#3 The Maturing Field of Online Citizen Engagement: From Process Norms to Policy Effectiveness

Beth Simone Noveck in Analyse & Kritik (2018)

Read #2 The Need for Collective Intelligence

Public consultation is, of course, not a new idea. The Administrative Procedure Act enshrined into law the right of all Americans to comment on draft regulations in 1946 (Noveck 2014). But that right is limited to comments on already-drafted regulations and does not imply any concomitant power to set the agenda for rule- making nor to participate in the lawmaking process. At the Jefferson Center, Ned Crosby pioneered the practice of convening small-scale citizen juries and at James Fishkin became famous for his successful experiments convening large-scale, representative assemblies to deliberate on issues of policy (Crosby/Hottenger 2011; Fishkin 1991). While used for impressive one-off exercises in civic engagement, neither citizen juries nor Fishkin’s deliberative polls have become institutionalized. The same can be said of citizen assemblies such as those created in British Columbia (Canada) or Ireland, among other places (Warren/Pearse 2008). They are exercises in legitimacy building but have no impact on formal decisionmaking or the exercise of power. The aim of these practices is to improve the quality of civic discourse and not, except in the most attenuated way, to improve the outcome of decisionmaking (Schuck 2014).

Fast-forward to the Internet era and there has been mixed success with efforts to bring public consultation online and institutionalize it. In the United States, one can comment on a regulation electronically, instead of on paper via regulations.gov. In many cases, this little known and less publicized e-rulemaking process simply increases the scale at which interest groups mobilize members to file identical electronic ‘postcard comments’ to log public displeasure at a regulation (Noveck 2004). The participation process, which comes after a regulation is drafted, is not especially designed to enhance the epistemic quality of decisionmaking.

Similarly, when, during the planning period following President Obama’s election and prior to his first inauguration in 2007–2008, the President’s transition team asked the American public for its suggestions for the first one hundred days of the Administration, this People’s Briefing Book process yielded 84,000 suggestions, not one of which was actually read let alone considered (Barris/Jain 2013; Noveck 2015). (I know: I suggested the project, failing to appreciate how it would unfold.) In hindsight, it ended up being a one-off publicity stunt de- signed to make it easy for individuals to participate but without regard for how the information would be used.

Podemos in Spain had more success with engaging its party faithful with giving input into drafting the party platform but less success formalizing that crowd- sourcing practice once elected. The Five Star Movement in Italy also set up an on- line system called Rousseau by which adherents could respond to proposals by its parliamentary members. “FSM members of parliament make legislative proposals, post short videos explaining them, and then party members post comments and vote for or against the proposals.” But, in practice, the platform is opaque with online discussions and votes being shaped by a very small number of people. “Participation in online deliberations has declined steadily from 2012 to 2017, falling from an average of 36,000 to 19,000 participants. Because the movement has grown considerably in that time, the decline in the rate of participation is even more drastic: from 68 percent of eligible members in 2012 to a mere 13 percent in 2017.” (Stille 2018)

Now the growing field of digital democracy is slowly becoming more mature and sophisticated. Public and civil society institutions (and private technology vendors) are beginning to develop strategies for using collective intelligence to improve the quality of outcomes, re-designing how institutions make use of diverse inputs to improve the quality of decisionmaking and problem-solving.

For example, in Monterrey, Mexico, the municipal government has pioneered the use of open innovation — the open solicitation online from the public of solutions to high priority policy challenges. Bogota, Colombia’s Bogota Abierta project and Costa Rica’s RevolucionCR initiative also employ the Internet to go beyond citizen-commenting and, instead, focus on asking residents to solve problems together. The difference in Monterrey, however, is that the Desafios project also changed how its public officials worked, first, training them in problem definition to articulate challenges in a form specific and actionable enough for the pub- lic to understand and, second, coaching public servants and the public to develop citizen-proposals from mere ideas into implementable new policies and services.

These new forms of participatory law and policymaking — crowdlaw — leverage new technology to tap into diverse sources of opinions and expertise at each stage of the policymaking process to improve the quality of outcomes.

Crowdlaw differs in quantity and quality from earlier forms of public participation, first, because it is institutionalized and has the potential to impact how power is wielded, money spent, and decisions made.

Second, crowdlaw focuses on obtaining expertise and ideas instead of opinions. It is not merely a form of better opinion polling or a way to win supporters for party political causes but designed to bring collective intelligence to bear to solve problems.

Third, crowdlaw emphasizes the institutional design needed to be able to digest all collected knowledge not merely the design needed for individuals to participate.

Fourth, although it takes different forms, crowdlaw processes generally involve ceding some control over some aspect of policymaking, at least in part, to a more diverse audience. Many of these platforms are still little more than glorified electronic suggestion boxes, but they are aiming eventually to change the institution and render it more democratically accountable.

Although it is still early days, some of these projects are starting to use AI to help manage the process of wrangling collective intelligence, leveraging machine learning algorithms to sift and sort content, match the demand for expertise to the supply of it, and render the process of using input more efficient and tractable.

With experimentation and testing, crowdlaw has the potential to go beyond accountability and to make public institutions more effective by enabling decisionmakers to leverage diverse and innovative solutions to solve problems more quickly but also to putting on the agenda new problems to solve, such as those of structural inequality, that have too long been neglected by political elites.

Read the next part — #4 Crowdlaw as Augmented Problem-Solving:The Five Stages of Policymaking