Engagement on Track

Submitted by: Tim Davies

Describe your idea. What will you do?

One of the biggest complaints about engaging is local democracy is that things never change.

Which isn't true. Things do change - but public institutions are notoriously bad at telling people what has changed - and at keeping the people who first raise an issue or who are interested in an issue engaged throughout the (often necessarily) long process of policy making and taking action.

Drawing on ideas from bug tracking software and open source software projects this project would look to work with a local authority or public institution to help track the progress of ideas and input from the public through the policy process.

Input from consultations and direct from the public would be logged on the system, with every time ideas are discussed, aggregated, discarded or turned into policy proposals and actions logged - so that the people who provided the input in the first place can come back at any time (or get e-mail updates) to let them know how their input has fed into policy making and change making at the local level.

A project to implement this would need to consist of both a technical solution (based on open source issue tracking software), and more importantly, the design of a process that helps the pilot local authorities/public institutions to capture and track all the relevant information through their decision making processes.

Worked example
This system and process would be a framework - but to see what it might be able to achieve on a very simple level - take a look at the worked example below.

A local consultation identifies a desire for Green Space in a particular locality. This is logged in the 'Engagement on Track' online system alongside the other ideas arising from the consultation.

A local resident who has set up e-mail alerts to let them know about any information on the system that relates to their local area sees the 'issue' about green space (they were at that point unaware of the consultation that had gone on) and writes to the local authority to suggest that a patch of wasteland behind the local lock-up garages could be brought into use as a small park. This 'idea' is logged on the system and links to the 'issue' from the consultation.

At a meeting to consider the consultation results, the environment officer checks with the planning department who owns the land behind the garages and whether or not it would be possible to turn the land into a park. They discover it is - and log this against the 'idea' in the system.

The meeting decides to find out whether other people locally think that the idea is a good one - so they e-mail everyone from the area who responded to the consultation - and make a special effort to contact those who raised issues about the need for green space. They point them to the 'issue' and the 'idea' where they can indicate their support or opposition to the idea - and can add comments.

It become clear there is support for the idea - so it is put onto an agenda for a meeting of the parks and open spaces committee. Minutes of the meeting are uploaded to the system, and the minutes relevant to the green space idea, noting that a planning application and funding bid will be developed are linked to the 'issue' (which has now been merged with the idea).

(more meetings are held... details are logged... interested parties can get e-mail updates and are invited to input more... etc. etc.)

Two years after the issue was first raised, work starts to clear the land and turn it into a small park. The person who suggested the idea in the first place has since moved to the other side of town - but gets an automated e-mail when an invite to the opening of the park is added to the issue (and it's status is set to 'closed'). They come to the opening - and have a renewed faith in the power of local democracy to get things done.

What will the benefits be?

• Keeping citizens engaged throughout the democratic process - and gaining from local knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm
• Encouraging local ownership of issues - and encouraging greater working in partnership with local authorities through increased transparency
• Educating citizens about the policy making process
• Helping local authorities think about how they handle input and ideas from the public

Who will you target?

My past work has been focussed on young people's participation - and a tool like this is especially important for work with young people - where the slow progress of policy can be very disaffecting. So - I could look to pilot this in a youth engagement context.

However - it could also be piloted in a general local authority, or locality context.

Is your idea linked to a particular town or region?

Not as yet - but it would need a local partner to get off the ground.

What kind of assistance would you like from others?

I would need a local authority/public institution partner to take part in the pilot.

I would also welcome input from anyone interested in exploring this idea further.

Comments

[Tim Davies on 13 August 2008 at 10:52 AM]

Ok - apologies for the type in the first sentence. That should read: "One of the biggest complaints about engaging /in/ local democracy is that things never change."

[Dave Briggs on 13 August 2008 at 01:20 PM]

Tim, this is a great idea, and I would love to help out where I can. As you say, bug trackers work great in software development, so why not apply them to tracking bugs in local service delivery?

[Steph Gray on 13 August 2008 at 04:35 PM]

This is a very, very strong idea - not least because it acknowledges that problems exist and need to be solved by a community of users and providers.

The other beauty of bug trackers is the ability to assign responsibility, change issue status and merge issues:

Government not best placed to address a local problem? Develop a mechanism for 'assigning' the bug to other individuals or organisations in civic society who have greater capacity to fix it, and help ensure the money follows the 'bug' in an open and transparent way.

Issue doesn't include enough information? Or is an issue for someone else? Or needs to be 'rechecked' by the person raising it? Use a status marker so people can see where things stand.

Ten people raise the same issue? Merge it and let them all know it's something that others have identified.

I'd love to see this happen.

[Tim Davies on 14 August 2008 at 02:21 PM]

Thanks for the positive feedback Steph. You've got it exactly.

The bug tracker style systems can capture all those points of assigning ideas, merging them, requesting more information etc. where so often the original idea giver and the communities who should benefit from change get disconnected form the process and fall out of the picture.

The biggest challenge I think with making an idea like this a reality is in working with an authority to look at all the 'data capture' points where these sorts of 'assign/research/merge' decisions get made (e.g. putting together the agenda for a meeting, writing up the minutes, informal conversation between two officers...) without introducing clunky new processes and systems for staff.

And, as Dave has said over on his blog, also perhaps in making the Bug Tracker style interface quite a lot more user friendly...

[Perry Walker on 15 August 2008 at 11:10 AM]

Ace idea, but you will perhaps have to say something about how it will work for people who don't use email.

I'd also support the use of a simplified version of Arnstein's Ladder of Participation to tell people how much influence they can have in any particular case.

Best of luck

Perry

[Tim Davies on 18 August 2008 at 10:28 AM]

Good points about both e-mail and the ladder Perry.

I would imagine a system could be set up to output letters / text messages / posters to go up in a locality as well as e-mail - although that might need some work to identify what volume of messages to send out via these channels...