Adventures in digital democracy

Part 1: UK

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What I did last summer

Me in a vineyard

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Whilst I’d planned a 4 week road trip across the

vineyards of France . . .
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But new gov wrecks my holiday plans

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The new Coalition government decide to run 2 different

mass participation exercises over the summer.
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What the UK government wanted to do

• Use the collective intelligence of the

people to solve national problems
– Your Freedom: reform unnecessary laws
– Spending Challenge: help save money
• Mass / nationwide participation
• New form of participative governance
• Make a statement that the new
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government was different.

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Your Freedom in detail

Add ideas

Search via tags

Read and rate ideas

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The Your Freedom crowd-sourcing

site allowed uses to share ideas
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What people were saying

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There was a mix of general popularist

`
ideas, together
with useful niche actionable ideas.
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Your Freedom in numbers
• 500,000 people visited site
• 47,000 took part
• 15,000 ideas
• 97,000 comments
An indication of high-levels
• 242,000 ratings of engagement.

• 11,000 tags
• Upto 40 Moderators
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Each person who took part, on average made x2

comments, x5 ratings. 1/3 added an idea.
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What happened (in stats)
90,000 visits on day 1
1/5th of all participation. High levels of
engagement

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On launch the site saw a massive spike in traffic on day

one, and generally high-levels of engagement.
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Massive spike + high participation
700,000 page views on
Day 1.

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Over 700,000 page views on day 1, and 4.2 million page

views across campaign.
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How we generated such volumes
RSS widget
Embedded in
key sites.

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A mix of launch PR, social media buzz, together with

RSS content syndication across partner sites.
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What happened in practice

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Due to spikes in traffic, in the first few days the site

crashed - due to lack of server capacity.
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Spending Challenge in detail

Same format as Your

Freedom

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The Spending Challenge used our Dialogue App - re-

skinned to tackle this specific issue.
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A two-part strategy

1)Ideas stage 2) Sorting stage

People then asked to rate
all ideas, to help the
People asked to give ideas
government sort through
of how the government
the 10,000’s of ideas.
could do more for less.

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Unlike Your Freedom, the Spending Challenge was run in

two distinct parts: 1) ideas stage 2) sorting stage
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What people were saying
Uses could rate

. . . comment on

. . . And tag

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The most useful ideas added were niche ideas. Beyond
these there were lots of more general (and quite
political) ideas like “Pull out of Afghanistan”.
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Spending Challenge numbers
• 250,000 people visited site
• 20,000 took part
Users added on average
• 43,000 ideas x2 ideas each.

• 14,000 comments
• 280,000 ratings

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Interestingly, participants in the Spending Challenge
added 2 ideas each, compared to 0.3 ideas per person in
the Your Freedom dialogue.
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Spending Challenge (in stats)
Spikes related to launch
of the 2 phases

High
engagement
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The Spending Challenge had even higher levels of
engagement compared to Your Freedom: over 15 page
views and over 9 minutes on the site.
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What happened next
• 6 weeks after the end of the process, the Chancellor
announced which initial ideas he was going to take
forward.
• 3 ideas were identified:
– a more common sense approach to Criminal Record
Bureau checks for junior doctors.
– piloting an online auction site for surplus and second
hand Government equipment
– replacing the plastic National Insurance number card
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with a letter written in white
reducing costs.

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. . . so what did this all cost?

£25,000 total

£0.45 per idea

£0.03 per citizen

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The costs involved in running these processes was about
£25k between them (N.B. certain server and design
costs were shared)
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And what we learnt . . .
• Invest in more servers!
• Create a compact process: define timelines
upfront, and pitch it as an *event*, rather
than ongoing process.
• Provide a timeline for feedback, to give the
process closure.
• Make sure the question asked is specific
enough toCopygenerate useful ideas.
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Possibly the 2 biggest things we learnt were 1) invest in

servers 2) create a compact process.
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+ make sure it doesn’t clash with your
holiday!

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Adventures in digital democracy
Part 2: US

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Right place. Right time.

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In 2008 members of our team went off to Berlin for a
seemingly obscure e-democracy conference, which led
us to Washington DC . . .
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Creating the Dialogue App

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

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In the weeks beforein white
the 2008 election, we were
commissioned by NAPA, the OMB and GSA to create the
Dialogue App as part of a pilot Dialogue around Health IT.

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Running Obama’s first Dialogue

2,000 participants from IT

Community. 520 ideas.
1,300 comments.

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When Obama won power, and after his Open Gov memo,
we were then commissioned to run the White House’s
first crowd-sourcing process around Recovery.gov
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Easy to role-out Dialogue model
All content
customisable

Add ideas

Read and rate

ideas Tag ideas

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XXXXX templated “app model”, allowing government to

Simple
quickly and easily set up their own dialogues.
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How the US run dialogues . . .
• Specific challenges: set up specific challenges
to niche problems.
• Specific communities: outreach targeting niche
communities of interest with specific
knowledge.
• Event-based: these challenges are set-up as
events.
• Tight timeframes: these will run for 7 to 10
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US government take a slightly nuanced approach to

running dialogues compared to the UK.
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 www.Delib.co.uk
www.CitizenSpace.com
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Chris@Delib.co.uk
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