Mobile Open Town Hall

February 3, 2012 | Posted by Robert Vogel in Product Updates

Many residents prefer to use their mobile phone over their computer to be online - especially those with newer phones such as iPhones. Others are more comfortable using a full browser sitting at their desktop or laptop computer. Our goal is to provide an online experience that works for everyone - and we reach that goal using a strategy called 'graceful degradation'.

Full Browsers

When someone visits Open Town Hall using a full browser on a desktop or laptop computer, they see our forum framed inside our client's website. That works great on a full browser - but not so great on the small screen of a mobile device. In these cases, Open Town Hall 'gracefully degrades' to display just the 'bare' forum, without the client's website frame.

iPhones and more

Our bare forum looks great, especially on iPhones and iPads - but not all mobile phones are the same size. Some are too small to run all the javascript and/or display all the data on some of the forum pages. For those phones, Open Town Hall gracefully degrades again, to show just the essential parts of the bare forum: the topic introduction, the recent comments and the option to sign in and post a comment.

Set your preference

This is all automatic 'behind the scenes': users just point their browser to Open Town Hall from any computer or mobile device, and we render the version optimized for their device. If users want to override our automatic optimization, they can tap 'mobile' or 'classic' to set their own preference. To learn more about our mobile strategy contact Robert at robert@peakdemocracy.com.

The Referendum Effect

February 1, 2012 | Posted by Mike Cohen in Insights

Government officials that are augmenting and diversifying feedback from their community via the internet should be aware of several challenges and potential pitfalls. These challenges include keeping the forums legal, civil, and fair — and equally important, preventing a pitfall with crowd-sourcing known as the Referendum Effect.

This blog post starts with a brief description of the Referendum Effect, and then focuses on how it can be impeded using online public comment forums (OPCFs).

How Crowd-Sourcing Produces the Referendum Effect

The Referendum Effect characterizes the loss of decision-making autonomy that government leaders incur when a community expects decisions to be based solely on the majority opinion of public feedback. More specifically, the Referendum Effect occurs when public feedback usurps the decision-making independence of government leaders. This dynamic is prevalent in conventional public hearings (and is especially problematic when the feedback from the public hearing is not representative of the community). The Referendum Effect can also arise when public feedback is gathered using online crowd-sourcing techniques in which participants are encouraged to vote on comments.

How to Minimize or Prevent the Referendum Effect

There are techniques that can minimize the potential of online forums to create the Referendum Effect. The most straightforward technique is to caveat the forum with messaging that explicitly addresses expectations. For example, Peak Democracy Inc's Open Town Hall OPCFs integrate the following message in the user interface: As with any public comment process, participation in Open Town Hall is voluntary. The statements are not necessarily representative of the population, nor do they reflect the opinions of any government agency or elected officials.

Another straightforward technique to minimize the Referendum Effect is to exclude the word "vote" from the user interface -- as the "v-word" can create an expectation that feedback with the most votes wins.

An additional and more sophisticated approach to minimizing the potential for the Referendum Effect is to structure the online forum to solicit only qualitative feedback (as opposed to quantitative feedback). For example, instead of the online forum requiring participants to indicate "yes" or "no", or option 1 or 2, the online forum can simply ask for a comment.

Structuring an OPCF using a qualitative format can eliminate the Referendum Effect, but if the qualitatively formatted forum garners lots of participation, then it can be difficult for decision makers to read all of the comments. This challenge can be addressed with clever analytical tools. For example, Peak Democracy Inc's Open Town Hall OPCFs can be configured to enable participants to support comments. The comments can then be listed in order of most to least supported, and links to similarly supported comments can be provided. This “related comments” graph enables decision makers to synthesize voluminous online feedback.

Enabling users to support other comments makes the OPCF structure slightly more quantitative. However, the risk of the forum becoming a vote for the most popular comment can be reduced by not showing the number of supporters that each comment obtains, and instead only listing comments in order of most to least supported.

In summary, caveating online forums, not using the v-word, and structuring forums for qualitative feedback can prevent the Referendum Effect, and thereby enable government leaders to leverage OPCFs without the risk of losing their decision-making authority. To learn more about the Referendum Effect and ways to prevent it, contact Mike at mike@peakdemocracy.com.

Should names be required?

January 17, 2012 | Posted by Robert Vogel in Tips

Before posting a statement, we require every statement author to register using their full name, street address and email address. At the same time, we agree to not share that information with anyone without the author's consent, unless we are required by law to do so.

One of the reasons we have this policy is to help us monitor the forum for civility: Name and address helps to ensure that no one person dominates the forum, and enables us to contact the rare author who posts a disruptive statement to resolve the problem without infringing on free speech rights.

The option to allow 'Name not shown'

It also enables our clients to decide whether to require authors to show their name next to their statement. If our client checks the 'Allow name not shown' box in the admin system, then authors will have the option to display 'Name not shown' instead of their name.

Is this a good idea? We frequently hear the concern that 'Name not shown' would encourage some authors to post statements containing personal attacks, profanity or other disruptive content. Reading the blogs and newspaper comment boards, it is easy to understand where that concern comes from: civility is not the norm on the web.

'Name not shown' is different from 'anonymous'

Open Town Hall is different from a blog. Most blogs are filled with comments written by anonymous authors: neither the reader nor the blog owner knows who wrote the statement. This enables some authors to write offensive statements while hiding behind their anonymity.

On Open Town Hall, no statement is anonymous, even when 'Name not shown' is used. We know the name, address and email address of every author, and monitor every statement - signed as well as 'Name not shown' - with software and staff to the same standards.

The choice is yours

Some people with great ideas will not participate if they are required to show their names. Especially for contentious issues, some will be afraid of interfering with their personal or business relationships by signing their name next to their opinion. Allowing 'Name not shown' allows more people to participate - and that helps broaden civic engagement and better inform community decisions.

We encourage you to browse through our 600+ forums and see for yourself. The choice is yours: you can require names on some topics and allow 'Name not shown' on others. After reading through our forums, almost all of our clients routinely allow 'Name not shown' - and routinely get constructive, insightful comments on Open Town Hall.

Why Public Hearings Need to be Augmented via the Internet

December 13, 2011 | Posted by Mike Cohen in Insights

Across the US and in other democracies, public hearings have been a mainstay of civic engagement and feedback to government leaders. Indeed, public hearings are often the most influential channel for feedback to government decision makers. However, this long-standing tradition of democracies has become incompatible with the lifestyles and mindsets of many citizens. This incompatibility is especially problematic for citizens with moderate views or an inclination to compromise, as well as parents with young children, adults with busy work schedules, and people that aren’t too mobile (i.e. being infirm or incapacitated).

This blog post details a series of problems with public hearings, and then culminates with an explanation of how online public comment forums complement public hearings in ways that (1) address their deficiencies, (2) enhance the insights and deliberations of government decision makers – and ultimately, (3) increase public trust in government.

The Problem:

The conventional approach to making decisions in local governments culminates at the city council meeting (or facsimile). These meetings are typically run under Robert’s Rules of Order, and each issue incorporates a public hearing. This public hearing isn’t the only source of community input to the decision makers, but it’s typically the only channel of public input that is officially unfiltered and open to the public. This transparency imbues the public hearing with extraordinary influence.

As the only official, unfiltered, transparent forum for citizen feedback, many residents, decision makers, and journalists erroneously conclude that the feedback at a public hearing is representative of the community. In other words, if the public hearing is dominated by one-side of an issue, then many mistakenly conclude that the community must be commensurately for that one-side. Likewise, if the public hearing is polarized by uncompromising opposite sides of an issue, then many mistakenly conclude that community must have few if any people that have moderate views on the issue and would advocate for compromise. Without other official, unfiltered, transparent channels of input, it’s hard not to assume that the public hearing is a proxy for the community. However, that assumption can weaken the decision making process and frustrate the public. Why is that assumption risky? Because public hearings have attributes that have become incompatible with the lifestyle and mindset of many Americans.

From a lifestyle perspective, public hearings are typically held in the evening and have agendas that don’t have time allocations and are subject to reordering. Consequently many meetings run late into the night. Perhaps these attributes weren’t a problem decades ago, when life was slower, young children were living with extended families, work schedules were less hectic, and most families had two spouses with only one working full time. But these days, attending public hearings is challenging for adults that are responsible for young kids or consumed by full time work responsibilities.

From a mindset perspective, constituents with an opinion on an issue but who are not passionate about the issue are unlikely to make the commitment to participate in the issue’s public hearing. Likewise, constituents with moderate views and inclinations to compromise are also unlikely to incur the inconvenience to attend the public hearing. This results in public hearings that are frequently dominated by people with extreme views – and that further discourages moderates from attending because the mob of extremists can intimidate the moderates from speaking.

Some might argue that the people who don’t prioritize attending a public hearing are indifferent or apathetic about the hearing’s topic. But that’s an insensitive outlook because it’s tantamount to believing that voting should be more challenging so that only those citizens that feel passionately about a particular candidate should vote in that candidate’s election.

The Solution:

The solution to this community feedback and decision-making problem is straightforward: establish other forums for community feedback that are official, unfiltered, transparent and have attributes that augment and diversify participation beyond public hearings. For example, establish online public comment forums (OPCFs) that emulate the order and decorum of public hearings.

OPCFs enable time-constrained residents to participate at the time and place of their convenience. By emulating the order and decorum of public hearings, OPCFs are fair and enable everyone to understand and learn from other perspectives. Also, integrating OPCFs with online analysis tools enables decision makers to efficiently synthesize voluminous feedback – and thereby enhance their preparation for public hearings.

OPCFs aren’t a replacement for public hearings. Instead, OPCFs complement public hearings by augmenting and diversifying civic engagement. This will enhance the perspectives of government decision makers, lead to more informed deliberations, and ultimately increase public trust in government.

Postscript:

Providing communities with OPCFs for feedback to government leaders isn’t a radical idea – as a high percentage of Americans (and residents of other democracies) already provide huge amounts of feedback to communities, organizations and companies via popular online services such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. However, in contrast to businesses, the challenges for governments are to offer OPCFs that are legal, civil, fair, insightful, cost-effective and don't usurp the decision-making authority of government leaders (known as the "Referendum Effect"). To learn more about addressing those challenges, contact Mike at mike@peakdemocracy.com.

Participate+ for Broader Participation

December 11, 2011 | Posted by Robert Vogel in Product Updates

We released three new features that help you get out the word and build participation without compromising the great quality statements that routinely appear in our forums. Collectively called Participate+, these three features make it easier for participants to quickly voice their opinion and to invite their friends to join the community discussion on Open Town Hall.

Support

When a well written statement expresses the opinion of many residents, many users click the support button next to the statement and express their opinion in just a few seconds. In this latest release, we've made it even easier for new users to quickly register and support statements in just a few clicks without leaving the statements page.

Recruit

When you enable this, statement authors are invited to recruit others via email or social sites to broaden participation and support their statement. Many of those will go on to write their own statement, further broadening participation.

Reward

Looking for citizen input on a fun topic? How about a T-shirt design for your summer concert series? Complement your serious topics with an occasional fun community builder, and use our Reward feature to offer prizes to the residents whose statement gets the most support.

Mix and Match

You can turn these features on or off, and optimize the feature set for each topic to maximize participation without compromising the forum quality. To learn more about maintaining quality or our other participation building features, contact Robert at robert@peakdemocracy.com.