Before you start
/Before you start
Whether you work for a government or another type of institution, there are some important things to consider when evaluating digital participation platforms. Many of these issues come up when hosting any participatory decision-making process. But they may need extra attention if you’re considering a digital platform.
Think through your process
It's important to sufficiently plan your program before selecting a digital platform to implement it. Creating a meaningful and accessible participatory process deserves careful consideration. After all, asking people to join a digital platform and share ideas or vote for proposals is not an insignificant request (especially if individuals are hesitant based on past experiences that have been less than satisfactory). The People Powered online resource center includes a selection of guides, manuals, case studies, and other tools that can help you design a participatory process. You can filter them based on language, country, and type of institution, among other factors.
At the same time, you may feel pressure to demonstrate immediate results. To assure you have enough time to design an effective participatory process, consider starting small with a pilot program. Beginning with a limited pilot can make it less likely you'll be accused of mis-allocating resources, while giving you space to learn what works for your context and participants. It can also help you manage high expectations while you learn what works and what doesn't.
With pilot projects, or prototypes of digital platforms, your goal is to demonstrate and further develop a meaningful participatory experience. Put the participant experience first, and build out the platform based on that. Participants' experiences when engaging in the process are paramount.
Another tip is to secure the backing of key decision-makers early in their term – particularly if they’re elected officials – when they may be more open to bold initiatives than later, as re-election or career considerations begin to drive their priorities. Ciudadanía Inteligente even requires mayoral endorsement to join the Abre Alcaldías project, as it demonstrates that there's sufficient political support to get started.
By researching your context and designing an appropriate process first, you can determine if or how digital platforms can support your program. This way you can choose your tools based on what you want to accomplish.
Before launching a participation platform, remember that how you run the process will communicate volumes to the people you’re engaging.
Commit to inviting participation for the right reasons
Bad reasons to run an open process include:
Trying to demonstrate support for decisions that have already been made (called “openwashing”). Digital participation platforms are an expensive and labor-intensive way of doing this.
Showing that you’re listening, but without making any adjustments to plans or follow-up actions based on participant input. People lose trust when this happens. It makes them less likely to participate in the future.
Expecting digital tools to result in accountability and oversight when dealing with corrupt governments or other bad-faith actors. If this describes your situation, you're better off partnering with existing advocacy organizations to identify an alternative strategy.
Collecting data from a community, and doing nothing with it. There are easier ways to do this, such as a simple survey.
Good reasons for running an open process include:
Wanting to achieve real constituent buy-in for a pending decision.
Inviting people to understand the trade-offs required by competing priorities.
Seeking to learn something from the public, with a commitment to adjusting plans based on what they share.
Getting a more diverse mix of ideas and comments than in-person meetings provide.
Reaching more people, in absolute terms.
Taking advantage of digital features, like the ability to send automatic updates to people who express interest in a project.
Gathering a large volume of actionable knowledge about the needs of your community.
Building a publicly accessible home for the documents, decisions, and conversations that went into a decision.
Commit to inclusion from the very start
"Half of the population isn't online," says Margo Loor of CitizenOS, based in Estonia, "and of those that are, 'online' means Facebook, because everything else is too expensive." (Facebook is less expensive because in many countries, its parent company, Meta, subsidizes internet and mobile providers to discount the data people use on its products.)
Even for people with internet access, the digital divide isn't solved with the mere availability of a data connection. In many parts of the world, women are still way less likely than men to own a smartphone — about 20% less, according to UNDP data. That means fewer chances to get online, access services, or even just stay informed. Add to that lower digital skills and fewer opportunities in tech education, and it’s clear that the digital world isn’t equally accessible to everyone.There are many factors, including civic efficacy (people's sense of whether and how their involvement makes a difference), comfort and confidence using digital tools, past experience interacting with institutions, and even how top-of-mind a participatory process is (or is not).
A recurring challenge in AI-driven civic initiatives is the assumption of a uniform level of digital literacy among participants. This can unintentionally exclude marginalized groups or reinforce power imbalances. Therefore, capacity-building efforts to equip citizens with the knowledge and skills required to engage effectively with AI systems are critical to effective digital participation. Digital inclusion must be paired with investments in AI literacy.
Participants' perception of their options appears to be an important factor. In San Pedro Garza García, Mexico, for example, people who were used to participating in person worried that their feedback wouldn't count as much on a digital platform.
Not everyone feels comfortable telling the government or public authorities what to do (even if they are invited to). There are many reasons for this, including historical and current oppression and various forms of inequality, such as unevenly distributed privilege. Even when traditionally excluded communities are given a genuine opportunity to voice their needs and desires, it may challenge the existing social hierarchy and many years of enforced norms.
One of the major barriers to effective digital platforms is the digital divide. This is manifested not just in disparity of internet access, but also speed of connections, cost of data plans, ownership of up-to-date personal devices, and/or degree of familiarity with the necessary technology. Digital platforms that aren't compatible with assistive technology, like screen readers, further hinder participation. In addition, platforms that require people to complete additional registration steps, such as email activation or identity verification with official documents, can quickly lose a significant number of participants.
The rapid roll-out of AI threatens to leave communities even further behind. People Powered members from a wide range of countries express fears that in many places, people are still catching up to the ongoing disruption that digitalization and the internet have brought. As an exponential factor in tech-driven transformation, AI could exacerbate these gaps.
Combined, all of these factors add up to a reality in which some people feel more comfortable expressing their views than others. Unfortunately, research suggests that digital participation platforms can empower the very people who already enjoy disproportionate power in society. Emilia Saiz, the secretary general of United Cities and Local Government, has found the same: "Underrepresentation of vulnerable groups in decision-making spaces has been critical, and we need to face this."
You will not realize the benefits of participatory decision-making if your process isn’t designed for the community you’re trying to empower. It is therefore very important that digital-participation hosts consider equity and inclusion at the beginning of the process. Achieving an equitable participatory process will probably take extra effort. This might mean spending more on outreach, or allocating more time to talking to people who use the platform. It will be worth it.
One way to promote equity early in the process is to dedicate more resources to both traditional and online outreach. The UN's E-Participation Index (EPI) formally recommends keeping the analog in-person channels open in addition to any digital platforms. "E-participation should complement rather than replace traditional forms of public participation in efforts aimed at ensuring no one is left behind; face-to-face meetings, paper-based communications, telephone calls, physical bulletin boards, and other hands-on modalities are still important. Strengthening the inclusiveness of vulnerable groups requires the provision of physical public space for the engagement of vulnerable groups, particularly at the local level."
Citizens’ Assemblies
An effective and increasingly popular method to drive inclusion is called the citizens’ assembly (also referred to as a 'citizens' jury' or 'sortition'). In this process, participants are randomly selected to ensure representative participation, and then supported and empowered to deliberate and consult on a decision.
The method tries to address the challenge of ensuring fair and inclusive representation in participatory processes while keeping group sizes manageable. Hosts start with a universe of people, like the national registry of citizens, and randomly select a sample from which to recruit. To achieve a representative group, hosts must still work to ensure consistent sign-up rates amongst the participants. Some ways to do this include providing a stipend to cover participants' time away from work, and free childcare.
You can find creative offline outreach methods in the Outreach and Engagement Methods Idea Bank appendix to this guide and learn more about deliberative democracy tools for breaking the gridlock in UNDP’s practitioner notes.
Education about participatory programs can play an important role in citizens' readiness to participate in even the most inviting decision-making processes. Brazil's e-Democracia parliamentary engagement platform, for example, integrated explanatory videos to help bridge gaps in knowledge.
The Brazilian Parliament's e-Democracia platform includes a variety of helpful videos like this one that explain how its formal political processes work, and how the digital platforms tie in.
Consider:
Who is likely to feel less comfortable using a digital platform to voice their opinions, and what can you do to ease that challenge?
Who is less likely to know that the engagement process is happening in the first place, and how might you adapt your outreach methods to reach them?
Social justice is advanced through the inclusion of traditionally excluded groups and citizens in vital decision-making processes. After all, the resulting decisions directly impact their communities.
Commit to accountability and responsiveness
Seasoned participation veterans know that implementing a tech platform is often easier than convincing politicians to devolve power to participants. But participants will quickly tire of voicing their opinions if there isn't a clear link between their participation and resulting action. Meaningful public participation requires more than asking for public input and setting up an engagement platform. If anything, doing these things without connecting voice to action can further decrease trust between people and their government.
Before launching a participation process, consider:
Are the relevant decisionmakers (beyond your immediate team) prepared and willing to delegate authority to participants? If not, it may be advisable to delay your program until you can secure their buy-in.
Will open participation subvert traditional decision-making pathways? Is this politically viable?
Do the relevant decisionmakers have enough political flexibility to engage participants in a new way?
Does the host institution have the capacity to facilitate a genuinely open process? Can the process survive the existing bureaucracy and power dynamics?
If the initiative relies on the support of executives, what will happen to the program when they're no longer in office? Can you plan around term limits and elections, and design for long-term adoption by future leaders?
If you get participant feedback that doesn't apply to your project or department, how will you make sure it reaches the appropriate recipient? What will prompt them to act on it?
How long will your process run? Can it be a regular or ongoing program? Is there a clear point person or office who people can contact if they want to keep engaging after the process is complete?
By hosting an open participation process, you're assuming the responsibility to connect participant feedback to relevant decision-making and action.
If the sheer volume of participant responses is a challenge for your institution's response capacity, you can commit to a reply deadline for proposals with a pre-specified level of public support. For example, your institution may commit to providing detailed responses to petitions with at least 5,000 signatures within 3 months of the petition's delivery. Some participatory program managers go further and strive to respond to a set percentage of participants' suggestions, such as 90%. The more you can respond to participants, the stronger the transparency you can nurture.
An example of the administrator’s view of the Party Citizens' Dialogue (빠띠 시민대화는 질문과 대화로) digital participation platform in Korea. Hosts can categorize proposals and designate the appropriate department responsible for following up.
Accountability also means taking participant feedback seriously. In the vTaiwan participatory decision-making process, a government agency invites stakeholders to come together to deliberate a controversial issue and make a recommendation. For example, to determine whether Uber should be legal in the country, vTaiwan brought together taxi drivers, Uber drivers, and riders. The hosting government agency is required to respond to the feedback received: All opinions are incorporated into the related decision-making discussions. The host also must provide a timely reply to questions that arise, specify which recommendations are being adopted, and report back in detail on why the others are not.
Even though you may not be able to implement every idea your constituents suggest, doing your best to respect their input by replying will build trust in the overall process.
Consider it a long-term relationship
Creating a smoothly operating participation process can take years. Likewise, nurturing constructive interactions between citizens and government (or institution and constituency) can take decades. This is a long-term process. So, it's important to treat public engagement not as a one-off event, but as a “habit.”
You can do this by planning for long-term participation from the start. Budgets shift, administrations end, and staff come and go. A digital participation platform preferred by one political party may lose favor and be discontinued when a rival party wins power. If the budget for the platform and its outreach program were not renewed, which design decisions that you can make now that will ensure the process was still a meaningful contribution?
One key way to achieve long-term results is to help participants connect with each other, not just with the host institution running the participatory process. By using the resources you have now to connect residents with each other, you can foster relationships that will fuel long-term civic involvement. Fostering relationships between participants may produce other ongoing benefits long after your participation process has ended.
Choose a digital platform that allows people passionate about the same issue to connect. Can you make proposals available for all to see, so that even if you don't have the capacity to act on each idea, others can?
Offering features such as the ability to form working groups, exchange private messages, and schedule offline meetings or events can strengthen social bonds between users.
Another way to ensure your work endures is to embed participatory processes into the institution itself. While executive leadership support is critical to initiating a new process, enshrining it in the day-to-day functioning of the bureaucracy is equally important.
The Parti Co-op team refers to the process as a "journey," and recommends that you treat digital participation as a multi-year project. If you are working within government or a similar institution, you will likely face pressure to run one-off engagement campaigns. Fight the instinct to think in one-year timelines. A successful digital participation process and platform requires several levels of institutional action, including policy and operations, with a longer horizon. The Parti team has found in its work in Seoul and elsewhere that a substantial portion of the platform development process is project planning, with the involvement of internal teams required at many steps along the way. Work to convince relevant stakeholders that this is a long-term project, and therefore deserves long-term planning and operational experience over time to be successful.
Next: Challenges and opportunities of using AI
Previous: What can digital participation platforms do?