What does an ‘Open Model for Citizen Engagement’ look like?
The new Government is seeking greater openness, transparency and accountability. A central tenet of this commitment is providing a greater voice for citizens. Already there have been a number of high profile online processes which put this commitment to public engagement into action. Despite these positive attempts, critics have been quite negative.
The Spending Challenge, a Treasury consultation inviting public sector workers and citizens to help identify public spending savings, faced particular difficulty after the Government decided to remove the interactive element of the consultation website only a week after it had gone live as the result of 'a small number of malicious attacks'. Since then, the site’s users have been unable to see the suggestions of others, or to comment on or rate those suggestions. However, the Government has now announced three ideas proposed by the public which will be implemented and will help to make savings. It expects to make more in the coming months.
The UK Government is not alone in attempting to engage the public in this way. In Ireland an independent citizens’ crowd sourcing process the Ideas Campaign has secured commitment from the Irish Government to implement 17 of the ideas. The US Government is presently launching a site Challenge.gov with the aim to involve citizens to contribute big ideas and solutions to some of the challenges facing the country.
These first attempts at engaging the public in a new way, raise a series of questions about how to make this type of exercise more effective; harnessing the best of citizen energy, rather than magnifying the worst of mob debate.
Earlier this year, the Open Forum Foundation held a workshop in the US which focussed on this broad dilemma. Creating Great Citizen Engagement Software aimed to deal directly with the difficulties that communication systems face in connecting citizens to elected officials. There was consensus that the present communication systems for connecting citizen and state are based on a model that cannot function with the volume of messages that are being sent today. The attendees of the workshop emphasised the need for a more open way of engaging citizens.
But what would this look like? To answer this question in a participatory and collaborative way, an online platform – The Open Model for Citizen Engagement – was created. It is dedicated to co-producing, defining and implementing a new way of communicating and engaging.
The Government is “committed to engaging and collaborating with people online”. It is therefore important that questions about how to harness the internet more effectively for citizen engagement are tackled.
Another place for sharing thoughts and ideas for moving this complex conversation forward is with us on the Sciencewise-ERC forum.