UK Parliament now has online consultation

William Heath at  The Ideal Government Project welcomes news that Parliamentary consultation goes online:

Hooray. Parliament has got a consultation site, plugged into the Select Committee work. First up is Medical Care for the Armed Forces (Defence Committee) and Local Government and the Draft Climate Change Bill.  It’s taken a while, and it’s a slow start. Ross at Hansard Society points to the journey here, and the breakthrough when MPs themselves moderated this. Parliament is where consultation can make a huge difference (even if a number of MPs Don’t Get It). This should be an essential medium for NGOs. If it’s helpful and unofficious, it could go far.

Over at Whitehall Webby Civil Servant Jeremy Gould looks at the reality of the process, and the difficult of integrating it with offline processes:

Online consultation across government is patchy and this development should set a good example to the rest of us to up our game. But there are a number of problems with this:

• Select committees call witnesses and take evidence from experts in their investigations, online consultation extends this questioning to a wider potential audience.
• Government departments, on the other hand, have a specific process to follow when engaging in consultation exercises (note on the following - I’m not a consultation expert) - a detailed published document with a series of set questions, a three month period for replies to be sent in, later on a published collation of the responses to the consultation.
• This latter procedure is optimised for the printed word, its quite formal in its approach and doesn’t translate well to the online world. Some have tried, with varying degrees of success, but fundamentally it doesn’t make best use of the medium (for the record, we offer the consultation documents as .pdf files and the list of questions as a MS Word document that can be emailed back to the consultation team). I understand that there is a piece of work across government working to modernise the regulations on formal consultation. But I don’t know how digital communication is being considered as part of that work.
• Although there have been some initiatives to improve the use of online tools in government consultation (in particular, Hansard Society’s Digital Dialogue programme) they seem to my mind flawed. Piggybacking a formal offline process doesn’t bring out the best in online - the consultation period is too long, the requested responses are too structured, and the choices often too limited to encourage genuine debate and discussion.
• A perennial problem of government digital communications - lack of resource and expertise - sometimes hampers online consultation. In my experience, moderation causes difficulties for consultation teams who seriously underestimate the time and effort this will require.

Jeremy adds:

Maybe government consultation, in its current form, can’t be successfully replicated online. Instead, perhaps we should look to the stage that precedes formal consultation - development of options to be put to consultation - as the opportunity to make best use of the digital tools available to us. We could call it something like online deliberation and provide a space to encourage genuine debate.

As long a significant proportion of the population do not/cannot engage online, and a more formal offline consultation process is required, then the less likely that we will be able to crack online consultation.

I think it is enormously helpful to have views from inside as well as outside Government, although this can be risky, as  SoSaidThe.Organisation reflects in Three Types of Government Blogger.

Comments

[Jeremy Gould]

I should clarify I was talking about formal government consultation processes, not 'consultation' per se which can of course take many forms.
Be great is a consultation policy expert read this and joined the conversation. I'd love to know the thinking about how government formal consultation might develop.

[Colin McKay]

In making the distinction between formal and informal consultations, I think we overlook the fact that informal consultations are still restricted in breadth and depth by traditional behaviour in government.

Policy Analysts have regular contacts with think tanks, NGOs, professors, fellow civil servants. They phone the same people, and consult the same networks when collecting information and developing new ideas. Even in local issues, you can usually identify the nutters or citizens motivated by NIMBY that will participate.

The real nub here is: how do we involve people outside those traditional networks? With or without net access, how can interested citizens begin or join a conversation with policy experts inside and outside government?

And for those of us inside government: how do we determine and accord authority and expertise to these "non-traditional" participants?

Rather than focusing on the mechanics of the process for consultations, would we do better to spreading the existing dialogue about authority and representation more widely within the civil service?

Or, more simply, do we wait five years until there are enough Generation Y staffers in the civil service to force the issue?

[Ross Ferguson]

Fundamentally, good online consultation is not a question of technology; its about content, interaction and skills. Good design isn't always a feature of online consultation, but at a basic level: design is not difficult, it's well-informed. You've got to think about why you want to use an online method of consultation in the first place, who the intended users are, how you are going to manage the process and what's going to happen as a result of the interaction? Only with unambiguous answers to these questions, should you start bringing in technology.

I agree that online methods should be used strategically. There are circumstances in which ICT-based methods of consultation are the right - even the best - choice; there are others when they are not - when new media is just a distraction, or a PR stunt. There are times when it is best to lead with the ICT; and others when it is best used as a supporting resource. Mapping exactly when these conditions present themselves is our present challenge.

Some opportunities might be easy to spot. Parliament's use of an online forum on the Communications Bill in 2001 was a straightforward option because Parliament wanted to engage switched on media practitioners and policy types who were keen on the net. Some might be less obvious. A forum for service personnel on medical care might seem to play against the way the military deals with its problems, but it was exactly right because it encouraged an open and structured deliberation, encouraged new voices to step forward and created a sense of momentum around a policy area deemed in need of reform by a select committee. Other seemingly obvious opportunities are in fact mirages. The DCA wanted children and young people to talk to them about their experiences of family courts proceedings - a very public online forum was not the right platform, despite the fact that young people are regular and confident users of the internet.

(Sorry David - this is a long post and a rework of a rushed comment on Jeremy's blog. I should really get my own blog.)