Online engagement evaluation
From:
David Newman
Date:
Nov 25 14:13 UTC
Short link
One thing that makes this hard is that the values by which different people
judge e-participation can be quite different. We found that consulters on the
island of Ireland valued most citizen views, and least citizen participation in
decision-making. The consultees ranking was the other way around (see the
report linked from www.e-consultation.org).
So we turned to the academic literature looking for applicable theories. We
found at least 7 mutually contradictory approaches (e.g. cf. the focus on the
efficiency of a single consultation in the public administration literature,
versus the concern for long-term relationships of trust in the deliberative
democracy literature).
Over the last 3 years I have been going to e-government and e-democracy
conferences and running electronic brainstorming sessions to find out how
experienced practitioners and researchers judge one e-participation example as
better than another. It looks like their criteria can be grouped into around 10
value categories.
Dave Newman, Queen's University Management School