Council - jon bounds

February 17th, 2009

The Big City Plan – Part 4 – Did it work?

The Big City Talk site collected 274 comments, not a huge number perhaps — but from my point of view they were all helpful, considered, and intelligent. There was also clear evidence of commenters building on the work of others, and better ideas forming. It is also very possible (and I’ve seen from anecdotal evidence) that people were using the plain English version of the site to inform their comments put though the “official channels”.

Pending a FOI request to find the exact number comments generated by the Council’s consultation methods (which also included two large-scale facilitated consultation events, a number of smaller ones and a “consultation bus“) the local paper reported: “more than 1,600 people express views, including over 500 opinions online in the city’s blogging community.”. Whether they’ve been confused as to where blogging comments came from, or have overestimated both, it doesn’t matter — 274 comments out of a total of 1600 is a good amount.

Had we not had to follow the structure of the Big City Plan “Work in Progress” document, or had to provide direct “translation”, or expend a lot of effort making the purpose of the BCT site clear — had we been able to have the site available for the full eight weeks (it took around four to make the plain English, commentable version) — then the number of comments and the standard of them would have been higher. That is not to mention the effect of the expensive advertising campaign pointing to BigCityTalk.org.uk rather than BigCityPlan.org.uk, or the kudos gained from being the official site — who knows what effect that would have had.

My Conclusions

The resources needed to produce the Big City Talk site were only time (the domain name cost £2.99, and I used existing hosting), the skills we used would have been readily available within the council structure — and experience if needed is already in the city. The only thing stopping Birmingham City Council running a “social” online consultation was the organisational will. I think there may be more of that now.

The Big City Plan is still a long process, having finished this consultation period the next step is to write a final plan — which again has to be put out for consultation.

I will consider the Big City Talk project a success if that consultation’s online component is a lot more like our way — and I won’t hesitate to repeat the exercise if it isn’t.

These are only my conclusions and views, and the “organisation” that produced the BCT site is a classic case of “organising without organisations” as Clay Shirky puts it — everyone will have thier own opinion. I’d love to see as many opinions and views, and constructive comments on how this sort of thing should work — please leave them here, blog yourself, or link to any you find.

The Big City Plan – Part 2 – Why

I enjoy my free time, so why did I (and the rest of the team) give up huge swathes of their Christmas break and January evenings to help our local council through a consultation process?

Simply, we are all people who care deeply about our city and also believe passionately in the power of online and offline collaboration. The official online consultation system wasn’t something that we saw as able to provide the best chance to the citizens of Birmingham.

We wanted to blog about it, nay were encouraged to do so by council officials — but blogging would have been a futile and time-consuming exercise. To pick out a small part of the plan (which consisted of many different, some complementary, some opposing, wildly different options) would be to have written something inconsequential and without context.

There was also the problem of explaining the options without editorialising — as the document was very very dense and complex, that it also referenced a large number of other development plans and studies didn’t help matters.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

The official “consultation portal” used the Limehouse software, that had some obvious shortcomings (lack of RSS for one) but does allow commenting. However the council department responsible took the decision not to publish comments for the duration of the consultation period — as yet they still haven’t.

As I told them:

“the limehouse software was clearly set up for users to leave comments, and to view the comments of others (there’s a search function just for this purpose).

To invite comments and then for people see no evidence of either:

a) their own comments appearing – as they would on the BBC or any newspaper site or any blog

or b) anyone else leaving any comments – which indicates that this is an unloved (unwanted?) plan

created a very bad impression.

If a site isn’t going to publish comments it should clearly say that they are being “sent to the team for consideration” and not imply that they are going to be shown.

To publish the comments is to invite debate, it could stimulate conversations around the questions — people building on other people’s ideas are more likely to both be constructive (it would lessen the chance of purely anti the “question” comment) and to be better comments “the wisdom of crowds” in effect.”

To be fair their are many people within Birmingham City Council that could have solved these issues, but for whatever reason they were too far away from the decision-making process in this instance.

The comment problem wouldn’t have been as bad if the document was easily understandable to everyone, whereas conversely if people could have used the comments online to help each other understand the document then the inaccessible language it was written in would have been mitigated against.

To fail in both ways made the online consultation — to my mind and to those of my fellow social-media types — very poor indeed. We had the skills and the motivation to do something about it.

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