Curiouscatherine’s Blog

I need to actually define my research question so that I can get going on the research proposal (have had close encounter with an exam this week and intend to never ever leave something so acutely to the last minute again).  I am currently looking at the following wording:  “Is it possible to deliberately create online spaces where citizens are participating in the formal democratic process“.  Two words need clarifying here:

• Deliberately:  A large part of my thesis is the idea that it is possible to deliberately engineer online spaces – or rather an exploration of this idea.  This is in contrast to the idea that there are already online spaces where democratic conversations are taking place but have not been deliberately created to support this.  This then gets developed into the idea or acceptance that we are trying to socially engineer the space rather than observing an existing effect.
• Formal:  The end point of the process in this project is intended to be the participants actually taking part in the formal demcratic process.  I will need to define this as part of the proposal but it is essential to make the point that this is not a virtual environment project.  This is a project using online spaces as a way of building participation in democracy .  The measures for this are in the main part in the physical world – for instance council meetings.

Building from this central question are the more instrumental questions about how you go about moving people through the experience to the ‘end point’ of having participated in the formal process.  I plan to do this by looking at the specific trigger points:

• What is the starting point for the process?  Is it the first stakeholder meeting (i.e. with no technology in place) or does the online space need to be created in order to engage people?  More simply put – how do you get them there in the first place?
• Can you create the right conditions to encourage people to register and not just read content?
• Can you create the right conditions to encourage people to create content
• Can you create the right conditions to encourage people to become active – ie as moderators, lead petitioners etc etc

In answering these questions I hope to create an repeatable set of actions that can be shown to equip and motivate people to engage with formal democracy.

This is work in progress – these questions need more work!!

 The Citizenscape December project meeting went much better than I hoped with the balance being in favour of actual work rather than EU project talk.  Main points are:

• We made some real progress with the actual content for the sites and I believe that if we can keep to the development schedule then we will be fine to launch in January as planned. This is good as we have a project review at the end of Jan and I really don’t want to turn up to that without content.
• As mentioned in an earlier post – there is a lot of confusion around the stakeholder meetings. To reiterate – one of the underlying assumptions around citizenscape is the idea that the social networking engagement will have a greater chance of success if the web spaces are co-created and include existing content and groups. The project team have identified very little content like this and I will need to see if this is going to undermine the research data I can gather. I am not clear on whether this didn’t happen because the project team didn’t understand the requirement – ie it is a problem that can be managed out in the future – or if we need to add a ‘beta’ stage to the process so that we show stakeholders a beta version of the space and then ask them what they want to add. This may work better in terms of getting things moving as it is easier to show people than to tell them about an idea like this – but I am concerned that it really undermines the co-creation idea which I feel is so important to actually getting people using the sites. I am planning to post this as a query on the project blog (yes – they all agreed to take part so we will see if they are prepared to post!) and see what the team thinks as a first stage.
• This does also mean that the pilot sites are looking a lot more formal than I had originally planned – ie are council led issues rather than grassroots isses – but we shall have to see if this is a problematical
• And finally – one of the really ‘killer’ ideas as we talk about the project is the fact that you can 99% guarantee that everyone cares about what happens 1 mile from their house (actually the Italians cared about 1KM but you know what I mean!!!). We need to make this integral to the process in some way.

One other thing – we went for a lovely meal at Due South with the team.  Even if you think the research here is nonsense please trust me on the restaurant recommendations!

This is a short note prior to a proper post but as we move forward with getting the Citizenscape sites actually up and running you can start to see why the idea of co-creation needs to be so strong in the citizenscape methodology.  The Citizenscape sites will be containers for different types of widgets which means that it will be much easier than in a standard website for content to genuinely be sourced from different places (and owners) in a far more authentic way than by just copying it there.  You can recreate branding and styling to really reinforce the fact that this is a shared space.

As the sites get up and running it will be easier to show this to the participants (the teams have struggled explaining this idea to stakeholders) that there is a place for their content – which should be possible if we can really put across the fact that these sites are beta and can be amended.

The upshot of it is that we need to look at amending the methodology to formally include this extra stage as part of the process.