Better governance through Direct engagement: Get the gist on using IT to consult citizenry

Indications of Change

The advent of new technologies is heightening consumer and citizen expectations, especially those regarding access to ICT. Individuals expect to quickly and easily find the information they want online no matter where they are or what time it is. They are also increasingly demanding to communicate their unique wants and needs to companies and government agencies for the sake of improved services. Thus far, the private sphere has made better use of new technologies to further consumer engagement than the public sphere. The general public has grown comfortable with this kind of engagement, and the public sector will need to follow the lead of the private sector to reach citizens in the manner in which they are the most familiar and comfortable.

New Expectations

As the private sector engages consumers, citizens are expecting government leaders to open as well. However, not citizen will be ready for such measures either technically if they cannot use the technology or philosophically if they disagree with what the government is attempting. Governments may need to educate those citizens who wish to participate in the creation of policy, and they will need to communicate in a delicate manner to avoid scaring their citizens.

Public Demand for Engagement

Since technology has enabled convenient engagement at an individual level, consumers and citizens expect organizations to be equally engaging.

Consumers increasingly expect new levels of digital engagement, forcing those who want to serve consumer or citizen needs to establish a digital presence, and to provide consistent information, services, and brand experience across all channels. (Tech Trends 2014)
Individuals—especially Millennials and other young people—increasingly want to be engaged. In the private sphere, for example, Gartner determined in 2015 that 89% of companies—up from 36% in 2011—believe that customer experience (including personalization, engagement, etc.) will be their primary basis for competition by 2016. (Digital Business Era)
As a result, greater efforts to engage increasingly sophisticated and tech-savvy consumers will soon become even more essential for companies—and other agencies—that want to serve tomorrow’s consumers. (The Five Mega-Trends Shaping Tomorrow's Consumers)
Public-interest charities such as Samara Canada—“dedicated to reconnecting citizens to politics”—are encouraging greater political participation and civic engagement from all citizens to build better politics and a more democratic Canada. (The politics of distrust: Samara paints a disengaged picture)

Educating and Empowering Consumers and Citizens

In order to empower citizens, governments will need to educate them on how to participate effectively, and libraries will play a key role.

The World Economic Forum projects that improved collaboration and knowledge sharing, facilitated through hyper-connectivity will pave the way for a participation society, in which engagement in societal endeavors becomes essential to its citizens. (Living in a Hyperconnected World)
However, the skills of media literacy and digital citizenship—the ability to access, search, and evaluate information and produce and distribute content—will become increasingly essential to participate in the social, educational, economic, and political benefits of society. (Digital Life in 2025)
Libraries and other institutions will have a growing responsibility to help students gain appropriate levels of digital access, engagement, and critical understanding, allowing citizens to acquire deep digital literacy. (Living and Learning in 2034)
Libraries will continue to be valued by citizens as safe, democratic places that offer opportunities to meet in free public spaces, resources and expertise to support the activities of users, and a virtual presence that social networking and links to other online resources. (The Library of the Future)

Crowdsourcing and Co-Creation

The wisdom of crowds is already utilized for creating the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and many other public goods. The same may extend to different aspects of government works.

Crowdsourcing platforms and social media offer tools for organizing collective intelligence and participatory problem solving. (Developing a Policy Roadmap for Smart Cities and the Future Internet)
Digital tools and crowdsourcing approaches can allow citizens to become more informed about issues, budgets, and upcoming decisions—and thereby increase and improve both government transparency and citizen voice. In addition, crowdsourcing methods may increasingly become tools for gathering data, ideas, and perspectives in useful ways—providing groups with both voice and accountability. (The Future of Knowledge Sharing in a Digital Age)
Co-creation may involve deployment at large scales of digital social platforms for multi-disciplinary groups developing innovative solutions to societal challenges, encouraging bottom-up participatory innovation paradigms and the development of collective awareness and knowledge. (Horizon 2020)
In green businesses, for example, open innovation and crowdsourcing approaches are being used to co-create new businesses that rely on collaboration and partnership, helping to break down impediments to establishing innovative businesses, and enabling those who have ideas to reach people more quickly. (6 Sustainable Innovation and Design Trends)

The Challenge of Measuring Success

Evaluating the worth of crowdsourced ideas and policies and measuring their impact may pose a challenge, but effective metrics are being tested.

Without developing and implementing mechanisms that evaluate and separate the good ideas from the bad and transform online enthusiasm into policies with real-world impact, crowdsourcing and social media could lead to what Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, board chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, calls “over-innovation”: the constant introduction of new and unproven ideas that draw attention away from scaling up proven solutions and achieving measurable change. (Disruption for Good)
Because not all social actions are equal in impact, it will become increasingly important to establish a weighted engagement metric (in terms of such consumer social responses as shares or retweets, likes, and comments or replies) to provide a more accurate measure of content performance. (Social Media Trends for Tourism Boards)
Since 2003, the UN E-Government Survey has assessed the development of e-government, including e-participation, on a country-by-country basis. Assessment of e-participation has steadily expanded to include e-consultation and e-decision-making initiatives—i.e., engaging citizens in public policy-making and implementation through such tools as social media and online bulletin boards, polls, petitions, discussion forums, and voting tools. In 2013, the countries achieving the highest scores on the e-participation index were South Korea and the Netherlands. (The Global Information Technology Report 2015)

New Tools

ICT is growing in importance around the world, and Canada is the second heaviest user of internet tools and services in the world with an average of 41.3 hours online^{Footnote 9} per month. Canada also ranks number 16 globally for internet penetration with 86.8% of its citizenry^{Footnote 10} connected to the internet. The growth in the number of devices and connected citizens is intensifying the benefits and the need for organizations to utilize them as communication channels. Four of the most important tools for the public sector when considering direct engagement are the continual increase in ICT, social media networks, growth of data for analytics, and gamification.

ICT Explosion

The growth of ICT among citizens will continue likely until near full saturation, and ICT will be a primary avenue of communication for an ever increasing segment of society. Governments which do not actively pursue online direct engagement will risk being the only organizations left not participating effectively.

And the number of devices each citizen uses will also continue to proliferate. So, governments will need to look beyond desktop engagement and meet their constituents where they can be engaged. Otherwise, the benefits will be missed by the demographics that have already ceased using desktop computers.

Global Internet access is projected to reach almost 5 billion users by 2020. (Emerging ICT and Technology Mediation Social Developments)
Growth is especially strong in mobile devices. In 2015, the mobile Internet will connect 15 billion devices and 2.5 billion people throughout the world. (Innovation in Technology Based Companies)
By 2017, 80% of consumer engagement with brands will be on mobile devices. (Advance Your Mobile, Cloud, Analytics and API Capabilities) And citizens will be expecting to engage with their governments in a similar manner to their preferred brands.
Wireless technology enabled by advancement in cellular networks, satellite networks, RFID, Wi-FI and WiMax will lead to IT infrastructure and other services to be 80% wireless on a single integrated platform in 2020. (World's Top Global Mega Trends to 2020)
Digitization of services, processes, and interactions is anticipated to continue at a rapid pace in coming years, becoming even more pervasive, which will lead to disruptive effects on lifestyles, governance, and policy making. (Envisioning Digital Europe 2030)
Devices are increasingly interconnected, making it incumbent on business and government leaders to rework their offerings and processes accordingly. (Digital Business Era)
As connected devices, sensors, and smart machines continue to proliferate, customers, employees, and citizens alike will become engaged principally through digital means. (3 Big Data Trends for Business Intelligence)

Social Networking

Information shared directly with government agencies through social networks (e.g. posting to agency Facebook page, replying to agency tweets) will be invaluable for the agencies especially in identifying their constituents’ needs and motivations.

New communications technologies, especially social networking, are broadening individuals’ sense of community, allowing them to bridge national, regional, ethnic, and gender divides. (Alternative Worlds)
Social media will reshape the citizen experience, and force governments to adopt social media etiquette or standards of engagement. (Social Media and CRM to Further Expand in 2015)
Social networking technologies can serve as an important tool for both corporations and governments, providing them with valuable information about individuals and groups and facilitating development of robust predictive models with applications in everything from targeted advertising to counterterrorism. Social networks can also introduce new classes of services resistant to centralized oversight and control that could displace services currently provided by corporations and government. (Alternative Worlds)
A European Commission FP7 project called WEGOV is developing a toolset to allow governments to take full advantage of a wide range of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, and others to engage citizens in a two-way conversation that is integrated into policy-making and governance processes. The platform will allow policy makers to efficiently collect citizen opinions as soon as they are created. And it will allow policy makers to make full use of the high levels of participation and discussion that already take place in existing social networking communities, helping to close the loop between policy makers and citizens. (Envisioning Digital Europe 2030)

Big Data Analytics

Big data analytics has some potential for the public sector for improving citizen services and tailoring messages, however, there are parameters for the uses of data in this context, unlike in the private sector. The public sector should realize that in most areas, businesses are tailoring their offerings to consumer needs, and citizens will likely come to expect some degree of customization from the public sector, even if subconsciously.

The question of privacy in the private sector is most concerned with the benefits provided in exchange. So too, government agencies have a great many benefits to offer citizens who opt in to data sharing if the agencies can find an ethical and legal balance in which to offer the benefits.

Using big data allows providers to shift customer engagement models from reactive to proactive. T-Mobile, for example, is using an individual’s personal history to better understand, predict, and mitigate potential customer issues before they occur. (Tech Trends 2014)
According to the chief executive of Nesta, an “innovation agency” in the UK, many governments still haven’t scratched the surface of what’s possible with predictive analytics and machine learning. The public sector, he suggests, should pay more attention to such private sector best practices as consumer segmentation. (The Digital Governance Dilemma Canada's Public Sector Must Confront)
The public will easily become fearful of big data and its potential because big data is most useful when enabled to improve customer service, i.e. when the experience delights and surprises users at the most convenient point of contact. (Big Data Jargon We All Need to Reign In, Right Now)

Gamification

Gamification involves the incorporation of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards to spur interaction and boost engagement, loyalty, fun, and/or learning. It has been demonstrated to cause feel-good chemical reactions and in certain situations to improve learning, participation, and motivation (Gamification)^{Footnote 11}. Engaging citizens using gamification strategies could increase participation more than small offers of personal benefit. If governments want to increase their citizen participation rates, gamification could be a solution. Showing voters the percentage of elections they have voted in versus the overall number of elections could spur them into voting more often to either maintain their current level or increase it.

In today’s engagement economy, in which time and attention are at a premium, people have been shown to gravitate to activities that make them feel rewarded and respected for their opinions and support. (How Gamification Is Reshaping Business in the Engagement Economy) Gamification is also becoming an important means for organizations to engage more deeply with audiences. It allows organizations to engage a target audience and then leverage the collective intelligence of the crowd to solicit ideas, develop those ideas, and then use predictive market mechanisms to forecast how those ideas will be received. By 2016, Gartner forecasts, gamification will be an essential element for brands and retailers to drive customer marketing and loyalty. (Gamification 2020)
More and more businesses and governments will introduce game mechanics (and human psychology) into marketing messages, services, and situations because businesses and government want to understand and influence consumers and voters. (Gamification)
Daren C. Brabham, a University of North Carolina communications professor, anticipates that “gamification will continue to penetrate every aspect of our lives. Gamification will even shape our interactions with government. Crowdsourcing and incentivized models for engagement will drive public participation programs for public issues (policy design, the planning of public space, etc.).” (Gamification)

More Participatory Governance

Although difficult, opening the policy process to citizenry will increase participation and empower citizens while potentially reducing or at least controlling social unrest.

Digital Engagement as a Tool for Good Governance

Both the EU and the UN promote multilateral engagement with stakeholders for reasons ranging from good governance to security. In this context, ICT advances, social networking, gamification, and crowdsourcing—by increasing participation, transparency and broadening inclusion—will become key tools.

UN millennium goals establish that good governance must be based on principles of inclusion, stakeholder engagement, and the participation of all groups in society. (Realizing the Future We Want for All)
The EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) likewise urges the EU to adopt policies—based on education, dialogue, and new ways of communicating and interacting with different stakeholders—that foster e-participation and e-democracy that ensure greater inclusion, embracing the multicultural and social diversity of the EU. (Facing the Future)
Strengthening urban governance by involving and empowering citizens and building partnerships with civil society and the private sector, for example, is seen by the UN as perhaps the single most important factor in addressing urban risk. (Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction)
The e-governance strategy of the EU, for example, aims to ensure universal access to information, openness and transparency, participation, and equity. (Review of Science and Technology Foresight Studies)
In the EU, the JRC holds that ICT tools for governance and policy will ultimately force changes in institutions, even if they resist change. By 2030, barriers will no longer exist that prevent citizens and businesses from participating in decision making at all levels. All institutions—whether public, private, or third sector—will start to listen more carefully to their stakeholders. (Envisioning Digital Europe 2030)

The Future of Governance

Governments around the world are responding to 21st Century technology and the resulting expectations citizens are placing on government leaders. In the future, a system much closer to true democracy may arise.

Governments face challenges in adapting to technological developments. The trend toward “made-for-me” service delivery and citizen-led co-creation, for example, will stress the capabilities of many governments. (Cognitive Government)
Yet increasing access to technology could usher in an era of open governance, heightened transparency, and crowdsourced decision-making. (The Future Role of Civil Society)
The 2015 UAE Government Summit on “Shaping Future Governments” determined that a commitment to co-creation is one of the essential requirements needed to achieve truly fundamental changes to the architecture of government. (Cognitive Government)
Technological progress may afford citizens opportunities to exert control over their governments—facilitating bottom-up, user-driven, and massive collaboration that may influence policy formation and e-governance decisions—while at the same time opening up the organizational cultures of governments. (Facing the Future)
ICT tools will allow a shift from expert to non-expert knowledge, making the decision-making and governance processes more horizontal and participatory. Locally based activities will promote and facilitate the reuse and linking of public data and information, making that knowledge available and visually user friendly to the vast majority of users. (Envisioning Digital Europe 2030)
In the long term, the EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has concluded, governments will embrace networked governance structures—but only following a struggle between traditional bureaucratic systems and network-based mechanisms over which offers the best way to organize people, knowledge, and service delivery. Ultimately, governance actors will become increasingly aware of the needs and desires of citizens, businesses, and administrations for more choice. And the principles of facilitating greater participation, more user-created content, deeper user engagement, and ownership of public services will exercise a powerful influence on governance and policy-making mechanisms. (Envisioning Digital Europe 2030)
Digital technology can bring new voices into policy making, and rapid, digitally enabled feedback on how policy is working has the potential to lead to more agile governance. (Why Greens Should Embrace Digital Technology)
In establishing platforms that enable users to design, create, and self-direct services to their own personal requirements, governments will provide more individualized services. Governments will in this way become more open, participative, and democratic—welcoming inputs and interests from all segments and all levels of society. (eGovernment of Tomorrow)
An exemplary 21st century government that embraces a client-focused organizational culture and uses the latest technology for citizens could invite and induce citizens to develop a modern relationship/contact with “their” government. (Destination 2020)

Making it Happen

The idealism of technology enabled true democracy is justified. Cities and nations alike are pursuing different methods of engagement, and these locations provide benchmarks for new ways of attaining policy goals.

Cities as Test Centers

In many ways, cities provide optimal testing grounds for new ICT engagement strategies since they operate on a large contained area that is much smaller than most nations.

More and more cities are tapping into growing public calls for more local control and decentralized government. (Alternative Worlds)
New forms of governance for an online world—employing new forms of online participation making use of the latest ICT—are being employed to achieve the increasingly urgent goal of re-engineering cities to make them smart, competitive, equitable, and responsive. (Smart Cities of the Future)
A growing number of cities, for example, are introducing proactive programs—smart parking, smart lighting, energy and waste management—that provide greater engagement with their citizens. (How the Internet of Things is Affecting Urban Design)
Social networks will further empower both consumers and businesses to communicate more transparently—and ultimately help shift the balance of power toward consumers. (Insurance 2020)
In coming years, ICT will increasingly be used to ensure that citizens are aware of municipal activities and to provide opportunities to participate in the democratic decision-making process. (Smart Cities)
IBM predicts that by the end of the decade, learning systems, mobile devices, and social engagement will create “sentient cities,” with computers anticipating and understanding what people want, need, like, and do, as well as how they move from place to place. Mobile devices and social engagement will enable citizens to establish relationships with city leaders, allowing their voices to be heard. (IBM's Predictions for Next Five Years: Everything Will Learn)
Ultimately, city leaders will be judged by their achievement in transforming their cities, and integrating citizen feedback into operations through ongoing engagement and stakeholder management will play a key role in overcoming infrastructure challenges. (Urban Infrastructure Insights 2015)

Scaling It Up to the National Level

Some national governments are also attempting experiments that harness ICT and social networking in order to create more inclusive and participatory governance. These experiments will provide benchmarks for the growing list of nations looking to transition to more participatory government.

Recognizing the need for 21st century agencies to embrace the power of social networking communities, the US Patent and Trademark Office was one of the first US agencies to embrace blogging and tweeting and hire staff skilled in social networking. They also use wiki-style tools to enable various stakeholders to contribute to important agency documents. (Building a Service-Oriented Agency)
More than three million responses received in a public consultation helped influence the FCC to preserve net neutrality (the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites) in the US. (The US Net Neutrality Saga Is a Lesson to the World)
“The release of the comments as Open Data … will allow researchers, journalists, and others to analyze and create visualizations of the data so that the public and the FCC can discuss and learn from the comments we’ve received,” announced an FCC blog post. (FCC Gives Data Geeks New, Exciting Way to Show Public's Hatred of Net Neutrality Plan)
And as the share of women and minorities among US veterans continues to rise, the US Department of Veteran Affairs is recognizing that increases in the diversity of the veteran population will heighten the need for more diverse services, outreach, communications, and engagement efforts. (FY 2014-2020 Strategic Plan)
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency is currently developing a social media strategy that will enable meaningful engagement and communication with both the public and partners about the projects it regulates. (Destination 2020)
In the UK, the Public Administration Select Committee has recommended a wiki approach to policy making, using digital technology to open up the process, and seeking and valuing public opinion and ideas at all stages—from identifying problems to developing solutions. (Report Published on Public Engagement in Policy-Making)
“Citizens will be most likely to engage with Government if they believe they can make a real difference,” explained Bernard Jenkin, MP. “I would like to see advances toward more direct, real public involvement in policy making, whether via the Internet or other means,” added Robert Halfon, MP. (Report Published on Public Engagement in Policy-Making)
In an experiment in democracy intended to provide all citizens the opportunity to participate digitally in Swedish democracy, the Swedish government is giving control over Sweden’s official Twitter account to a different Swede each week, allowing them to share daily local experiences. (Digital Scotland 2020)
Scotland also employs technology to offer parents the option to make a variety of school payments—including those covering lunches and school trips—through a simple online system linked to the young Scot Entitlement Card. (Scotland's Digital Future)

Concerns to Remember

While potentially facilitating more responsive, efficient, and effective governance, ICT advances and social networking also pose threats that may challenge governments.

“A number of clear dangers remain, chiefly, the abuse of social media to promote populist and disruptive agendas and ideologies; the increasing corporatization and astroturfing of social media spaces; the exploitation of personal information made public through social media by criminals and overzealous law enforcement agencies. On balance, social media spaces and communities have, to date, remained remarkably resistant to such interference, but there are no guarantees that this will continue. But social media also enable their users to organize to combat infringements and interference, and this is a cause for optimism.” —Axel Bruns, associate professor of media and communication, Queensland University of Technology, and general editor of Media and Culture journal (Imagining the Internet)
Global communications could help fuel future radicalism. Increasing interconnectedness enables individuals—including cohorts of the downtrodden, disenfranchised, and angry—to coalesce around common causes across national boundaries. (Global Trends 2025)
Social networking technologies also allow groups to communicate easily outside traditional media and government channels, and therefore may enable groups to pursue disruptive and even criminal agendas with potential impact across geopolitical boundaries. (Alternative Worlds)
Social networking may therefore enable citizens to coalesce and challenge governments, as has already been seen in the Middle East. (Alternative Worlds)

Date modified:: 2023-01-19

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