Curiouscatherine’s Blog

I am taking a break from the statistical wrestling necessitated by my exam next week to note down my thoughts on my questionnaire as its been preying on my mind and is a lot more interesting than the stats (or to be more accurate more interesting than SPSS – the stats are fine!).

The questionnaire seems to have taken on a life of its own – its initial purpose was to provide a benchmark for my research so that I could measure whether the citizenscape pilots had succeeded in making people more likely to do something democratic.  However I now want to combine this with additional exploration of the similarities in behaviours required for informal participation online and formal democratic participation.  This is still work in progress but the main sections of the questionnaire will need to be:

• Demographics - I want to find out a little about the respondents and at the moment plan to look at age, gender, educational background and main occupation.  We should also find out where (if anywhere) they use the internet.  This section should support the link between age and online participation.  There will also be a question to define their role in the process for example citizens / officers / members (though I want to make it possible for people to choose more than one role)
• Current online activity – This section will look at what respondents already do online.  I want to cover transactions, social interactions and user generated content.  This needs to be properly catagorised but I am aiming at a distinction between doing the weekly grocery shop, posting to a friends facebook wall, gaming  and blogging.  We will also ask people to list their 3 most frequently visited sites
• Current democratic activity:  This section will look at how involved the respondents are in their local community, communities of interest or in democratic debate more generally.  Within this section we need to look at formal and informal activity including democratic transactions such as petitions.
• Where should this happen? This is the section that I am struggling most with as I want to ask a set of questions which explore where people want to talk about ‘important’ things, where they think they ought to be listened to and whether they see the connection which I am making between informal participation and formal decision making.  I want to ask questions which explore the idea of a virtual civic space and their feelings towards this (including opinions about moderation and co-creation) but I am going to need to think more about how to pose these theoretical attitudinal questions – and also read more about questionnaire design to support this

The questionnaire will be administered online, by paper through the pilot sites (if they are prepared to do the admin for this) and also with some interviews as I want to use this as a basis for a more substansial discussion with a few stakeholders (I might do this to pilot the questionnaire as well).  We will then run follow up interviews as well.

At the end of this process I am hoping we will have a random sample of data from a number of UK sites as well as from the other pilot areas for both CitizenScape and EuroPetition.  The first three sections will serve as a benchmark for both these projects as well as being a standalone piece of research on the current informal/formal behaviours online.  The last section is much more focused on my research question.

The post on the questionnaire has been hijacked by my pressing need to pass a stats course which is being examined next week – ask me about ANOVA if you are not afraid to hear the answer! However I just wanted to note this thought as its been on my mind all day:

There is far too much talk about how we monetise the new social websites – I want to talk about how we democratise them. It really is horribly disappointing that we would manage to get people talking to each other only for the outcome to be a growth in financial rather than social capital. It gets to the heart of a problem I have with my day job – how do you defend the idea of money spent on democracy when you are asked to present a cost benefit analysis for democratic projects. I want to reframe the debate and I want to be talking about social not fiscal value.   The idea of value has been taken over to be linked with money and we need to reclaim it – there is value in the public sphere (yes – have been reading Habermas) and this needs to be appreciated and nurtured.   I believe we all have a responsibility to do this which I suppose is why a couple of articles about this have been nagging at me.  There is perhaps a linked point here which is to point out the danger of the fact that we are building social institutions (ie Facebook et al) on commercial and not social foundations – there are risks associated with this which are just being touched on with increased discussion about indentity management.  I am looking beyond that and worrying about the democratic implications.

Anyway – high horse back in the stable….or should I say the old nag…

I have just spent a couple of days in London for the launch of our new EU funded project:   Europetition which has been designed to do two things:

• To build up clusers of local petitioning organisations – usually Local Authorities – in our 5 pilot regions so that they can share best practice, protocol and also co-market petitions
• To join up these petitions with the aim of producing cross border petitions which can then be presented the the European pilot

Unlike CitizenScape this is a very simple concept in eParticipation but it brings in many similar elements (which is possibly not a surpise).  My interest in petitions is, like my interest in webcasting and PB, around the idea of establishing reasonable and practical points of entry to the democratic process.  I’ll make a note to describe in more detail my grouping of these tools.

Petitions sit on the boundary between formal and informal activity.  The action of creating a petition and promoting is an act of engagement with the formal established decision making process but the signing of a petition really represents the ’smallest’ action that can be considered to be part of the democratic process.  This is additional true of online petitions which systematically gather information about the signatory as well as, where possible, capturing an email address.  It is this email address – an implicit invitation to talk more – that makes these online petitions such a strong entry point for democratic engagement.  In talking to clients and project partners about this I have been trying to emphasise the importance of leveraging this opportunity and providing a pathway of more substantive engagement.  In the same way as amazon is always suggesting your next purchase a democratic organisastion should be laying out the next possible democratic act.

The other thing which interests me about the Europetitions project is the way that the act of petitioning sits at this gateway between the informal and formal participation and is a potential conduit between them.  This is how is fits with the work we are doing on Citizenscape and how I see it as relating to my main research focus.

And a final though – it was obvious from the meeting this week that we have a very strong team for this project which will make a hige difference – ask me in June if this first impression is correct!!

PS  Talking to the EuroPetition team has really refined my thinking on the pilot questionnaire – will update this tomorrow.