active and positive citizen engagement

Dr. Norman J. Jacknis Director of Program Development IdeaScale July 1, 2014 Norman.Jacknis@ideascale.com!

SUCCESSFUL CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT

ENGAGEMENT & INNOVATION 1

How Citizens Used To Be Engaged

• 4 4!

This Leads To A Key Question How can the engagement of the town meeting scale up from a couple thousand people standing in one location to many more than that?

How do you hear from the many people who can’t show up for meetings, but will show up to vote on election day and decide who’s doing a good job?

Why Engage Citizens? Reason #1: It’s Part Of Quality Of Life

The Importance Of The Experience “Goods and services are no longer enough. Instead it’s the experience of being a customer – or a resident/citizen of a city, state, nation.”

-- “The Experience Economy” by B. Joseph Pine and James

H. Gilmore

You can do everything people want, get it 100% right and still fail to satisfy citizens if the experience is not positive and memorable.

ENGAGEMENT & INNOVATION

Survival Question For Cities/States When most people can work anywhere, where will they choose to live & work? Many people will choose based on quality of life And quality of life includes the citizen experience.

Why Engage Citizens?!

Reason #2: To Understand Their Priorities

Calgary and also NYC, Chicago, Vallejo.

City Of Calgary, Canada

Ideas for cutting the state budget were generated with this online campaign:

•  2,000 ideas posted

•  130,000 votes cast

Reason #3: To Get New Ideas & Innovations

Why Open Innovation? Generate ideas from a wide number of sources – internal and external. Increase community diversity in the ideation phase to stimulate creativity.

Examples Innocentive, P&G Connect, NetFlix Prize, Cisco iPrize

“P&G employs 7,500 people in its R&D division, but there are 1.5 million scientists throughout the world with expertise in P&G’s areas of interest.”

"More than 50% of P&G innovation comes from external companies of all sizes and from individual entrepreneurs too”

Larry Huston, Procter & Gamble’s former Vice President of R&D

•  Determining the course leading to the

President’s challenge for human orbital

exploration of Mars in the 2030s

•  Objective: engage and inform

citizens on Mars exploration

progress

•  Visitors presented questions, but

also answered each others questions

•  Engaged over 1,400 users who asked

nearly 600 questions in only 3 months

•  Video page for experts to weigh in

on popular topics

NASA: Mars Program

Madison, Wisconsin

City of Ottawa Have a Say! Sustainability Campaign

•  In 2013, a new global partnership called Making All Voices Count launched with a single initiative: create a world in which open, effective and participatory governance is the norm, not the exception.

•  Objective: source and sponsor creative solutions to transform the relationship between citizens and their governments.

•  Of the original 196 submissions, ten finalists were invited to Global

Innovation Week in Kenya where the winner was announced.

•  Winning ideas included improvements to civic services, citizen engagement, and

health services delivery among others.

Making All Voices Count

46,319 users

196 ideas

68,000 votes

Reason #4: To Improve Legislation & Regulations

Snowmobiles In Finland - Crowdsourced lawmaking suomijoukkoistaa.fi!

Reason #5: To Predict Public Reactions To Proposals

Why Engage Citizens? Reason #6: To Get Their Help Delivering Services

Why Engage Citizens? Reason #7: To Gain Their Understanding About The Realities Of Governing

Reason #8: To Regain Their Trust And Support

The Internet Changed Expectations •  Governing consists of conversations. •  The Internet is enabling conversations

among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

•  As a result, citizens are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked society changes people fundamentally.

•  People in networked societies have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from government agencies. So much for government rhetoric about the value of their professional way of doing things.

•  The networked citizenry knows more than governments do about their own services and programs. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

•  Citizens want to talk to public leaders. •  What's happening to citizens as a whole

is also happening among employees. [more of the 95 Theses at http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/8651385911/government-consists-of-conversations]

Things To Consider To Ensure A Successful Citizen Engagement

Be Realistic & Set Expectations: Remember The 90/9/1 Rule

If you’re really good, you’ll get to 70/20/10 – still only a minority is active

The Target Audience

Identify who you want in the conversation •  All members of the jurisdiction?

•  Just those served by or of interest to a particular agency?

•  Just “experts”?

•  Employees and the public?

•  People beyond your jurisdiction?

The answer will depend upon: •  What goals you want to achieve

•  How complicated the problem is

Conditions For Good Crowdsourcing

Not all crowds are wise

Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds recommends these conditions to achieve maximum accuracy of the results:

•  A great variety of perspectives on the problem, bringing individual knowledge and coming from different places

•  Each person's judgment is independent of the judgments of others

Getting People To The Party Like any other initiative, this needs to be publicized, promoted using all media. But don’t hype – call it an experiment to keep the public’s expectations realistic.

You – the government – need to get the conversation started

The “ask” should be: •  Brief

•  Clear

•  Written in an objective, fair way – not obviously looking for an affirmation

•  Of interest to the target audience, even compelling

•  Open to new ideas

•  Encouraging to people who don’t normally get asked or who feel they

have a rare perspective

•  Not so sensitive politically that you won’t be able to use the results

•  Balanced between too broad and too narrow a topic

Starting The Conversation

Structure The Conversation If Necessary

How Things Can Get Off-Track

Tone •  Inappropriate and offensive

comments •  Merely criticism

Accuracy •  Gossip and misinformation

Technical Issues •  System down •  Data breach •  Privacy issues

Hijacking •  Excessive lobbying and

promotion •  Too few participants

Keeping Up The Conversation All conversations need some degree of editing (“moderating”) •  To maintain an acceptable environment for all participants and to

keep things on track •  The question is how much you’ll need to edit?

Analytics •  Analyze participation, patterns, etc. quickly so you can respond and

improve things

To ensure you understand what people are saying, find ways to confirm they mean what you think they mean.

Don’t forget to sustain the engagement as long as it is useful and then formally end it.

Don’t Let the Engagement go Stale

No New Ideas!

Use game mechanics to sustain engagement

•  Reward certain actions

•  Measure behavior and makes it transparent

Different motivations for different people

•  Accomplishment: Recognition by moving up levels; see how many others are at your level

•  Recognition: Leaderboard or photos

•  Social Goal: Make the city/nation/community a better place – see the impact on greenhouse gasses, etc.

•  Social Network: How many people followed something you did? how many people are in your social graph?

To Get People To Stay At The Party – Think Like A Game Designer

What Will You Do With It? •  If you don’t do something with the results, people will be

unhappy

•  Explain what you’ll be doing and how the engagement process helped you do things better

•  You don’t have to take the ideas exactly as stated

•  This is a conversation, so you can refine the ideas

Ideas for cutting the state budget were generated with this online campaign:

•  2,000 ideas posted •  130,000 votes cast

Problems: •  The ideas were not implemented •  Both the government and citizens

were left unsatisfied •  Some ideas did not "reflect the

relationship between Federal and State Government"

•  Some were politically sensitive and not even a modified version went ahead

Be Prepared To Act – Or Don’t Ask

Who Will Get This Done?

Who is going to manage this? •  It doesn’t all have to be done by you and your staff

Get volunteers from outside the paid staff •  Give campaign workers something to do between campaigns

•  Use people on agency advisory boards

•  Identify active (objective, fair-minded) members of the community

and deputize them as leaders

You can use the network to build your network

Should not be an additional workload for established business units

Keep it simple for users

Let people start now: •  Avoid long planning cycles and drawn out implementations

Let it grow organically: •  Voluntary participation cannot be driven top-down

Treat The Initial Engagement Project Like A Startup

Take Aways •  We can now scale up collaboration and participation

•  This is a great way to get help and new ideas, test proposals, understand priorities of voters and educate citizens

•  In response to the general decline in respect for major public, nonprofit and private institutions, crowdsourcing is a way of earning back respect and trust - and convincing a skeptical public that you really care

•  All this makes it easier to govern better

Thank you! Norman.Jacknis@ideascale.com

Twitter @NormanJacknis LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/njacknis/

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