In Development

As part of my work here at the State Services Commission, I’m involved with a Participation Community of Practice, a group of practitioners with an interest in public participation online (and off) drawn from government agencies, local government, private firms, academia, civil society organisations and international practitioners. It was this group that contributed to our Guide to Online Participation, and there are some really smart people involved, who have a lot of great ideas to share.

One of the things that we do in this community is hold regularly scheduled talks about the areas in which we work. Last Friday, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a fantastic presentation from Superintendent Hamish McCardle and Anna McKenzie from the NZ Police about their experience with online participation to invite public input on the review of the Police Act.

You may very well have already read about this, as it was a story that got picked up across the media, from influential sites BoingBoing and SlashDot to the BBC and the Sydney Morning Herald, but in case you missed it, this is essentially what happened:

The NZ Police has used several forms of public feedback on the review of the Police Act over the past 18 months, ranging from the traditional forms of consultation through to online methods. They wanted to canvass a wide view as possible. They’d run both a Myspace account and a YouTube page for a couple of months beforehand but hadn’t had any response to these pages. They weren’t looking for a Web 2.0 solution as such - in fact Hamish added that he hadn’t even heard of the term, but after reference to the online participation programme here at the SSC, they decided that a wiki could be the ideal solution for the following reasons:

• It was more intellectual-feeling than other Web 2.0 technologies
• It was practical
• It had the right kind of feng shui, in that the open style of the tool matched the openness of government that they were hoping to achieve
• It was a very economical solution, being cheap to implement
• Because putting an act into a wiki for public review was a new idea, it was easy to market, turning something that could seem dull into something exciting.

With those points in mind, the Police Act wiki was launched on 26 September 2007 to engage a broader public awareness of the opportunity to think about future policing and encourage fresh ideas on policing and the potential shape of new legislation.

Hamish and Anna said they weren’t prepared for how much of a reaction they’d get. Instead of having someone check the site every couple of hours for moderation purposes, they found they needed four employees working full time during business hours so that live moderation could happen, although they also noticed that members of the public were doing their own moderating of inappropriate remarks.

As Hamish said, “With any public consultation, you get rude and silly comments”.

There can sometimes be a perception that if something’s happening online, it’s going to be ruder than in real life because of the anonymity factor, but as someone whose first job out of university involved standing in shopping malls talking to members of the public on behalf of local government about rate increases, I can assure you that abuse happens face to face as well, and in fact, it’s a lot easier to deal with online.

The wiki was only online for a short while, but from the police’s point of view, it was a success because:

• The profile of the Police Act Review was raised, ideas generated, consultation increased, at low cost
• Consultation ethics were maintained
• A firmer and fuller base of ideas generated and consensus built for the new legislation.

Now Hamish and Anna have found themselves in the role of being spokespeople on online participation when all they really wanted was a cheap solution. And that’s what I really love about this project. They didn’t grab a piece of technology for the sake of it. They had a problem, and sought a solution, and it just happened that it was a Web2.0 tool that solved their problem.

Our next Community of Practice session is on May 9, and will feature John Pennington and Simon Wright, Bioethics Council Secretariat speaking on “Further Adventures in Public Engagement : Deliberation”. If you’d like to join our community of practice, come along or even just find out more, send me an email – joanna.mcleod@ssc.govt.nz.

 Edit: links to Slashdot and Boing Boing  changed to be more specific