As we’ve mentioned before, we do far more interesting work here at Delib than we can talk about, due to client sensitivities. Even more important though, we rarely get to talk about the results of what we do in terms of actual hard data as, well, that’s the client’s data, not ours.
So it’s nice to be able to talk about one project we’re doing at the moment that’s going really well. It’s an e-participatory budgeting pilot with the Bristol Partnership, which we’ve covered here before for those new to it, and it’s going great guns.
In essence, the Partnership had been, and indeed still is, running public meetings to decide what some of the neighbourhood budgets should be spent on across the city. However, they wanted to take that opportunity online, with a view to engaging the participation of more people, and ideally from a younger demographic too.
Results as of ‘half time’ for the project a few weeks ago show that both of these things have been more than achieved. 130 people had registered on the site by that point, and 30 ideas had been submitted, a participation rate that, whilst small in terms of the internet, is substantially larger than participation in offline public meetings held to date. Both figures have grown since this data was published too.
Interestingly, and perhaps as we might have expected, the site hasn’t seen a massive flood from the ‘young people’ (under 18) demographic, as the idea that ‘the internet = young people’ is as much of a myth as it’s always been. That said, the bell curve for age demographics has moved down about 20 years in age compared with attendees at meetings, showing the project has indeed worked to get ‘younger people’ involved.
Location was another thing that the site asked respondents to state, and this has shown a happy clustering of respondents from around the three wards in which the pilot funding will be spent. So people are engaging in their local area, but others are having their say too, just as intended, especially given one of the pilot wards covers the city centre, used by pretty much all Bristolians from time to time.
One final point to note, which may be of especial interest to local authorities moving to a more customer focused approach at the moment. A sizable proportion of the ideas submitted turned out not to need funding after all, and could be got on with more quickly. These ranged from ideas actually being issues that were able to be passed directly on to council officers for action, to users being able to help each other. In one instance, one user suggested it would be good to fund having bus timetables on your mobile phone, and another replied saying that they’d already worked out how to do it, and gave instructions on how to do so!
The council has thus benefitted both from opening another channel for listening to customer feedback and encouraging the wisdom of crowds, in addition to the intended benefits provided by the pilot project itself.
So, the project’s working, the client’s happy, and if you fancy having your say as someone who has ideas for improvements in Bristol, then head over to www.itsmybristol.org and sign up!
