peer-to-peerdiscussion of the questions or responses ithas no features to provide opportunities fornegotiation, mediation and consensusbuilding. On the other hand, the systemprovides ample opportunities for producingconflicting responses to questions fromdifferent “micro communities”. These couldeasily amplify political conflict betweenrepresentatives. In principle such conflictsmight be addressed by weighing up the“targeted” Micro Democracy responsesagainst other evidence of the depth andbreadth of public opinion, for example fromwider Citizens Panel surveys on the samequestions. Micro Democracy is intended to beused in this “multi-threaded” manner, thoughit remains to be seen whether any conflictingresults can be resolved that way.

Community control

The Micro Democracy approach has anelement of accountability, to the extent thatthe envisaged targets of a response in 2–4weeks are met and that response ismeaningful. The target is a strength of theproject, but the implication that suchresponses from the council would make aclear link between decisions made and surveyresults does not seem plausible.

The approach uses the term “community”frequently, but to denote a targeted sub-population rather than a social groupingwhose members are aware of their ownmembership. In fact the respondents had notbeen informed of any aspect of the MicroDemocracy approach other than that in theintroductory letter shown in Figure 5.1.

The approach may, as claimed, comply withthe Data Protection Act requirements (we arenot competent to give legal advice). If so itmust be based on a very wide interpretationof the principle of informed consent. Manycitizens would probably be alarmed at theprospect of the system building up detailedprofiles of them, collated from varioussources including their previous answers toquestions. In its current version the systemdoes not list individual respondents againstthe data held about them, although it easilycould and this may even be necessary for thesystem to fully meet its objectives. Thismakes detailed and published safeguardsessential in our opinion.

The benefit claimed for Micro Democracy ofimproving take-up and engagement byproviding citizens with relevant questions isopen to misunderstanding. The approach hasno way of testing the relevance of thequestions except in terms of the responserate (as does any survey approach). Whetherthe questions are relevant or not depends onnothing more or less than an assumption thatthe targeted sub-population will find themrelevant, if the topic coincides with one theauthority wants to consult on. Of course thatassumption may be well-founded on theknowledge of councillors and officers of localconcerns gained from other sources, but theMicro Democracy approach cannot supplythe knowledge to ask relevant questionsunaided.

In its current incarnation Micro Democracyappears more likely to empower councils thanthe communities they serve, although each ofthe criticisms made above could be rectifiedthrough further development of the systemand the procedures for putting it to use.


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This project is part of work package 2.4a“Democratising Cross-cutting Issues andPartnerships” and involves three localAuthorities, Wolverhampton City Council who lead the project, Surrey County Council and Reading Borough Council. Our evaluation for this report is focussed on Wolverhampton’s experiences18.

The aim of the project is:

“…to develop best practice on engagingcitizens in issues that cut acrossorganisational boundaries, and engagingthem with the work of partnerships.”19

This section focuses on Wolverhampton’sexperience of the project and their publicengagement context. The project is intendedto work through the WolverhamptonPartnership. This is a Local StrategicPartnership, bringing together organisationsfrom the public, private, voluntary andcommunity sectors in Wolverhampton.

The council has been instrumental indeveloping structures to conduct consultation,share information and co-operate on theimplementation of policy. To this end, thecouncil and partners have developed a“Consultation and Community InvolvementStrategy”, that has received the commendationof the “Neighbourhood Renewal Unit”, part ofthe Office of the Deputy Prime Ministerresponsible for the government’sneighbourhood renewal strategy.20

By participating in the National Project,Wolverhampton aims to enhancetransparency through the WolverhamptonPartnership, the city’s Local Strategic

Partnership; to make that structure clearer tocitizens and respond clearly to what they saywhen consulted about local issues. This needis more evident as consultations followthemes that cross the boundaries betweenservice departments and involve partners in.

The development of a strong partnershipinfrastructure has been seen as a priority ifthe partners were to gain from the benefits ofpublic consultation. To accomplish this, thecouncil in conjunction with partnersdeveloped the City-Wide InvolvementNetwork (CWIN), a strategic group of sixteenof the Authority’s major partners, includingsuch agencies as the Police, the Primary CareTrust, and representatives from the voluntarysector. The purpose of CWIN is to co-ordinateconsultations, share information andcollaborate on consultation projects, forinstance, the Community Planningconsultation that contributed to the 2002publication “Moving On…Wolverhampton’sCommunity Plan 2002 – 2012”.21

This is complemented by the development ofstructures within the council itself. Officers areappointed to each Service Group, with theresponsibility of managing and carrying outconsultation. These officers collectively formthe council-wide Public Involvement NetworkGroup (PING), aiming to ensure theconsultation activity within the council is co-ordinated and avoids duplication of effort


716 Democratising Cross-cutting

Issues and Partnerships in Wolverhampton

18 A separate report from the project will detail the work undertakenin other Councils, and for workpackage 2.4b which concerns datasharing across partnerships for democratic purposes.19 Project Brief 2.4a version 0.2.20 See http://www.neighbourhood.gov.uk/default.asp21 “Moving On…Wolverhampton’s Community Plan” available at:http://www.wolverhampton.gov.uk/government_democracy/council/partnerships/strategic/community_plan.html

through different departments or agenciesconsulting on similar issues or notcommunicating results effectively. As anadditional level of co-ordination, a number ofservice groups have combined to formService Improvement network Groups (SING),with the aim of eliminating duplication ofeffort by pooling information and sharingviews on “best practice”.

About three years ago, the council createdthe post of Consultation Manager, workingwithin the Office of the Chief Executive,specifically to manage and co-ordinate theconsultation work within the Authority. Atpresent, this post is vacant, though at thetime of writing, there was an expectation thatthe position would be occupied within a veryshort space of time.

“Wolforum” was Wolverhampton’s first brushwith online consultation. This was the result ofa European-funded research anddevelopment project to evaluate technologyfor handling online consultations, workingwith, amongst others, WolverhamptonUniversity. The emphasis of this project waspredominantly technological, and was notespecially concerned with how thesetechniques could be turned to the benefit ofthose involved in consultation. The councilused “Wolforum” for a number ofconsultations, for instance on the preservationof buildings within the city, but for a numberof reasons once the project finished it was leftunsupported. However, the conclusion of ascrutiny review was that the facility should becarried forward.

The council has an existing Citizens Panelwhich it consults regularly and is the basis forthe e-panel project led by Bristol City Council(see chapter 2). Although undertaken forworkpackage 2.2 this overlaps with

workpackage 2.4 since the mechanism foronline consultation – an online forum – is the same.

From the outset of the project the partnerstook the view that online tools for improvedcollaboration were a pre-requisite forconsultation. In addition, the software behind“Wolforum” necessitated a centraladministration team whereas the idea with thePartnership was to allow the partners toinitiate and manage their own consultations.

Wolverhampton’s initiative is thereforepursuing web-based facilities for “internal”collaborative working on shared documents,as well as the online consultation facilitywhere partners can place issues before an e-panel. Workpackage 2.4b involves work ondata sharing that is outside the scope of thisevaluation, but includes a consultationdatabase, to carry the results of consultationsconducted across the Partnership, seeking toeliminate redundancy in consultation effort.

The councils consultation capacity includesthe provision of a consultation trainingprogramme that the partners are beingencouraged to use. These courses areprovided free to all parties within thePartnership and involve two-day accreditedcourses in consultation, offered in conjunctionwith Birmingham University.

In addition, a Workpackage 2 training coursein online moderation and hosting providedthe Project Manager, Debbie Turner, with auseful starting point from which to developguidance notes. These included aConsultation Institute workshop held inLondon for the benefit of partners in the e-panel project who were setting up moderatedor hosted online discussions.


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Websites exist for individual partners in theWolverhampton Partnership and the citycouncil. There is also a “Wolverhampton City”site that is run from within the council, butwhose main purpose is to promoteWolverhampton as a place in which to liveand do business.

6.2 The e-engagement tools and process

The Partnership website and e-panel run onsoftware provided by iNovem, chosen throughBristol City Council’s short-listing of tools forthe e-panel project. Many elements of thesoftware matched their requirements,especially for collaborative working betweenthe partners. Part of the iNovem package is atool called “Team Initiative”, the collaborativestrengths of which meant that the LocalStrategic Partnership could have a separate“online community” for each of its subgroups,to share documents, and work togetheronline. Having a single all-embracing packagewas judged to be preferable to selecting andintegrating open source modules as a meansof fulfilling their software requirements.

Main Partnership website functions for users

This site has a link from the WolverhamptonCity Council site via the e-consultation page22.The following gives a brief indication of thefunctions of the main pages on the site.

The Wolverhampton Partnership Home Page

Provides background information on thePartnership (see Figure 6.1 below) as well asan introduction to the e-panel with provisionto register and log-in to the consultation.

Figure 6.1 Home page

One City Newspaper: No content as yet.

Community Plan: Describes the CommunityPlan and has PDFs of the Community Plan inboth “summary” and “full” report format.There is also a link to the Partnership page ofthe Wolverhampton Council site.

Theme Groups: Contains a list of thePartnership groups and subgroups:

• Safer Wolverhampton Partnership: nocontent as yet.

• Green City Group: no content as yet.

• Health and Social Care PartnershipBoard: contains information about theHSCP Board and provides links to boardmember details.

• Economic Competitiveness Board:contains information about the EC board.

• Learning Partnership: containsinformation about the partnership and hasa link to the Learning Partnership website.

• Strategic Housing Partnership: nocontent as yet.


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22 http://www.wolverhampton.gov.uk/government_democracy/council/contacts/e_consultation/

• Children and Young People’s StrategicPartnership: contains information aboutthe partnership and provides links toCYPSP. Provides links to the “Structure”(provides information about the CYPSPstructure) and “Action Plan” (no content)

Dates For Diary: No content as yet.

How to Use This Site: Provides backgroundinformation, including links to the “Moderationpolicy” and “Discussion Forum Guidelines”(gives details of the conditions of use).

Get Involved: Provides facility for registeringon the e-panel (see Figure 6.2 below), and alink to background information on the currentconsultations, e.g. a leaflet outlining proposedchanges to city centre available to registeredusers.

Figure 6.2 – Login and Register page

e-Panel Page: Provides information on howto join the e-panel, and currently has a link tothe discussion on “What is best and worstabout Wolverhampton”. This allows non-members of the e-panel to read commentssubmitted to the various discussions.

The main pages on the discussion site are as follows:

• All Discussions: lists the discussions withinformation on who started the thread, howmany replies, and the date of the first andlast message (see Figure 6.3 below).Discussions can be listed in group or dateorder. Within the discussion it is possible tonavigate backwards and forwards throughthe comments, as well as navigating to thenext or previous discussion (see Figure 6.4below).

• Site Home: returns to Partnership homepage

• Find Group: allows for searching on keywords in topics.

• Help: provides help on such matters as“navigation”, for example.

Figure 6.3 The List Discussions page


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Figure 6.4 e-Panel page showingnavigation

Developing the e-panel engagementprocess

Project Manager Debbie Turner hascoordinated the engagement process andmanaged the Partnership site. Theconsultation topics have arisen from varioussources and initially have included:

• Best and Worst of Wolverhampton:taking a leaf from Ask Bristol’s similar topic this was the first discussion to be launched.

• Accident and Emergency services for theelderly: The council has six scrutiny panels,five of which look at council services. Thesixth is the health scrutiny panel, whichlooks at wider health services in the cityincluding local NHS services. In particularthe panel has recently been looking ataccess for older people to servicesincluding Accident and Emergency. ScrutinyOfficer Fiona Sullivan saw potential in theonline discussion facility to provide anotherway for people to express their views inaddition to offline methods.

• Healthy lunchtimes for secondaryschools: This also arose to support thework of the health scrutiny panel byseeking views on whose responsibility itshould be to ensure that pupils atsecondary schools have a healthy lunch.

• Proposed changes to the city centre: TheHead of Marketing, Barbara Holt,suggested this discussion after aconsultation workshop. The onlinediscussion was publicised via leaflets andan exhibition.

• Contracts for residential homes: Thiswas a closed consultation for Social Care,open by invitation only to the 200managers of residential homes, who werealso given the option to respond in writing.

• Is Wolverhampton becoming a part ofGreater Birmingham? This was taken upin response to a suggestion by a citizenmember of the e-panel.

• Public transport: this was also initiated bya citizen member of the e-panel.

Where online documents have been availablethey have been provided as links in theintroductory messages. The diversity ofavenues is seen as important to establish thesystem before developing a formal process toinitiate consultation topics, which is to be theremit of the Consultation Manager whosepost was vacant at the time of our visit.

When consultations close the analysis of theresults will be passed to the appropriatecommittee. If there is a strong indication thatthe public are against the council’ssuggestions, then the matter will be referredto the council cabinet. The results arepublished once decisions have been taken,so whilst there is an expected four to sixweek minimum period between the close of a


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consultation and subsequent decisions, thistime will be shorter where the public are inbroad agreement with the council’s proposals.

Evaluation considerations

The Partnership’s online consultation processis expected to lead to efficiency savingsthrough better sharing of knowledge on whois consulting on what. This should be quitestraightforward to assess in terms of thenumber of consultations carried out annuallyacross the partnership, which is expected tofall within a year.

Planned evaluations of the online engagementwithin Workpackage 2.4 had not beenconsidered feasible, and it was thought thatfuture evaluation should include anassessment of online discussions on thequality of the responses. This may helpestablish how well-considered are citizen’ssuggestions for policy-change, as well asgiving some indication of the depth to whichcitizens are engaging with each other.

However it was thought too early to setrealistic targets until participation had beenbrought up to a level consistent with othermethods, given the “multi-channel” nature ofthe consultation process. The most effectivemeasure of participation were thought to bethe most straightforward – the numbers ofregistered users and the proportion of thoseregistered who contribute.

Accessibility

Accessibility testing was coordinated throughBristol City Council. Automated accessibilitytests were run on 18th November 2004. TheTeam Initiative software did not meet theLevel A WAI standard but most of the issueswere considered relatively easy to rectify. Theusability evaluation carried out on e-panelsoftware, described in more detail in the AskBristol chapter of this report, included iNovemTeam Initiative.

Working in partnership with other contentproviders introduces an added layer ofcomplexity into ensuring the site isaccessible. Peter Thomson notes “It is not aneasy thing to achieve. The problem is makingsure that other people’s content complieswith the standards.”

Studies of how other online consultation sitesaddress usability issues have fed into thedevelopment process, and “One Voice”(http://www.1voice.org.uk/), an organisationthat represents people with differentdisabilities, is to be invited to assess the site.

There is an awareness that the content of thesite needs to be presented in languages otherthan English, and the options foraccommodating other languages are currentlybeing debated. The impetus has been to getthe discussion forum going in order to gaugeinitial impressions before developing it further.However, there are plans to change the lookof the site to make it more appealing, inrecognition of the fact that the appearance ofthe front page influences whether or not userswill explore the site further. Presently, there isa high proportion of text on the site, and thePartnership has engaged a journalist to re-design the content in a manner that willattract more users.

6.3 Actors’ roles and expectations

In Wolverhampton our participants were thecouncil officers closest to the project;Workstream leader Peter Thomson, ProjectManager Debbie Turner and Head ofMarketing Barbara Holt. We were also able todraw on results of interviews with ScrutinyOfficer Fiona Bottrill and surveys of e-panelmembers, provided by RBA consulting, butwere unable to speak directly to citizens or tocouncillors or staff from other agencies in theWolverhampton Partnership.


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Project managers’ views

Enhancing transparency

For workstream leader Peter Thomson, theonline forum has a key role in enhancing thetransparency of the Local StrategicPartnership’s structure and work. Much ofthat is little understood and the site can playa vital communication role:

“The roles are not clear between thePartnership, the council or any otheragencies that are involved. Neither is thecouncil’s role clear, in the sense of thepublic knowing who provides whichservices. It’s emerged from consultationthat what concerns local people are suchthings as “street crime”, “rubbish” andhealth issues. These are multi-agencyPartnership issues. So when thePartnership had to develop a communityplan for consultation, they came up withcommunity themes that are similar to everyother community plan that you look at –such as the environment and the economy,and they are all cross-cutting themes. If wetake consultation seriously, then addressingthese issues will involve a number ofpartners. That may not be whattransparency is usually taken to mean, butwhen someone says they are worried aboutbeing mugged, the answer we give issomething complicated, and they wantsomething straightforward”.

The Partnership’s organisation into thematicgroups that match the Community Planconsultation themes is seen as a key step toachieving transparency. This has raisedinteresting dilemmas about the use ofbranding on the site, to reflect the corporateidentity of the Partnership as a whole, or itsconstituent partners.

“At present we have chosen to stick withthe Partnership identity. I’m sure there willbe more discussion about that question. Ifpartners or the council have their ownspecific consultations then it might bemisleading if they have the Partnershipidentity. That is tied up with thetransparency issue; understanding what theroles are and how they fit together. It iseasy to understand the technology as aresource; it is difficult to know how tomanage participants as a resource.”

Promotion of the partnership site

From the experience with “Wolforum” theproject managers recognised that a great dealof effort is needed to produce a small amountof uptake, so were prepared from the outsetfor strenuous promotion. So far, there havebeen a number of avenues taken to raise theprofile of the e-panel, including an exhibition,interviews in the media, and press releases. Inaddition, a number of leaflets have beenprepared and distributed, and there is a planto distribute small incentives, such as mobilephone holders and key rings to encourage theyoung to take part.

Online promotion is limited to hyperlinks tothe Partnership page from other websites.There is recognition that this has not beenpursued as far as desirable; for instance,there is a perceived need to establish linksbetween the Partnership, council and Citywebsites to the appropriate consultationpages. For the discussion on “Healthylunchtimes for secondary schools” the teamare hoping to get links placed upon the“Virtual Workspace” initiative for 14–19 yearolds across Wolverhampton, Shropshire andWarwick as well as with “celebrity chef”Jamie Oliver’s Channel Four website onimproving school meals.


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Moderating and facilitating

Most of the moderation has been undertakenby project manager Debbie Turner, who alsohas experience of facilitating focus groups. A major difference has been in the skillsneeded to intervene; with online discussionsthe comments are posted one at a time,allowing the moderator time to consider howto respond to the contribution. In a face-to-face focus group the facilitator needs torespond immediately to steer the direction ofdiscussion, but has more to go on – the fullrange of physical gestures and intonation ofvoice. Lack of these in online discussionmakes it more difficult to read the intentionsof contributors, eg whether they were beingserious or sarcastic.

A drawback to having the forum open forpostings twenty-four hours a day, seven daysa week, is that the moderators are likely towant to attend postings only during theirworking day. Evening and weekends may beprecisely the time when people most want togo online. This has made decisions overwhether to use pre or post moderationdifficult. With pre-moderation, any postssubmitted outside office hours will remainunchecked until the following day, losing thebenefits of immediacy. With post-moderation,unacceptable posts will be visible for asufficient period to generate responses beforebeing removed.

Data protection

Ensuring the forum complies with the DataProtection Act has not raised major issues,but was felt to be an issue that should bekept under review. For example it wasthought that as the system becomes moreused by members of the Partnership accessto registered members’ details should bemonitored and there may be a “gatehouse”through which requests for consultations will

have to pass to ensure protection of the panelmembers personal details.

Online vs traditional channels

It is a clearly recognised that e-consultationsusing the e-panel will serve as a supplementto traditional forms of consultation for theforeseeable future. As the entire consultationapparatus has yet to be put in place itremains to be seen how these may best beintegrated. Experiences with this have hadlimited results. For instance, Social CareServices ran their consultation on newcontracts for the managers of residentialhomes. As Debbie Turner relates:

“The two hundred managers of residentialhomes were informed of the online facility,though they were given other options too.Eleven out of the two hundred registered onthe site to download the documentsconcerning the new contracts.”

This was considered a promising start, andthe managers’ reliance on traditional methodswas partly put down to the novelty of theonline facility, but also due to the existence ofestablished channels of communicationbetween them and Social Services. It wasthought probable that managers would favourwritten responses because of theorganisational arrangements in place forresponding formally in writing.

Analysing the results and evaluating the process

Analysing results is a challenge comparedwith survey methods according to ScrutinyOfficer Fiona Bottrill, who managed theconsultation on Accident and EmergencyServices. With an online discussion, thequestion arises of how to actually analysethat information and make sure there is validrepresentation of the views of residents.


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For Peter Thomson this is a need that willgrow along with the usage of the site, andboosting that remains the first priority.Currently, web usage data is being collectedbut the most important metric is;

“...what proportion of registered usershave contributed. It is not especially high.With Wolforum the publicity resulted in ahuge increase in people looking but nochange in the numbers contributing. Butthis needs to build up over time; there is athreshold before people take part in aforum, so their confidence needs to grow”.

The need for user-centred design andevaluation is also considered important forthe future development of the tool. “Thesoftware has a pedigree in communitybuilding, so we felt that we can trust them fornow – give it time to prove itself” saysThomson.

Gaining trust within the Partnership

There was an ongoing need to build trust inthe consultation process, with citizens butalso with councillors and departments, andexternal partners. Traditionally there has beenan emphasis among some departments onexpert knowledge of service provision, andamong councillors on “what will play with thepublic” in terms of policy changes.Addressing this was seen as a question ofproviding a clear process that partners andcitizens know how to use.

The future: online communities for neighbourhoods

In the longer term, Peter Thomson sees therole of the forums becoming onlinecommunities for neighbourhoods, whichwould include the local councillors asparticipants and in some cases as hosts.Thomson acknowledges this is a long-termprocess:

“Only a small minority of councillors wouldcontemplate it at the moment, but it is thetechnology they are uncomfortable with ratherthan the democratic principle.”

Consultation Manager’s Views

Two managers of the first of the project’s e-consultations gave their views: Head ofMarketing Barbara Holt and Scrutiny OfficerFiona Bottrill23, responsible for theconsultations on the City Centre and A&Eservices for the Elderly respectively. Bothremained optimistic about the potential of e-consultation and although online responseshad been disappointing in comparison withthe traditional approaches there were valuablelessons learnt.

Scrutiny Officer Fiona Bottrill feels that the e-panel will probably become have anincreasingly large part to play in the way thecouncil consults people, although inconjunction with other methods. The A&Eservices consultation had not had asignificant online response, but this wasbecause the target age group of elderlypeople and carers are less likely to take partin an e-forum. This consultation highlightedthe need to make sure that membership ofthe e-panel is as broad as possible, so thatconsultation can easily be targeted to aspecific group without numbers ofparticipants being an issue.


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23 Interviewed by RBA Consulting.

The consultation also highlighted someimportant moderation issues. For Bottrill,there was a need for ongoing support for thisrole, which might become time-consuming.The critical issues were:

• E-panel members may post questionsthat need replied to and the moderatormay need to refer the question to anothercouncil department.

• There is a need to have systems in placeto manage potentially difficult situations.For example if there’s one particularlyproblematic member, is there an appealsprocess for that member to complain?

• There is a risk of a forum becoming apolitical tool, and issues getting slanted.

Barbara Holt, Head of Marketing, also feltthe online forum was still in its initial phaseand it needed time to build up support forconsultations such as the current City Centre one:

“It is a really good idea, especially in thefuture. These are early days of thePartnership, but there is no broadunderstanding of what the Partnership is allabout. The site needs to be clearer on whatthe site is all about and what thePartnership is.”

Citizens’ views

Wolverhampton were unfortunately unable tosupport field tests of the partnership site inthe time between the launch of the site andthe evaluation. However some telephonesurvey results were made available to us byRBA Research, and Project manager DebbieTurner was able to comment on thecomposition of the e-panel.

In terms of composition, the e-panel is top-heavy with men in their thirties, whereas the

traditional Citizen’s Panel tends to be elderly,white, affluent and literate people, fromcertain areas of the city only. There is aperception that the online environment wouldattract the young as it is regarded in somesense as their technology. Efforts to engageparticipants from that background have beenhampered by delays in supplying theresources necessary for recruitment, such asleaflets and posters.

The “City Centre” discussion afforded anopportunity to obtain demographic details ofrespondents, but this was passed-up througha wariness of breaching Data Protectionregulations. With hindsight, it is now acceptedthat such details would be useful to thePartnership and the possibility of their beingcollected in future consultations is beingconsidered. Whilst it is important to knowwhether these discussions are reachingcitizens who would otherwise be without avoice, there are drawbacks to collecting suchinformation; not only are many peoplereluctant to provide personal details online,but there is also a danger that beingpresented with forms requestingdemographically relevant data might easilydeter citizens who would otherwise beprepared to contribute to a discussion.

There is no indication from the commentsposted on the discussion pages of how thecitizens in Wolverhampton anticipate thePartnership proceeding with their input.However we can gauge some of this from thetelephone survey conducted by RBAConsulting for evaluation of the e-panelworkpackage. Figures24 drawn from theirtelephone survey of 72 e-panellists includedresidents of Wolverhampton, and indicate thata majority of panellists either tended to agreeor strongly agreed that the subjects forconsultation were interesting and important(71% and 67% respectively). Yet when asked


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24 These comments are based on evaluation reports on iNovemsoftware conducted in November 2004 for the Bristol e-Panel facility.

if they agreed that the council takes notice ofthe responses, there is a fairly even splitbetween those who agree/strongly agree andthose who disagree/strongly disagree, and amajority who were either neutral or who didnot know (17%, 19% and 65% respectively) –see the questions and Table 6.1 below.

Q1 Through the e-consultation, the council is consulting me about subjects I find interesting.

Q2 Through the e-consultation, the council is consulting me about subjects thatreally matter.

Q3 The council is taking notice of what the e-consultation is saying.

Table 6.1 – response to telephone surveyon e-panels

Q1 Q2 Q3

Strongly 17 15 3agree

Tend to 54 42 14agree

Neither agree 3 14 14nor disagree

Tend to 10 14 13disagree

Strongly 6 4 6disagree

Don’t 11 11 51know

No reply 0 0 0


The system has only recently been deployedand it would be unrealistic to expect anyimpact of the consultations on decisionoutcomes. This does not mean that decisionmakers have not responded. For example theforum discussion on “Is Wolverhamptonbecoming part of Greater Birmingham”brought a response from the council leader.

At the time of interviewing, the results of the“City Centre” consultation were yet to beanalysed. As mentioned earlier the analysisof the results will be passed to theappropriate committee with a decision likelyin several months.

From the first discussion on 13th January2005 to 16th March 2005, there were sixtopics attracting 91 posts. A comparisonbetween the number of responses to thediscussion on “A&E services for the elderly”(5 replies in 21 days), and “What is the bestand worst about Wolverhampton” (31 repliesin 21 days) suggests that online discussionsare better suited to issues likely to have wideand broad appeal to the local population.

There are further indications that some topicshave appeal; people continue to participate inthe discussions, especially with “Healthylunchtimes for secondary schools” and “What is the best and worst aboutWolverhampton”. Also there are a number ofindividuals who have taken part in more thanone topic and more than once within a topic,suggesting that the forum has retained theirinterest (from the 91 posts between 13.1.05 –16.3.05, there were 53 unique users,indicating that 28 posts were from individualswho had posted already).


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Web metrics give more information on theappeal of the site. In the period ofapproximately 8 weeks from the launch of theforum to 17 March there were:

• A total of 41,040 page requests to thesite, and 1156 visits by 782 uniquevisitors. However this includes requestsfrom within Wolverhampton City Counciland other members of the Partnership,and to pages that were used for site administration and internalcollaborative working.

• The e-panel page received 2310requests, i.e. twice on average in every visit.

• The registration page received 902requests, many more than the number ofregistered users, suggesting that fewpeople who visit it go on to complete theregistration procedure.

• The login page received 1306 requests,while the My Groups page displayedafter logging in received 733, indicatingthat the log in procedure was completedapproximately. half as many times asthe corresponding page was accessed.This might indicate that users haddifficulties with the log-in page or that itlacked appeal.

• The discussion shown by default afterthe My Groups page; The Best andWorst of Wolverhampton received 530 requests.

• The page used to reply to a discussionmessage received 135 requests,compared with 92 replies that weresuccessfully posted to the site, whichmight indicate a need to look further atthe usability of the reply page or perhapssome hesitancy in taking part.

These figures show that early interest in thesite has been established, and highlightsome possible issues worth considering aswork progresses to enhance the appeal ofthe site. Also the overall site usage seemshigh, and this may be in keeping with theemphasis of the partners on sharinginformation for other uses.

6.5 Conclusions

Representation

The Partnership site appears to have beengreeted with enthusiasm by someconsultation managers, so far this is limited tothose within the council rather than partnerorganisations. Councillors are reportedlyinterested in how the facility might serve them and the council leader has participatedin one forum.

The emphasis given to online support forcollaborative working between partners, as apre-requisite of effective consultation, is apotential strength of the project but needsfurther study to evaluate its contribution.

Engagement

The Partnership is built around social“themes” that were identified in thecommunity plan, “Movingon…Wolverhampton’s Community Plan2002–2012 “, and represents a coalition ofpublic, private, voluntary and communityorganisations. Citizens can engage with thePartnership via information contained on thewebsite, and by becoming members of an e-panel, taking part in discussions. As thesefacilities have only been available for a shortperiod, it is difficult to assess how successfulthey have been in engaging the public. Inboth cases, these facilities are currently beingdeveloped to fulfil their role to a greaterdegree; the public face of the website is to be


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made user friendly and the recruitment to thee-panel is to be stepped up.

Problems with the e-panel are recognised,but it is felt to be better to have somethingrather than nothing. To date, only thediscussion on proposals for the City Centrehas produced results, but these had yet to beprocessed at the time of writing. The initialimpression suggests that comments uponthe City Centre proposals were similarwhether submitted by paper or online. WhilstCity Centre results were regarded asdisappointing within the council, thereremains a feeling that the principle is worthpursuing, and that it requires time before abalanced assessment can be made. So far,there is nothing to indicate the reaction of thepublic to these facilities.

Transparency

All stakeholders interviewed are firmly of theopinion that unless the citizen sees how theircontribution influences policy, then they willcease to participate with the Authority.Providing transparency, however, is notsomething that can be achieved in the short-term as it requires the co-ordination of severalkey elements – in this case, the Partnershipwebsite, the e-panel and the consultationdatabase. The situation is further complicatedby the desirability of allowing time for each ofthese elements to establish themselves priorto the process of their integration.

To date, effort has been focussed upondeveloping the components to the point atwhich they can begin to have some impact.Both the Partnership site and the discussionforum have only recently been available tostakeholders to use, and it is hoped that the consultation database will shortly be in commission.

The corollary of the above is that theconnections between these componentsremain ambiguous, with uncertainty beingexpressed upon such matters as how thevarious agencies articulate with each other,how the ICT components relate to each other,where responsibilities lie, and howconsultation fits in with service delivery.

Whilst these questions lie at the heart oftransparency, it would be unfair to expectanswers to be available at this point in theproject’s life. The important thing is that themanagement have taken these points assetting the agenda for the future developmentof this project.


The project’s capacity and skills inmoderating and facilitating the discussionforum appeared to be well developed by theproject team. Effort has been made to ensurethat appropriate training in consultationtechniques is available to those workingwithin the Partnership. Furthermore, initialtraining in hosting and moderating has beensupplemented with the provision of guidancenotes. This role has been shared by twopeople, with others in the Partnershipseemingly reluctant to take on such aresponsibility. Whilst limiting the numbershosting entails a consistency of approach tomoderation, there is a danger that the expertknowledge within the Partnership is not beingutilised to its fullest extent within this context.


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Political equality

It is too early in the life of the forum forinformation to be available on whether it isincluding individuals or demographic groupspreviously under-represented. The sitecurrently is acknowledged to needimprovements to widen the accessibility of itscontent25. Steps are being taken to simplify thelanguage used. As with the other e-democracy tools considered in this report,more could be done to present the facility inminority ethnic languages or at least provideinformation on such translation services asare available.

Community control

Because the website is still underdevelopment, and because there have beenno outcomes from the discussion site, it isimpossible to say what impact these toolshave with respect to bringing the public, thelocal authority and its partners closertogether. We agree with the project managersthat its nature, i.e. online collaboration amongpartners in order to achieve collaborative e-consultations, makes it very difficult toidentify short-term benefits.

Instead, the immediate benefits of this projectlie in the experience gained that is nowavailable to other councils interested inorganising a partnership structure. Thedocumentation that is available as a result ofthis project will provide others with a headstart, helping them avoid pitfalls, to providethem with ideas that otherwise they might nothave considered, and allowing them to makeinformed choices upon what is likely to workin their particular case. There remains a needto evaluate how the WolverhamptonPartnership site shapes public involvement inthe partners’ activities.


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25 INovem’s eConsult application does comply with WAI Level A.Team Initiative meets most of the Level A criteria and the companyhave stated that it will be compliant in the near future.

We began with five main evaluation questionsthe first two of which were:

• How do the actors involved understandthe initiative to benefit the relationsbetween councils, electedrepresentatives, public, partners andCentral Government, and what in theirview are the disadvantages?

• How do the politicians, officials andcitizens involved in using toolsdeveloped in the initiative characterisetheir “added value”; what methods andprocesses contribute that value, andwhat differences are there between themand other public engagementapproaches used?

These can be summed up in the shorterquestion “Have the projects enhanceddemocracy?” and answered in terms of thedemocratic criteria given earlier. These formthe basis for the conclusions below. The finalthree questions are considered afterwards.

7.1 How the projects enhancedemocracy

Sections 2 to 4 have already consideredspecific aspects of the projects using thecriteria for enhancing democracy. Here wesummarise the main strengths andweaknesses of the projects on the same criteria.

Representation

The major strength of Ask Bristol was thedevelopment of existing liaison between theconsultation team and service departments,in some cases with their direct participation inonline discussion. The e-petitioner projecthad strong support from councillors, althoughthe outcomes of e-petitions remain uncertainand there were weaknesses in the integration

with other engagement processes. The Micro Democracy project reported keeninterest from councillors. The WolverhamptonPartnership project rests on a strongconsultation infrastructure, although activesupport from partners appeared focused oncollaborative working between staff. Thatprovides a strong basis for sustainable e-consultation, although current support for it appeared limited from partners and councillors.

Engagement

In all cases strong efforts were made toencourage public response on issues of localrelevance. The early evidence has been thatthis is forthcoming but only when the issuesare general enough to affect a broad cross-section of citizens.

Transparency

The e-petitioner project was strongest on thispoint since it is establishing a process forpublishing decision outcomes. There ispotential in each project to enhancetransparency, but it would have beenpreferable for them to first establish whatcitizens would need or expect in terms ofenhanced transparency. This is necessarybecause “enhancing transparency” may betaken to mean either providing detailedinformation or hiding it in the name ofsimplicity. The projects each had publishedpolicies on privacy and acceptable use, withthe exception of Micro Democracy which wehad strong concerns about.


Each of the projects provides an online forumand opportunities for divergence of opinionon the issues raised and the method forraising them, with the exception of the MicroDemocracy project. The preparation for


857 Overall Conclusions

effective moderation of such discussions wasa strong feature of Ask Bristol and theWolverhampton Partnership projects. InBristol e-petitions are moderated by the sameteam as Ask Bristol discussions, and thesoftware supports the moderation task.However Kingston’s preparations formoderation were not extensive and shouldany controversial e-petitions stimulate heatedonline discussion there is risk officersconcerned may be unprepared to deal withany consequences.

Political equality

The projects each show strong potential forgreater inclusiveness. The web traffic andresponses to the engagement suggested theground had been laid for strong andsustainable take-up. There was evidence thatthe tools were already being actively used byhundreds of citizens in each of the localauthority areas. There was also evidence,albeit very limited, that these were mostly notpreviously “engaged” in contributing to localauthority decision making. In demographicterms there were disabled and minority ethnicusers almost in proportion to localpopulations, although they were also morelikely to be male and middle-aged. The MicroDemocracy project also had strong potentialgiven its integration of online and offlinechannels, although its take-up cannot beassessed yet.

Community control

Citizens had modest expectations that theirviews would have some impact on decision-making and strong expectations that thecouncils should in any case publish aresponse to their input. The evidence thatcitizens were satisfied with the arrangementswas limited but mostly positive for e-petitioner and Ask Bristol.

The Wolverhampton Partnership showedstrong potential in terms of liaison withexisting community groups, althoughunfortunately we could not directly assesscitizen support in the time available. MicroDemocracy placed much emphasis onresponsiveness, though again citizens viewson that were unavailable.

The projects need sufficient time forawareness to increase and for decision-making to allow responses to be given, beforeassessing responsiveness more conclusively.However they also need to give thecommunity time to respond. The UKgovernment consultation guidelines specify a12 week minimum period. They are centralrather than local government guidelines, butthe three projects supporting onlineconsultation had e-consultations open formuch shorter periods, and none had beenpublicly open for as long as 12 weeks. It wasalso noticeable that in all cases theparticipation of stakeholders in the designprocess was generally restricted to the one ortwo managers most directly affected, andthere was minimal participation of citizens indesign. The time pressures on the projects nodoubt contributed to this.


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7.2 Following up the evaluation

Our questions included:

• What methods have already been usedto find out politicians’, officials’ andcitizens’ perspectives on the initiative?What outcomes do the participatingcouncils report so far?

• What trade-offs have the technologistsinvolved in the initiative considered in thedesign of the software and processes,and what further changes should beconsidered?

• What are the needs for guidance onappropriate ongoing evaluation methods?

These questions have only been touchedupon owing to the very limited time allowedfor the evaluation, and the lack of any priorevaluation having been carried out in theprojects concerned. The limited length of thepilots also provided insufficient responses toconsider any relation between their breadthand depth in relation to existing methods.

The report of our evaluation has given moreemphasis to e-petitioning than the two otherprojects included, simply because the authorshad less difficulty with access to the peopleengaged in it. This difficulty was mainly aresult of time pressure on participants ratherthan obstruction.

Ongoing evaluation will be needed of thequality of the responses from citizens andcouncils to each other. The tools were eachintended to promote informed onlinediscussion, and there is a growing body ofwork that establishes and applies criteria forassessing the deliberative quality of thedebate. We have previously applied suchcriteria to analyse the extent to which debateis informed by consultation materials linked toa forum (Whyte and Macintosh 2000, Smithand Macintosh, 2001), and wanted to gaugethe potential for this analysis in the pilots.

As well as serving academic purposescontent analysis of this kind can serve theengagement process, if the criteria usedcharacterise what stakeholders are looking forin the results to helping their decision-making.The pilots we report on here unfortunatelywere too short lived to generate the level ofresponse that would justify such analysis, butin each case the officers involved consideredit a necessary next step.


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Checkland P and Scholes J (1999) Soft Systems Methodology in Action(2nd edition) Chichester: Wiley

Coulthard M, Walker A and Morgan A (2002)People’s perceptions of their neighbourhoodand community involvement: Results from thesocial capital module of the GeneralHousehold Survey 2000HMSO London

Macintosh A, Malina A and Farrell S (2002)“Digital Democracy through ElectronicPetitioning”; In McIver W and Elmagarmid,A.K (eds) Advances in Digital Government: Technology,Human Factors, and PolicyBoston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer AcademicPublishers pp137–148

Nielsen J (1993)Usability EngineeringBoston, US: Academic Press

Pawson R and Tilley N (1994)“What Works in Evaluation Research?”British Journal of Criminology 34(3)pp291–306

Rowley D (1994) Usability Testing in the Field: Bringing the Laboratory to the User Proceedings of CHI’94Boston Mass. (U.S) New York: ACM Press.

Stromquist N (1993) “The Political Experience of Women: LinkingMicro- and Macro-democracies”La Educación 116(3), 1993, pp541–559available at:http://www.iacd.oas.org/La%20Educa%20116/stromq.htm

Suchman L and Trig R (1991) Understanding Practice: Video as a Mediumfor Reflection and DesignIn: Greenbaum, J and Kyng M (eds.) Design at Work: Cooperative Design ofComputer SystemsLawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hove

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Whyte A and Macintos A (2002)“Analysis and Evaluation of e-Consultations”e-Service Journal; 2(1) 2002; pp9–34

Smith E and Macintosh A (2001)“What sort of Scotland do we want to live in?”e-consultation: Analysis of the comments receivedAvailable at: http://www.teledemocracy.org

Wolverhampton City Council (2004) Moving on: Wolverhampton’s Community Plan 2002 –2004Available at:http://www.wolverhampton.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/C9825418-CFBE-4563-86ED-EBF47EDE3091/0/full.pdf [21.03.05]


888 References

This Annex expands on the framework in the Introduction to the report. It gives more detail of:

• Criteria used to draw conclusions on theimpact on democracy

• The “key dimensions” of e-engagement

• The e-democracy “tool quality” criteria

• Detailed evaluation questions and the methods and participants addressing them.

9.1 Democratic criteria

The Local e-Democracy National Projectdefined at the outset the criteria summarisedbelow in Table A1.

As these criteria define what the workstream2 projects should do to support and enhancedemocracy they underpin the evaluation, and were used to assess the results and draw conclusions.

Table A1 Democratic criteria


899 Annex A: Detailed Evaluation

Framework

Criteria Description

A1 Representation E-democracy should be used to support, complement or enhancethe activities and understanding of representative government,and should not undermine the value of representative democracy.

A2 Engagement Projects need to support local identity and help individualsunderstand and link in to the wider democratic processes that are part of their community.

A3 Transparency Projects need to make decision-making processes more transparent.

A4 Conflict and Projects need to recognise that divergence of opinion may be consensus an inevitable outcome of enhanced democratic engagement.

Wherever possible, tools should incorporate an expectation ofsuch divergence and provide opportunities for negotiation,mediation and consensus building.

A5 Political equality This criterion requires e-democracy to improve the inclusivenessof policy-making or, at the minimum, not to further disadvantagethose who already are in some way excluded or less powerful inthe political process.

A6 Community control Democracy is about citizens collectively controlling those whotake decisions on their behalf. The tools of e-democracy thereforemust ensure that citizen engagement is closely linked to decision-making processes and that those who take decisions areresponsive to the communities which they serve.

(Source: Project Initiation Document, National Project on Local e-Democracy v3.0)

9.2 Key dimensions of e-democracy initiatives

To relate the main evaluation issues to thespecific projects and develop the frameworkfurther we used a set of “key dimensions” asshown in Table A2. These are aspects ofpublic engagement that we have previouslyused to characterise e-democracy initiatives(Macintosh, 2004).

The table summarises aspects we envisagedwould concern council members, officersmanaging democratic processes, and otherswith a direct stake in the projects’ outcome.

Table A2 Key Dimensions of e-DemocracyInitiatives (from Macintosh 2004)


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Dimension Description

B1 Type of e-enabling, consulting or empowering: to what level of policy engagement detail, and with how much weight given to citizens’ responses.

B2 Stage in When citizens are engaged in relation to the policy life cycle:decision-making agenda setting; option analysis, draft policy, implementation,

monitoring.

B3 Actors Who is engaged and by whom, who are the stakeholders, whodevelops and manages the process.

B4 Technologies used How participants are engaged and with what devices and interaction mechanisms. e.g chat, discussion forum, survey, etc.

B5 Rules of What participants can do online, and what personalengagement information is collected.

B6 Duration and The period of time made available to participants, and any sustainability relation to any other engagement initiatives.

B7 Accessibility Measures to ensure that resources can realistically be accessed, and assessment of take-up: how many participatedand from where.

B8 Resources and Resources required both in terms of staffing and financial, Promotion also the promotional mechanisms used.

B9 Evaluation and The approach taken to assessing the results, and how the Outcomes results influence the outcomes.

B10Critical success Any other political, legal, cultural, economic, technological factors circumstances contributing to the results.

While most of the definitions above are self-explanatory the first (B1) demands elaborationof what is meant by “enabling, consulting or empowering”:

• E-enabling is about supporting those whowould not typically access the internet andtake advantage of the large amount ofinformation available. The objectives we areconcerned with are how technology can beused to reach the wider audience byproviding a range of technologies to caterfor the diverse technical andcommunicative skills of citizens. Thetechnology also needs to provide relevantinformation in a format that is both moreaccessible and more understandable.These two aspects of accessibility andunderstandability of information areaddressed by e-enabling.

• The second level is the use of technologyto engage with citizens: consulting a wideraudience to enable deeper contributionsand support deliberative debate on policyissues. The use of the term “to engage” inthis context refers to the top-downconsultation of citizens by government orparliament.

• The third level is the use of technology toempower citizens: e-participation isconcerned with supporting activeparticipation and facilitating bottom-upideas to influence the political agenda.From the bottom-up perspective, citizensare emerging as producers rather than justconsumers of policy. Here there isrecognition that there is a need to allowcitizens to influence and participate inpolicy formulation.

(Source: Macintosh, 2004)

9.3 e-Democracy Tool Quality Criteria

We also considered aspects of the toolsproduced and/or deployed in the projects that were likely to concern the technologistsand officers responsible for developing and maintaining the tools and supplying their content.

The Table A3 below shows evaluation criteriadrawn from established sources for judgingthe quality of public websites. Theyencompass aspects of usability, usefulness,and social and technical acceptability(Nielsen, 1993), many of which also appear inthe Quality Framework for UK GovernmentWebsites 26. The criteria are hierarchical, withsocial acceptability at the top level,comprising trust and security, relevance andlegitimacy, and usefulness. Usability is alsosubsumed within “usefulness”.


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26 Quality Framework for UK Government Websites: available at: http://e-government.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/Resources/WebGuidelines/fs/en

Table A3 e-Democracy Tool Quality Criteria


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Criteria Description

Social acceptability

C1 Trust and security Is the information presented accurate, complete and reliable, and is the information users have provided handled in a secure manner?

C2 Relevance and Are the intended users satisfied that the tool meets a purpose legitimacy relevant to their own and their community’s needs, and are the

content and surrounding processes relevant to that purpose?

Usefulness

C3 Accessibility Is the level of compliance with Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)content guidelines sufficient to meet the needs of users with disabilities?

C4 Appeal Is the take-up in line with expectations, and do the intended userslike it enough to want to use it?

C5 Content clarity Can users understand what the content means in relation to their task or situation?

C6 Responsiveness Does the tool and/or process answer the user’s questions quicklyand effectively?

Usability

C7 Navigation and Do the intended users have sufficient and consistent informationorganisation about their current position within the site organisation, the path

they have taken, and the options available to them?

C8 Efficiency and Can the intended users perform tasks in an acceptable time, andflexibility are there appropriate short-cuts for doing repetitive or

familiar tasks?

C9 Error recovery Can the intended users “undo” their previous action, and are theyguided effectively on the correct procedure so they can continuethe task without distraction or hesitation?

Notes on definitions

C1 Trust and security: includes userconfidence in the steps taken as well asany specialist or stakeholder assessmentof data handling procedures and theircompliance with relevant legislation orguidelines.

C2 Relevance and legitimacy: the focushere is on whether the e-democracy tooland service is seen as meeting a relevantand legitimate purpose, rather than on itseffectiveness or efficiency in answeringquestions (for which see B6“responsiveness”).

C3 Accessibility: This term is also used intable 2.2 to refer to the measures taken toprovide access and ensure that theintended users can realistically make useof the tool and resources it provides(Poland, 2001). In this table however“accessibility” is associated morespecifically with the Web AccessibilityInitiative guidelines, i.e. the results ofmeasures taken to comply with them, andthe acceptability of these to disabledusers. The other senses of “accessibility”are represented here by “appeal”, and“content clarity”. See also QualityFramework for UK Government Websitesp11 “Predictor 3: Content”.

C4 Appeal: This encompasses the number ofusers, the extent of their use of a site, andtheir willingness to return to the site, asmeasured by web metrics or satisfactionratings.

C5 Content clarity: corresponds with QualityFramework for UK Government Websitesp10–11 “Predictor 3”.

C6 Responsiveness: corresponds withQuality Framework for UK GovernmentWebsites p10–11 “Predictor 5”.

C7 Navigation and organisation:corresponds with Quality Framework forUK Government Websites p10–11 “Predictor 2”.

C8 Efficiency and flexibility: correspondswith Quality Framework for UKGovernment Websites p10–11 “Predictor 1: download delay” and “Predictor 4: Interactivity”.

C9 Error recovery: not specifically coveredby the Quality Framework for UKGovernment Websites, but a standardelement of most usability guidelines (eg Nielsen J 1994 Heuristic Evaluation. In Nielsen J and Mack RL Eds, UsabilityInspection Methods, John Wiley andSons, New York, NY).


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9.4 Bringing the dimensionstogether

The “key dimensions” and “quality criteria”were used to generate further more specificevaluation questions. E-democracy evaluationis concerned with both social and technicalaspects of e-democracy initiatives (Whyte andMacintosh, 2003), but it would be misleadingto view these aspects as separate. What isconsidered “technical” may vary dependingon actors’ roles, and the different aspectsreflect our expectations of those actors’varying concerns.

There is an important difference between thetables. The Table A2 dimensions are notevaluation criteria. Although each dimensioncan be related to good practice guidelines,there is no widely accepted set of evaluationcriteria for e-engagement. For example “stagein decision-making” does not prescribe asuitable stage for e-engagement- butsuggests that the timing of e-engagement inrelation to policy development is likely to havea bearing on decision-makers’ views of theinitiative’s successes and failures.

The descriptive rather than prescriptivecharacter of these dimensions reflects thetable’s role, which was to generate concretequestions to which participants couldrespond with their understanding of theproject’s aims, the methods adopted and theirrelation to current practice, and expectationsof the outcomes, strengths and weaknesses.

Figure A1 brings together the variousdimensions and criteria to give an overview ofthe approach, and introduce the methodsdescribed in the next section.

Figure A1: Criteria and sources for e-democracy evaluation


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Stakeholders’ aims,methods and

expectations of publicengagement

Public take-up, usageand acceptability

Tool Quality Criteria

E-engagement: enhancing democracy?

Democratic Criteria

KeyDimensions

9.5 Detailed Evaluation Questions

In this section we elaborate on the questionsthat were used to structure discussions withthe participants.

These questions were derived from the “keydimensions” given earlier in this chapter, andwere then used to generate concretequestions for interview topic guides. Othermethods used to address each question areshown in Table A4 below.


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Key: The table refers to the methods and keygroups of participants already mentioned:

1 Interviews; analysis of field notes andtranscripts.

2 Field tests of e-democracy tools; analysisof field notes and transcripts,

3 Online questionnaires; descriptivestatistics of responses to questions.

4 Project documentation of requirements,user materials, and “internal” evaluationsof (e.g.) usability or accessibility.

5 Results of online discussion/responses;descriptive statistics.

6 Web server log files; descriptive statisticsof page requests etc.

a) Citizens who have used the e-democracytools deployed (or agreed to take part in a pilot).

b ) Citizens who have not used the tools.

c) Councillors involved in the engagementprocess.

d) Engagement “owners”: managersresponsible for aspects of theengagement process.

e) Project managers/ technologists, whetheremployed by the council or by suppliers.

f) “Internal” users: moderators oradministrators.

Dimension / Questions Methods Sources

Type of engagement

1 How does the project relate to the council’s e-democracy and 1 allparticipation agenda, and how should it benefit relations withthe public, elected representatives (executive and opposition),partners and national government? Have views changed in light of the outcomes apparent so far? If so, how?

2 What are actors’ views of the weight given to engagement 1 allresults in the council’s decision-making, and how do their perceptions differ from those of officials and representatives who “own” the engagement process?

Table A4 Detailed evaluation questions andhow they were addressed


96Dimension / Questions Methods Sources

Stage in decision-making

3 Where do actors think the engagement process fits into 1 allservice delivery and/or more general policy making (as “monitoring”, “agenda setting” etc.)? How does this vary according to the issue or topic?

4 What important differences, if any, are there between the 1 2 3 5 allissues raised in online engagement and those using other methods?

Actors

5 Who are the relevant actors (politicians, officials, technologists, 1 3 5 allcitizens as individuals and groups), and why are they involved?ie who does the work, who controls it, who are the actual orpotential beneficiaries, who may be adversely affected, who isotherwise involved?

6 What important differences, if any, are there between the roles 2 (d) (e) (f)of the moderator (or facilitator) in online engagement compared with other approaches used?

Technologies used

7 How are the tools provided used? 1 2 3 5 6 all

8 How useful are the tools to their intended users. all (a) (b) (f)

Rules of engagement

9 What is the impact on public engagement of the project and all allwhat implications does that have for the engagement process?

10 How do actors view the privacy implications of engagement and 1 2 3 allwhat measures have/should be taken to address these (considering DP and FOI)?

Duration and sustainability

11 How does the project impact on other public engagementactivities, especially when they also have an online element? 1 2 4 5 all

Accessibility

12 What measures have been taken to provide appropriate accessibility levels (in terms of the Web Accessibility Initiative)? 1 2 4 all

13 What is the relative appeal to citizen-users of the main online 1 2 3 5 6 (a) (b)functions provided?

Table A4 Detailed evaluation questions andhow they were addressed


97Dimension / Questions Methods Sources

14 Whose voice is represented in the results? ie are there all alldemographic differences between online/offline participants,and for what reasons are online/offline preferred? Why do some citizens not use either?

15 Is supporting (online) information on the users’ and 1 2 (a) (b) (f)administrators’ / moderators’ roles and tasks considered easy to understand by target users?

Resources and promotion

16 What important differences, if any, are there between the 1 2 5 (a) (b) (c) (d) recruitment and promotion methods considered appropriate, (e)compared with other engagement methods? Does this differ according to whether issues are seen as affecting particular localities or wider interests?

17 What are the ramifications of the project for the representative 1 2 4 allroles of councillors and their communications with the public and with officials?

Evaluation and outcomes

18 What approaches have been used to understand the system 1 4 (d) (e)and process requirements, and the value attributed to the e-engagement tools by citizens and stakeholders? With what outcomes? What specific benefits or barriers, are report?

19 What guidelines on methods for routine evaluation are needed? 1 (d) (e)

Critical success factors

20 How have those involved in developing the tools balanced 1 (d) (e)anticipated pros and cons of software features, and how has the balance between local and general features been affected by the size/scale of the council’s concerned?

21 What part did the intended users or other beneficiaries play 1 4 (d) (f)in the development of the system and related processes?

22 What further changes to system and/or process should be all allconsidered as a result of the evaluation?

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