Virtual Town Hall workshop: Essex

Spent the day in Chelmsford today meeting loads of people re: Virtual Town Hall.  This is by way of some observations and notes for me to remember for research purposes:

Meeting the districts:

• We spent the morning with 3 districts who are considering getting involved and we had a very in-depth discussion about the concept of the VirtualTH as well as the specific project details.  Once again the basic proposition held up to scrutiny but there was a lot more concern about risk management than we have had in other meeting - this is perhaps because I have spent a lot of time talking to social web people who are more relaxed about the idea of content being unmoderated – but highlights the need to talk about risk when I start interviewing officers/members about their experiences of the project.
• It was also clear that there is a considerable amount of additional complexity added by working in two tier areas.  Questions of where decision making will sit, relationships between the two sets of members and concerns about what might happen if two participating organisations found themselves in conflict over an issue where raised.  It will be interesting to see which (if any) of the districts decide to get actively involved and which decide to wait on the sidelines until it is clear how things are going (have put predictions in an envelope and we will see how accurate I am!!).
• There were a couple of folks there from the LSP and they seemed very interested in the project.  LSP involvement could be really important in terms of connecting citizens to the right decision makers for specific issues so it was good to have their involvement
• Overall it was a very useful morning with lots of good discussion – hopefully it will lead to some active involvement from districts – if not immediately then early next year

Getting the internal infrastructure working

The afternoon was spent with the Essex CC team discussing more operational issues such as:

• Social web audit:  We have yet to really crack the social web audit as Essex and we spent some time discussing ideas of new places to look for activity.  Lots of new leads here which was very useful.  We also defined some more of the useful questions which we can apply to other sites.  it is increasingly clear that this is a process which will never be finished – we need to build it in as a regular maintenance task
• Social web policy:  We discussed the process of getting this into place and also went through the key points for inclusion – next up I have to deliver a draft.  Part of this will be defining the commitment which is made to participants in the site and as part of this I am going to suggest a list of democratic activities which could be offered here – I will post this list later in the week hopefully.
• Defining the democratic promise – we need to be very clear about what people can expect in terms of democratic outcomes from participation
• Recruiting Community Ambassadors:  We had a good discussion about where to find the right kind of people and came up with some existing internal mechanisms which can be connected to

Conclusions

We made a lot of practical progress today and it was also very useful to talk through the project with the districts.  As I was driving home however I was thinking about the scale of what we are trying to do here – in terms of fundamentally addressing the nature of the relationship between council and citizens – and though it is clear to me in every way that this is an essential process if we want to use the social web to do democratic things – it may be as well to try and break this down into more understandable stages (as per the ladder of engagement) so that we can focus people on more immediate goals.  Will need to think about this.

 

Virtual Town Hall – October Project meeting

We had our second VirtualTH project meeting yesterday so this is just a short update on that.  The pilot is now full with Kirklees and Redbridge joining Chorley, Essex CC and North Lincs as pilot sites.  We are also lucky to have Carl Haggerty participate as a ‘critical friend’ on the technology strand which is hugely helpful.  We have got an excellent balance of sites in the pilot now and I will document them in more detail at a later date.  The addition of Kirklees is of particular interest as we are running the VirtualTH alongside their 21st Century Councillor project – which is a great fit.

For th pilot however the focus right now is on two things:

• Technical build – getting the pilot sites up and running
• Recruiting the community ambassadors who are going to actually make these sites work

The technical stuff is moving along well and we had a fairly complete demo – including Ady making good on our claim that you can build a new page in 10 minutes.  More on the sites in a month or so once the team have had chance to get each of the pilots properly set up.

However interesting the technology is (and it really is if you like that kind of stuff) it is, in my view, clear that this is not the difficult part of the project.  The real issue is of course in the social stuff.  We are approaching this as follows:

1. Carrying out a ‘social web’ audit so that we can get a picture of what is going on already.  We’re breaking activity into News / Council content  / Blogs & social reporters / Social networking.  This exercise has clearly shown which sites already have relationships with the social web presence in their area and where we need to start making those connections
2. Once we have this in place then we need to identify the community ambassadors – real people who are going to be involved in spreading the word about the project using social tools as well as moderating some of the content.
3. We then need to get a draft social web policy in place for use with citizens, officers and members

We are now planning workshops at each of the sites which will help bring internal and external teams together as well as briefing members and generally getting people ready to use the sites.

There were a number of interesting debates during the day but the one which really struck me was around the social web policy.  Firstly, we have decided to have the same document for use by the external content providers as for officers and members.  I think this is an important change as it points towards the sense of co-creation which we are trying to achieve but by combining the internal and external audiences we highlight the issue as to how possible it is for officers to participate as citizens.  When we asked whether people felt that they could express their personal opinions online there was, I felt, a real sense that whatever the policy said about officers being free to express their opinions if they did it in the appropriate way that no-one thought that it would ‘work’ to take a position which was, however constructively, in opposition to council policy.  And this is a huge problem – officers are amongst the most community minded and engaged individuals in the community and if they are effectively silenced online then not only is that not democratic it is also missing a big opportunity to encourage and increase democratic activity.  I think this is an issue which we will return to as we tease out what the idea of virtual civic space really means.

Finally, we all agreed that part of the ‘education’ process that we need to undertake is around digital identity management – it’s about helping people grow a civic persona and make some choices as to how they do that.  A more sophisticated approach on this will mitigate the officer/citizen dilemma as well as help allay concerns which also emerge around the customer/citizen axis.

Thanks again to all who took part – am looking forward to the workshops and also the promise of sausages and mulled wine at our next meeting!!

 

Social contracts for social websites

Though I am getting very excited about the technology for the virtual town hall (sad I know) the real challenges are I think in the social elements of creating a permanent civic space – a local public sphere (yes – lots of Habermas read this weekend).   There are three main social challenges in my view:

• The need to involve community ambassadors and all the challenges that working with volunteers and community activists brings (as well as the challenges for them of working with government!)
• The need to find a way to unlock the dual roles of the council officer /  citizen and to help them to find a voice and a role in these new spaces
• The need to put in place a social contract that will let the civic space include unmoderated comments from external sites without compromising the quality or effectiveness of these spaces – and without becoming an unmanageable risk for government

This last one is the issue that I am focusing on most at the moment as we are currently finishing the social web audits for each pilot site and this means that we are starting to get a picture of the social web activity at each location.  With that in mind we can now start to approach community groups and individuals to ask them if they want to be involved and have their content connected to the Virtual Town Hall (VTH) – at the same time as accepting a ‘democracy widget’ for their site.

Now – I think it is critical that this content is not moderated in any way by the host (in this case the local council) as it is essential that the VTH space is co-created and not ‘owned’ by government.  All of the pilots agree this but there are still issues of risk and appropriateness to be managed as it is naive to think that the council can host this without some kind of  process in place to managed to type of content.  It’s all about balance.

Our solution will be in social web contracts which will be agreed with each of the sites which have a presence on the VTH.  The main elements of these contracts will be:

• A common code of conduct in terms of language and behaviour – all the usual stuff about not swearing , being constructive and not getting personal
• Something about the degree to which party politics should be involved – clearly these sites are political but one of the biggest concerns that we are hearing is the idea that the sites will fall into the trap of party political point scoring – and this is a legitimate risk that needs to be managed in some way
• An indication of what the social contract will achieve – what the council is offering in return.  This will be in the way of confirming access to politicians, assistance with process or perhaps just better feedback and information.  I think this element is one of the most important but will need a discussion on a site by site basis.
• A clear process for what happens if the contract is breached
• Some due diligence about IP and copyright etc

We will be basing some of this work on the existing social networking policies which are already in place (see post below) but obviously this is all fairly new and any views would be very welcome!

 

More people – less technology

We need to remember that if we are going to make the virtual town hall work we have to always remember that its all about the people and we need to make this work in the messy realm of people compromises rather than the tidy world of technology.

One of the underpinning assumptions of the virtual town hall pilot is the idea that we will work with members of the community and train them to be moderators of CitizenScape sites. There are two main reasons for this:

• Communities will respond far better to moderation from within than to moderation from government

• There is no way that Local Government can take on the work of moderating a successful social environment so its best not to build with this as a requirement – it will just limit growth in the future

I have been discussing and thinking about this role a great deal recently and want to capture some thoughts before they disappear into next week’s todo list. We need to come up with a repeatable process for recruiting and then managing these moderators but before we do that we need to clearly define the role and manage the risks as this is a new type of engagement in an online context.

In an offline context there are precedents for working with community representatives which connect back to the ideas of the Arnstein ladder and its top rung of community control. Community representatives have been used extensively to intermediate with the decision making process and connect to the formal environment. This is not a straightforward process as you need to engage with the right people, keep them motivated and then, one the relationship is working, avoid the ‘Usual Suspects’ problem where the community representatives become more similar to your organisation than to the community they are there to represent. You also need to be clear that this is community and not democratic representation and ensure that you are still including elected representatives in the conversation.

[as an aside I really want to look into more detail at the way that these citizen relationships are handled in councils – isn't it odd how far adrift community engagement is from democratic engagement?].

In the online context there is a slightly different role – called moderators – who are responsible for managing and encouraging the online conversations in a particular space. Often people are given moderator status once they have shown themselves to be ‘good citizens’ of a web space and many communities function brilliantly essentially self-moderated by volunteers.

It is this idea that was in my mind when I designed in the idea of community moderators into the Citizenscape proposition and I still think its the right idea. However I was asked an excellent question about the role the other day that really clarified things and made me realise we need to do more work on this: Will they (the moderators) be filtering or moderating content? Of course I thought – in a democratic context there are two roles, as per the community moderators, and we will need to be very clear as to whether the participants are community representatives or community moderators. Apologies if this seems screamingly obvious to you.

So, here is a first description of the role which I will next discuss with the Virtual Town Hall project team:

• Firstly – lets not call them moderators and representatives – the role is something between these two ideas and calling it either things confuses things. At the moment my thought is that we call them Community Ambassadors

• Current thinking is the Community Ambassadors would do four main things:

• Help with offline publicity

• Help to raise awareness of the space out in the wider social web and take part in existing conversations

• Invite relevant conversations from the wider web into the democratic space to connect to the formal process

• Moderate any discussions which are being held on the Citizenscape space

• We need to make sure that succession planning is built into the role – partly to keep things fresh and avoid overburdening individuals but also because we want to avoid the usual suspects problem

• We need to get contracts in place – they will be acting for the council so we need to get the parameters clearly in place

• We need to do the social media guidelines in place as well as the code of conduct so the Community Ambassadors have a clear picture to moderate against

• We need to put some structure around training and ongoing mentoring. The idea is that someone from the council will co-ordinate a team of Community Ambassadors and so we need to figure out the infrastructure needed around this

• We need to ensure that we don’t trip over other community engagement programmes

We probably also need to come up with a profile for the role to help us recruit. I think the basis of this is:

• People who are natural communicators – viral marketers call them sneezers and Robert Putman talks about them as people who provide social glue in Bowling Alone.  We want people who naturally tell their friends and families about what they are doing

• People with existing community networks. Ideally we are plugging into existing networks rather than building new ones

• Civic minded people – they have to see the value in connecting people to the formal process and be able to deal with the frustrations this may bring!!

• Comfortable though not necessarily familiar with technology – we don’t expect to find experienced social networkers (though that would be a bonus) – but we do need them to be willing to learn

I think this forms the backbone of this strand of the project – we’ll flesh it out more when we start work next month.

 

Nothing better than a good debate…..

I had the excellent pleasure of someone not only having read my post on life leaks but then having them point out that I was contradicting myself at the very moment we were discussing it – it was such a good point that I didn’t even mind not having made it myself!!

We were talking about the fact that we plan to use OpenID as the login option on the platform being built for the Virtual Town Hall – and the fact that this will actually encourage life leak rather than helping control it. Good point!! But then I thought about it some more….

Personal Identity Management is exactly what it says – personal. It is your own responsibility and something which everyone will want to manage differently. OpenID is a tool for bringing your identities together into a single login which you can then control far more easily (just one password change and not dozens when you lose your laptop) but it doesn’t allow for much subtlety as yet as it really only deals with the registration part of things – it doesn’t allow you to present different part of your core data to different people and places which is what you really need to avoid the life leak problem.

Is this a reason not to use it? Absolutely not – it is an excellent development and a natural step in the evolution of proper identity management. But we should be very careful to make sure that people are away of the implications of using such a system and I think it throws more responsibility on us as architects of a new system to help people understand those implications.

 

Virtual Town Hall pilot – ready to go!

I’ve been rather focused this week on getting the paper I needed to get finished in order to explain the Virtual Town Hall concept and finish recruiting people for the pilot.  I’ve spoken to a lot of people in principle and had some very positive noises – now is the time to actually get the detailed sorted out.  I then of course had to write a two page summary document as few people will want to read the whole thing!!!

The pilots should get going in October and we are looking for 4-6 councils who are happy to join a shared project where they can learn from each other during the 12 month period as well as trying out the Virtual Town Hall idea. I am hoping to create a good mix of participants from different types of councils on a number of different criteria:

• Type of council (District/County/Unitary etc)

• Geographical location

• Size

• Urban / Rural / Suburban

I’ve also been working on the initial questionnaire and one of the things which is currently exercising me is coming up with a list of formal democratic actions that I can then measure any increases in over the course of the project.  So far I have:

• Vote

• Attend a council meeting
• Attend a public meeting

• Attend a local community meeting

• Stand as a councillor

• Respond to a council consultation

• Respond to a council question

• Respond to a government consultation

• Sign a petition

But this does not seem quite right so I am now looking for pre-existing lists of such things as I can’t believe such a thing doesn’t already exist – I would be very grateful for suggestions on this.

 

Internet Dog years – or a spatial/temporal take on the network society

Brace yourelf – its a long one…..

I am working on the theoretical framework for my thesis at the moment and so trying to establish its firm roots in the idea of a ‘network society’. The idea that we have moved into a post-industrial information age is well entrenched in current thinking (Webster 2006) with the ‘informationisation’ of the world advanced and increasing in pace and I am clearly positioning my work well within this sphere. The choice of technological, spatial, cultural economic approaches to this space are all appealing in different ways but I feel that the physical metaphor of the virtual town hall is leading me towards a spatial approach where I look at the network effect and its relationships in spatial terms rather than in economic ideas of exchange or a purely technological reading of the world. I think this allows me to more easily connect the ideas associated with localisam which I think are essential to the reinvigoration of democratic participation. This is not to say that I ignore cultural or indeed economic interpretations (though I may well trash the idea of a technological filter for the world) but the main thrust of the way that I view the network society is via the lens of connections between people and the changes in barriers of time and place. Cultural changes such as the malleability of identity can, I believe, be viewed mainly through that lens as a consequence of the spatial changes rather than a first principle effect. People use identity in a more malleable way online primarily because they can’t be as easily observed – i.e. a spatial effect – rather than any economic benefit for example.

But I also think that we need to look at more than a spatial analysis and consider the impact of changes in the way that timings of events can be changed. I have referred before to the idea of internet dog years – the point being that ideas move faster online in the same way as a dog year is the same as 7 human years – because I think that this speed effects outcomes. I talk about the ‘wildfire’ effect which is the way that the viral nature of the online world means that when ideas do take hold they move faster from person to person and as a result rapidly bombard us from multiple locations – and perhaps get greater credence as a result of this. And to move back to a spatial analysis objectives moving quickly startle us because of their speed and not necessarily their size or shape.

But what does this mean in terms of how I would go about building the virtual town hall?

• Firstly I think it means that we need to consider time as well as place when we describe the virtual architecture. In trying to create the ‘lift off’ effect needed in the sense off enlivening an online community it is not only the number of posts that needs considering but also the temporal proximity.
• We also need to build for the terribly short length of current attention spans online – at the same time as drawing people towards longer and richer interactions.
• One of the other consequences may be that I need to pay careful attention to within the metrics is the time spent on specific activities and that things taking longer are valued more highly enroute to engendering the more active citizen – interesting when you think that one of the benefits of petitioning is the speed with which you can do it and that one of the drawbacks is the dangers of mob rule over measured debate.

All of this may boil down to the fact that I think very visually and tend to imagine ideas in terms of shapes and relationships – and that I prefer the idea of evolution of society in the same way as I choose to live in a really old house with really good broadband to a new build with the same technology. Either way I think that a spatial / temporal analysis of the world will help to visualise and connect the ideas of the virtual town hall to actual communities as I start to develop the framework of engagement.

 

What do I actually mean by the virtual town hall?

I realise that I keep mentioning it but haven’t actually described what I mean. Here are the main points of the kind of space I am imagining:

• Its designed to incorporate and respond to the next online fad – and the one after that. Its just not efficient for you to keep reinventing your strategy and infrastructure every time the internet herd starts grazing somewhere new. You need a strategy which gets the best out of new technologies and uses new social spaces but always with the aim of bringing the democratic conversation home to a place where it can be had effectively. This really means a native web 2.0 architecture.
• It’s a co-created space. This doesn’t mean its all top down – for a space to be truly democratic it needs to be co-created with all stakeholders having a sense of ownership and stewardship over the space. A single destination for all democracy and engagement activities Your virtual town hall is somewhere where the citizen goes online to act like a citizen – to carry out their civic role. This means it has to have certain ‘rules of engagement’ as does any well run debate.
• Its moderated and managed – by all of the stakeholders.  For the sake of sustainability (you can’t moderate all this content with offices) and to reinforce the sense of co-creation you need to have those rules negotiated with and then managed by members of all the stakeholder groups – yes you need community moderators.
• Content is accountable and transparent. Council’s (or other democratic bodies) can’t make decisions on the basis of how many people join a facebook group – you need to know who is saying what. This doesn’t mean you can’t use screen names have people stay anonymous to the general public – but there has to be the sense that you are accountable for what you say in the civic space.

This is turning into something of a manifesto!!  I’ll go away and see if I can streamline things a bit more

 

Conferences and co-operation in The North

I have been out and about again over the last couple of weeks and the deadline for my research proposal is looming hence the lack of posts. I spent most of the weekend in the back of a VW campervan (hired from the excellent VWCampervans) on the Isle of Wight checking citations for the proposal so now seems like an excellent point to try and add a couple of thoughts to the blog. Its a beautiful day and as long as I can persuade my husband to make me another cup of tea then all will be well!

The week before last we were at out review for the eParticipate project which happily went very well and before that I was up in “The North” talking to a couple of councils about webcasting and also the virtual town hall pilot we are trying to pull together. In the course of this I met the excellent folks at Chorley who are doing some really good trials and experiments with social websites (check out their YouTube video). They seem to have hit just the right tone with this – its still council communications but it fits with the channel they are using really well.

This week I was once again in the North but this time it was Sheffield for the annual LGComms conference. It was a really good conference and I hope the team are pleased as it went very smoothly. We did some short reportage pieces from the event which you can view on YouTube and will be doing a longer edited piece as well. I did a workshop on social web stuff as well which I think went well (though clearly you will need to ask the participants!). The session was aimed at trying to put together some kind of strategic response to the now familiar “what are we going to do about Facebook” question. I think enough councils have experimented with these sites now for us all to need to start thinking beyond the thrill of getting 300 new friends to a strategic response which will still be relevant in three years time. Crucially this cannot just be a technology response – we need to have fit for purpose technology but we also need a strategy that addresses the social element of the web. At one level what we are really talking about is a strategy for the networked society.

The Virtual Town Hall project is intended to be a response to this strategic need because a keystone part of any strategy will be the need for Local Government to own the relationships with citizens rather than just chase them from site to site. Another part of a longer term strategy will be how the council organises themselves in order to support this new way of interfacing with citizens (at the same time as keeping the offline methods working too). Three main observations about this:

• In the same way as every conversation with a member of the public is a communication opportunity (how many times have you been asked about rubbish collections while in the pub!) councils will need to equip all staff who are online to talk to the public appropriately
• You will not be able to manage all of the moderation within Councils – citizens will need to be involved and used as a resource to do this (which links in very well to the idea of co-creation.
• The citizen relationship has always been managed from multiple locations within the council but with a shared environment like Facebook you will need to get organised – this probably means a loose coalition of democratic services, community engagement, communications and customer service in order to make this really work

 

Evaluation – You know you want to really….

However tempting it is just to dive in a set projects up in the social web I you need to consider stopping to think about how you will measure and evaluate success. It’s a big part of using these new tools to have a positive impact rather than just creating empty buzz.

I have been doing a few things this week that all tie together to make me think about evaluation. I’m right in the middle of writing my research proposal and so am having to focus on how to evaluate the impact of the CitizenScape approach in an academically rigorous way. I also took part in a MJ round table event talking about the way in which the social web is being used by Local Authorities and finally I was helping with the judging of the LGComms reputation awards. All of these things highlight the important of figuring out how to measure the impact and effectiveness of using web 2.0 sites and technologies and the need to bring some discipline to the process. In many ways this is a reflection of the fact that these technologies and sites are entering the mainstream – after all if the Prime Minister can make a t*t of himself of YouTube then the possibilities for Councils are endless!!!!

What makes a good evaluation?

This is probably stating the obvious but the key to good evaluation is knowing what you want to achieve in the first place. I think that experimentation is a perfectly good reason in its own right to try something. Its obvious that Local Authorities need to get involved in the online world and that the social web phenomenon is now too big to ignore and I have a huge amount of respect for the Council’s who are making foray’s into this world. However without systematic evaluation of the impacts of these trials we are just dabbling and not really learning. Its the difference between skimming the headlines and sitting down and reading a book on current affairs – you may be able to give the sound bites but you won’t have any particular depth of knowledge. Clearly I am a bit biased here as I take the importance of evaluation so seriously I am doing the PHD but still – evaluation matters.

What can you evaluate?

So – how can we evaluate social web projects? Many people seem to be looking at the traditional web metrics of counting things; numbers of people joining a facebook group, number of followers on twitter, number of views or comments on YouTube. This is one approach but if you go back to the question of what you are trying to achieve then the only question you can really answer with basic metrics with these is “did more people see my content” – its an advertising eyeballs evaluation. For many marketing campaigns then this might be enough but if what you are really trying to do is to reach ‘hard to reach groups’ or encourage some kind of participation then you are missing both demographic and impact assessment data. The absence of traceable / checkable demographic data is probably the biggest frustration here and one of the main reasons why I think it will remain impossible to carry out deliberative debate on these sites – or at least deliberative debate which can then be counted strongly as part of the decision making process. Its also one of the reasons that I think the Virtual Town Hall approach is a better bet. The issue of impacts is also an interesting one. You can probably judge whether or not the numbers of people – the metrics – have effected the decision but how can you measure whether you have effected the people? If you are trying to increase democratic participation then you probably need to know whether your interventions have meant they are more or less motivated to participate in the future.

Finding richer data – not just a head count

Richer data of course means more work. You probably need to do a survey and hound people to answer it and you should also run some actual focus groups (yes – face to face evaluation of an online project – oh the irony!!). My basic plan is to gain a baseline of participation, in both democracy and generally online from as large a group as possible as I can initally and then re-sample this group at the end of the project (and again in the middle if the elapsed time is more than a few months). I will use this survey as a recruitment tool to find out who is willing to either be interviewed or join a focus group. Simply put this approach breaks down like this:

• Web metrics will show you how many actions have been carried out

• Surveys will show you has done this and some basic motivations for their actions

• Interviews will allow you to get a sense of changes in attitudes

Hopefully this balances the need not to overburden the team with work and the need to actually find out more about the people and their reasons for being involved.  I am currently working on a baseline questionnaire and hope to have it out in the world fairly soon.

Analysis: Find a framework and stick to it

So – now we have a lovely lot of data what are we going to do with it? The chances are you will not be thinking of one large pilot – more about a series of smaller projects. In which case a standard evaluation framework (and consistency across your survey questions) is going to help make data collected across pilots comparable and also allow you to make draw some conclusions about whether you are having an effect on your population. In my research I am intending to translate the ladder of engagement idea into something which relates more closely to formal democracy and then to define online activities which have equivalence (where appropriate) with offline democratic actions. The underlying idea of this of one of progression – you plot where people are in terms of democratic engagement at the start of the project and then see whether or not they have moved through the course of your actions. Because you are gathering qualitative data as well as the easier quantitative stuff you can find out more about people’s motivations and their attitudes to the process.

There are also all kinds of interesting social network analyse tools you can use to look at measuring social capital – but these are probably a bit too much for everyday use.

Good value for money?

Just one final thought – though we would all like to do these projects for the love of democracy and the common good the reality is that at some point we will be asked about value for money. This is a huge post in its own right but the basics are:

• For communications projects: Equivalent ad spend figures can be a useful starting point

• For Community engagement projects: Cost of recruitment to a process comparisons or cost effectiveness of running better attended meetings with online supporting

• For democracy engagement projects: Democracy costs! But can you can make some comparisons between online and offline methods. If you look at the ‘cost ode democracy’ formula (yes – councils do have one) then online methods compare well to offline ones

Where you can make comparisons between offline methods then online always looks more cost effective. The issue is of course that no-one wants to stop doing offline – and nor should they. The trick then is to ensure that your pilots are not only creating online effects but also enhancing the existing offline process – for instance by reducing the cost of recruiting a citizens panel or by ensuring that more people attend a public meeting.

Any use?

Well – this has been helpful for me as I will now try and write something very similar but far more detailed for my research proposal!