Download to read offline
Uploaded byDella Rucker, AICP, CEcD
Selecting online public participation tools 08 26 14
The document discusses online public engagement tools and platforms in a workshop setting led by Della G. Rucker. It emphasizes the importance of choosing suitable public participation platforms, identifying user objectives, ease of use, and data analysis capabilities. Additionally, it addresses factors like audience inclusion, company strength, and technology diversity in the public engagement process.
More Related Content
Similar to Selecting online public participation tools 08 26 14
Selecting online public participation tools 08 26 14
- 1. NCDD Tech Tuesdays August 26, 2014 Online Public Engagement Tools and Platforms: the whirlwind tour The Wise Economy Workshop Della G. Rucker, AICP, CEcD www.wiseeconomy.com www.OnlinePublicEngagementEmporium.wordpress.com
- 2. The Wise Economy Workshop 2
- 3. The Wise Economy Workshop o The state of the industry (for the next 5 minutes) o What to look for in a public participation web-based platform o Let’s Talk 3
- 4. The Wise Economy Workshop 4
- 5. Who’s not atour meeting? Why? The Wise Economy Workshop 5
- 6. The Wise Economy Workshop Shop? Communicate with friends? Get news? Find solutions to their problems? How do you think they want to participate? 6
- 7. The Wise Economy Workshop 7
- 8. The Wise Economy Workshop 8
- 9. The Wise Economy Workshop 9 Start ups galore More and more players Many backgrounds Many technologies Many operating and sales models
- 10. The Wise Economy Workshop “App” providers • Single • Suite Semi-customized Build-to-suit 10
- 11. The Wise Economy Workshop 11
- 12. The Wise Economy Workshop 12 What are your objectives?M ake sure the approach fits
- 13. The Wise Economy Workshop 13 How will the interface look and feel to your public?
- 14. Understand when andwhere people will use it. The Wise Economy Workshop 14
- 15. The Wise Economy Workshop 15 Will the process allow you to pull the public into the process in a meaningful way? Will the tool help set priorities and identify areas of consensus?
- 16. The Wise Economy Workshop 16 How easy will it be for your public to use it?
- 17. The Wise Economy Workshop 17 How easy does the tool make it to spread the word?
- 18. The Wise Economy Workshop 18 How much control will you have over the content? How much control can you manage? How much do you want to deal with it?
- 19. The Wise Economy Workshop 19 How much control will you have over who is participating? How much will you know about who is participating?
- 20. The Wise Economy Workshop 20 What kind of data analysis capability will you have?
- 21. The Wise Economy Workshop 21 How will people with disabilities or who speak other languages be able to participate?
- 22. The Wise Economy Workshop 22 How strong is the company? Age? Staff? Experience? Expertise? Capacity?
- 23. The Wise Economy Workshop 23
- 24. The Wise Economy Workshop Della G. Rucker, AICP, CEcD Principal Wise Economy Workshop Phone: 513-288-6613 [email protected] www.wiseeconomy.com OnlinePublicEngagementEmporium.com Facebook: Della Rucker Aicp Cecd Twitter: @dellarucker LinkedIn, etc. Della Rucker 24
Editor's Notes
- #2 Uh, hi. This is an annotated version of the presentation I gave at APA 2012 . Since I don’t put many words on my slides, they don’t make a lot of sense if you just download them. Plus I often tile pictures on top of each other, and that looks like a mess if you are just looking at a print. I don’t work very closely from my notes when I give a talk, so these notes are based around what I think I said… or what a more clever version of me would have come up with at the time. And occasionally I think of something that I should have said and didn’t, so I’ll add that in here, too. My good friend Nick Bowden from MindMixer also presented in this session, and he was awesome. I will post Nick’s presentation at www.wiseeconomy.com as well. Ready? Mike check…
- #3 Let me start by telling you a few things about me so that you have some sense of where I am coming from. My undergraduate degree isn’t in planning, or economics or anything directly related to what I do today. When I got out of school, I was a teacher. Of course, I taught middle school, so my students weren’t anywhere near as cute as this, but come to think of it, neither was I. I have one of these career paths that looks like cooked spaghetti… eventually, I ended up as a consulting planner for a series of big firms. One of the specializations that I developed early on was public engagement, and I approached public engagement a little differently because of my teaching background. When I was in undergrad, the Big Thing in education was cooperative learning, which is a method for creating structured activities that help small groups of students make sense of complex information by working with it directly, with minimal teacher intervention. I still think that if you want to learn something, really learn it, this is _the_ way to do it. Period. So when I started doing public engagement, I drew on that experience to create activities where groups of residents work out solutions to tough challenges together, like these folks in South Bend, Indiana. I still do it this way. At the same time, I am the mother of two kids – ages 13 and 10 now – and I have been a working mother for pretty much all of their lives. That means I have about no spare time for anything and I end up doing things like writing presentations in parking lots outside of jazz band practice with alarming frequency. As a result of that, I have become a pretty avid tech adopter – not because I am into the gee whiz of it, or have a thing about having the latest new tool, but because it helps me manage the chaos of my life better. So: teacher, planner, moderate tech geek. What happens when those collide? A growing specialization in the use of online public engagement tools to meet planning and local government goals.
- #4 So here’s where we’re going. Ready?
- #5 So let’s be a little more practical for the moment: why should we be doing online public engagement? Sometimes people point to the gadgets and our love of the new, shiny technology. But that’s not the reason why at all.
- #6 We have a 19th century model of public engagement. When everyone worked on a farm, and public choices were pretty simple (and it was only the adult white males whose opinion we cared about, which leaves lots of hands to get the chores done while he goes to the town hall), then a 6 PM public meeting was the best way we had to make democratic decisions. But today we have A wider range of people who need to be part of the discussion, More complicated decisions to make, and More demands on that traditional meeting time window. If you work many kinds of jobs, go to school, take care of a family, or simply cannot move yourself to the meeting space or speak and be understood in a public setting, your 6 PM meeting might as well be at midnight. On Mars. It’s simply out of reach.
- #7 Partly because of those time demands, we do what we need to do more and more online. We’re just at the beginning of a sea change in how people live, and we tend to miss what a huge impact online sources have on our lives today. And it’s not just young people, or white people, or any specific demographic. Internet use increasingly crosses virtually all boundaries, and with touch screen devices and smart phones, even barriers like income, age and education are falling fast. Nick has some fascinating statistics on that.
- #8 So, ok, you know that your citizens are online and you need to be there…. So you put up a comment page, or a Facebook page, or something to “get their feedback.” What happens? Well, in the case of a project I was working on in Cincinnati, the first thing that happened was that someone who had an axe to grind with a consultant on the project (and who apparently lives in Texas, which is about a thousand miles from Cincinnati), found the web site and wrote three long posts about how he thought this project was going to go. Now, put aside for the moment the fact that the guy had some definite knee-jerk reactions, and some bad information, and didn’t live in the town he was talking about. Just look at the tone of the discussion. Does this sound like someone that a reasoned, level-headed person would want to spend time with? I mentioned before that people often don’t show up to our public meetings because their work, family or personal situation prevent them from doing so. The other reason that they don’t show up is because too often, we have let this guy dominate the microphone. You don’t have to be too oversensitive to decide that a “public forum” that allows a few people to spout off their partially-informed opinions or flaunt their closed-mindedness, judgemental-ness or just plain craziness… is not a room that you want to hang out in. Not only is it uncomfortable, but it’s a waste of the time you could have spent working, parenting, studying or doing something else more productive. It’s the same way in an online space – why would I spend my time here reading what the foaming whack-jobs have to say when I can find something more rewarding and less icky to do somewhere else? Obviously that’s not to say that we don’t sometimes need to have public comment time, and that even nut jobs have a right to state their opinion. But if we are serious about involving people other than the three guys who always show up, we have to manage this situation. We need to do that because there are good ideas that we don’t hear because this doof is hogging the spotlight. We need to honor their time and their willingness to help find solutions, and we need especially to hear from the people who are too scared or too modest or physically incapable of speaking at a microphone or engaging in the online equivalent of a speech. If we don’t proactively manage the situation to support that, they won’t come. If an open mic or comment thread is your only online public engagement, you are probably wasting your time, and that of your potential public partners.
- #9 A teacher doesn’t just put a book on a kid’s desk and say “Figure out the laws of physics. Test on Friday.” A teacher devises a logical progression of activities whose purpose is to help the student make sense of and gain mastery of the information. A few Mensa candidates might be able to ace the test after just reading the chapter, but most students need active teaching. When we do public engagement, we need to create a process that helps the participants reach the goals. They don’t want to spend their time wandering in the woods, and if they bothered to participate, they want it to matter. For this reason, let alone what our project needs, we owe it to them to create a process that channels their activities in a productive manner. If we want a stream of water to generate electricity, its power must be channeled through a productive process. It’s the same with public participants – whether online or in person. If we assume that random scattershot comments equals meaningful public engagement, we have done our project, our participants and our community a large disfavor.
- #10 Online public engagement technology is like many other Web 2.0 technologies right now: very fast-changing, very fluid, very entrepreneurial, and very under the radar. I find a new provider almost every other week at this point, and sometimes it seems like all they have in common with each other are humans and computers.
- #11 People often assume that one has to build a public engagement web site from scratch, but that’s seldom the case anymore. Just like a tailor is not the only way to get a suit, both pre-made but fitted and off-the-rack options are now available. Most of the providers employ an “app” strategy: a relatively simple computer application that does a small number of things very well. Think of the apps on your smart phone. An app’s advantage is low cost and high speed of deployment, and the shortcoming of an app are flexibility and customization. While apps can often be “skinned” to match your logo or website and include your graphics and data, the basic structure of an app is pretty set. You can change a budget scenario app from pounds to dollars pretty easily, and you can probably change the categories it uses to fit your community, but if you want to change the basic operations to include triple-bottom-line calculations, you are probably out of luck. Some providers provide one app, while others provide a suite of apps can be fitted together in one website and look like parts of the same whole. There are also a couple of providers who rely on web modules – pre-made segments that can be employed, changed and recombined with a relatively high degree of flexibility. Developing a public engagement platform through this approach requires much more involvement than simply buying an app, but it is quicker and less costly than developing a web site from scratch.
- #13 PlaceSpeak is a new provider based in Vancouver that geo-locates a participant and marks their location on the map based on the information that the participant provides. When I open PlaceSpeak, it shows me a map of my neighborhood with a dot on my house, even though I live thousands of miles from their current projects. For projects where location matters, like a neighborhood plan, it may be very important to know whether feedback is coming from inside or outside the area of interest, or even one side or another of a park or major highway. For other projects, such as perhaps a countywide comprehensive plan, this level of information might just make it harder to sort out the useful feedback from the noise. The tool need to fit what you need and what you plan to do with it.
- #14 Many people find an interface like this from MindMixer, with bright graphics and different colors, to be engaging and exciting. For certain projects (or project managers), however, this might look too busy or not serious enough. Each provider has its own visual style, and they range from the very plain to the very graphical. I am sure some of the providers would disagree with me on this (some of them are very proud of their graphics!), but I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all. The right kind of interface is the one that will look right to the people you are trying to engage
- #15 As Nick will show you, use of phones and mobile devices to access the internet is exploding – and this is where the most intensive growth in internet usage among lower income and elderly persons is happening as well. If your online engagement tools don’t run well on both a “smart phone” and a normal cell phone, let alone a tablet, you are likely to be missing a significant portion of your community – and especially those who don’t have, can’t use or don’t want to use a conventional computer. This screenshot is from Engaging Plans by Urban Interactive Studio, which recognizes whether you are accessing the URL from a mobile device and shifts you to a format that is optimized for a smaller screen.
- #16 If all you are doing is collecting comments to keep yourself out of legal trouble, like this quote appears to imply, you might as well go back to the town hall presentation with three people who show up to yell and then be ignored. Instead, look for how the tool will help participants interact with each other constructively, like this shot from a MindMixer does. Can people support others’ ideas? Can they elaborate or add onto them? Can the ideas with the most support bubble to the top? How many different ways can they participate?
- #17 The first screenshot, from Open Town Hall’s site for Palo Alto, shows a system that is set up for the written word. This app uses some nice text-analysis tools, like the Word Cloud, to enable analysis of the hundreds of written comments in the system, but to participate, you have to be comfortable writing a paragraph of persuasive or analytical prose. In a highly educated community, that approach will probably work just fine, but we forget sometimes that not everyone is comfortable writing a paragraph for public consumption. The second screenshot, from Crowdbrite, shows a very different approach. Not only do the visual cues imply something simpler and less formal than writing a paragraph, but you can also upload a picture or embed a video if that’s an easier way to get your point across.
- #18 Even if you yourself don’t use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, rest assured that many of your residents – and especially the ones who aren’t showing up to your meetings – are. For many of all ages, social media tools have become the go-to resource for sharing what’s important to them with the people they care about. Social media tools need to be integrated on several levels, from sharing the whole site to sharing specific comments. When you place a social media link, you are asking people to make a personal endorsement, so it’s crucial to be very careful to give people as much flexibility in what they share as possible. Otherwise they may not share anything.
- #19 As I discussed at the beginning of this section, some providers create apps, which others create semi-customizable platforms. There is a trade-off to be negotiated: how much do you want or need to be able to get into the guts of the platform, and how much of that kind of control do you have the technical capacity and time to mess with? This dashboard from an EngagingPlans site (developed by Urban Interactive Studios), gives the administrator the flexibility to do almost anything. I can not only upload new information and edit the content, but I can change the page heading if I felt like it. I can’t do that myself with a MindMixer or most of the other app-based tools – I have to tell MindMixer staff what I want. In my case, I have enough technical chops to get pretty deep into the site management, and – even better– my client has a guy on staff who understands the programming code and can actually get in and change the structure of the site. That gives us a lot more ability to control the site directly. But not everyone wants to spend the time on it, or has the technical know-how to do it. And that’s OK. For a lot of communities, less control and responsibility might be better than too much.
- #20 PlaceSpeak, which I mentioned at the beginning of this section, asks for enough information to pinpoint your location on a map. Other tools will let you participate with little more than an email address. As with many things on the internet, there is a privacy/control tension to be navigated here, and a level of personal information that is rejected as too much to ask for in one community may be perfectly acceptable in another. Do make sure that the provider you use asks for at least the user’s birth year – there are federal laws governing online activities on the part of people under 13 years old that you probably don’t want to tangle with. Also make certain that your provider includes the ability to block people who are crude or abusive or do something illegal or unethical. That’s a stick that you want to wield sparingly, or else you will be accused of censorship. But you need to have that option.
- #21 Like we saw with the Open Town Hall Word Cloud, data analysis can take a lot of forms. As part of choosing the correct tool to align with your objectives, you need to make certain that the site will generate the types of data you need, and allow you to work with that data the way you need to. If a program-generated infographic will do the job and appeal to your users, look for a capacity like this, again from MindMixer. If you want to be able to run your own statistical analyses, make certain that the tool will let you download the data as a CSV or Excel file.
- #22 One of the biggest benefits of online public engagement is that it significantly lowers the barriers to participation for people who are disabled or for whom spoken English is difficult, such as people who commonly speak another language or who are on the autistic spectrum. However, website designers who are not thinking about access issues often make subtle mistakes that many of us would not notice, but which can prevent participation and understanding for some users. For example, a photo that does not have a text explanation embedded in the code can create confusion for someone who is using text-to-speech software. Automatic translation tools, like the Google Translate widget, are critical for participation by people who speak other languages, but if it is going to be extensively used, it’s important to check the translation with a fluent speaker of the language to make sure it’s not coming through garbled.
- #23 As I noted at the beginning of this section, there are at least ten providers of online engagement tools today, and new ones emerge regularly. And just like you would review the credentials of a conventional consultant, you need to have a very deep understanding of a potential provider’s uses, approach, perspective and capacity before you give them your money. Some providers have a staff of dozens, some have one person. Some have a long list of client references, some are too new to be able to point to much experience. Some are set up as a software purchase model, while others provide you with a subscription. And some give you the product and some instructions and turn you loose, while others are set up to work in partnership with you throughout your project. Which approach is right for you depends on your objectives, your budget, your project and your people. One of the questions I always ask a new provider is, “What made you decide to create this product?” The answer to that gives you a key insight into what that particular tool is set up to do. A product developed by planners in response to a need to do better public engagement around a comprehensive plan has a very different approach than one developed by an architect to do charrettes, and both of those will differ substantially from the product developed by the former zoning commission member to make it easier to stay out of legal trouble. That’s not to say that there is a wrong or right approach. It is to say that the basic, underlying assumptions and perspective that led to development of the product will have a huge impact on what the product does – and what it doesn’t do. Keep in mind that all of these firms are small businesses, and most of them can be classified as start-ups. Some are bootstrapped, others have deeper funding, but they are all small. In the economic development side of my practice, I spend a lot of time on entrepreneur development strategies, and a critical point for any entrepreneur is find your niche – focus on what you are good at, do that well, and don’t try to be everything to everyone. That’s why it’s so important to look hard at what different providers do before you sign up with someone. Like a lot of young firms, these guys have a natural inclination to want to say “yes!” to everything – to think, sometimes, that they can do it all. When you’re a small business owner, you eventually learn that no, you can’t. But sometimes you have to get knocked in the head by saying yes to a client that you’re not really made for a time or two before you learn that lesson. You might as well be part of their capacity-building, rather than part of their time in the school of hard knocks. It wlll be a better deal for you both.
- #24 Finally, there’s one more point that matters… walk away with this, if nothing else from this presentation. Online tool are great – they can help us do our jobs in our communities much, much better. But they’re just a tool. You can have the prettiest web site, the most awesome public engagement doodads, but if people don’t get invited to participate -- truly and sincerely invited, and invited in a way that they actually get the invitation (read: a legal notice in the paper doesn’t cut it), then the best web site will be no more than a waste of time and money. If the invitation doesn’t get to them, and make sense to them, they won’t come to the party. People want deeply to be on the team. Let them know that they can be on the team. More importantly, make sure they know that you want them to be on the team. They may not believe you at first – they have heard a lot of insincere junk before – but keep telling them that. You’re building a championship dynasty, and that online public engagement platform is one of the foundational drills. The strength of the team is always going to be its players. Thanks. Here’s Nick Bowden, CEO of MindMixer.
- #25 INSERT NICK INFO