We’ve been doing work here recently on online consultation survey architectures with regards to required questions. It’s more fun than it sounds, honest. For one, it’s thrown up some bigger questions that got me thinking about the nature of consultation as a whole.
In online surveys, required questions are generally seen as ones that the end user has to fill out in order to complete their submission. Have too many of them and you kill your response rate, too few and you can risk getting more junk data than you’d care for.
The work we’ve been doing though is about required questions in terms of questions that have to be in a survey. If you want your survey tool to link automatically into other systems, then you’ll need at least one information field that the other systems know they can look for and be sure to find in each survey response. So, such questions have to be in that survey from a technical point of view.
But that got me thinking. What if we had questions that had to be in all surveys, regardless of whether they were online, postal, face to face or telephone? What if there were questions that were required to be asked in all consultations by law? Sure, we have consultations and questions within them that have to be asked on a regular basis by law at the moment (e.g. the Place Survey), but what if we went further than that?
Here’s an example. I had an idea for something I’d like to see be done in Bristol city centre last weekend, and was going to submit it to the It’s My Bristol e-Participatory Budgeting site we’re running for the Bristol Partnership at the moment. The thing was, the more I thought about it, the more I thought of ways in which people in authority might be able to object to it, health and safety grounds, litter, etc.
So I got to wondering if anywhere else had implemented my idea before, but again I couldn’t immediately find something on google. So, if my idea was to be taken forward, more research would be needed on it. I haven’t the time and resources to do that for an idea that might go nowhere anyway.
But then I thought why should I? I’m the citizen, the person who knows how I would like my city to be, the ideas guy if you will. If other people are to object to what is a relatively simple idea, then surely the onus is on them to do the research into it.
Then it struck me. How many great ideas get submitted as part of consultations every week that never get implemented, because at some stage along the line after it’s been submitted, someone thinks “ooh, I don’t know about that, sounds like it might be tricky, can’t see it working myself, let’s forget that was mentioned’? I suspect a fair few.
So, what if, as part of every consultation, the respondent had the right to request more research be done into an area of policy?
This could in fact work in two ways. First, the example above, where someone suggests an idea and requires the consulting organisation to work up some research on it. But second, there could also be the option for respondents to challenge the evidence provided as part of a consultation, and demand more research be done. I know when I worked as a researcher in local government I found a few assumptions were being made that were actually contradicted by the evidence once i’d properly researched them. This research had some fairly major impacts on the final policy that was produced.
So, rather than asking the public for opinions, why not let them shape the research agenda too, let them tell you what areas you need to look into more?
One area of consultation that could be strengthened as a result of taking this approach is consultation feedback too.
Often concrete feedback on consultation outcomes is one of the hardest things to produce, and yet with this approach, there’s a clear and demonstrable chain between public opinion and action being taken. They say “I want you to look into this area more” and the consulting organisation reports back saying “OK, this is what we found out”. It would be interesting to see local authority scrutiny functions open themselves up to this kind of approach for a start, when currently research and scrutiny agendas are set by officers and members, with perhaps a passing glance over any priorities that may have shown up in a citizens’ panel now and again.
Why not let the public themselves set the agenda for what the council should be scrutinising? If we’re serious about devolving power to citizens, then this sort of approach naturally follows.
There are of course downsides to enshrining this sort of public participation in law. Research isn’t necessarily cheap to carry out, and parties with a malicious agenda could try to tie the organisation up in research project after research project, no matter the actual worth of the topic being researched.
But this could be overcome with sensible mechanisms around the process. The public demand research on, say, topics 1 to 10, and the organisation responds and says “we can only afford to research 5 of these this year” before running a quick exercise allowing the public to prioritise which should be researched first, the top 5 chosen then being looked into.
There are more things that could be done with this sort of approach, of building meaningful public interaction into the process of consultation across the UK, the ability to demand research is just one of these. But it’s interesting isn’t it, once you start thinking how meaningful interactions can be built into consultation processes through regulation, rather than just specifying how long a consultation should last, that it should be accessible, etc.
This blog post is just a start of the idea, but perhaps there’s something in this, moving consultation from something authorities do to citizens, to something citizens do to authorities.
What do you think?
