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A guide to e-consultation
Main Topics
- What is e-consultation? (an introduction).
- Examples of e-consultation in practice.
- Participating in an e-consultation
- Planning an e-consultation
- Consultation processes
- Technology for e-consultation
First steps for:
- Policy makers, commissioning an e-consultation.
- Organisers, designing and managing one.
- Facilitators of one part of an e-consultation.
- NGOs and activists
- Technologists
Resources
- Issues listed at LYIT meeting
- Information Resources : what do we know?
- References to external resources
- Writing this guide
Prepared by the E-Consultation Research Project.
E-consultation ideas
Helping solve the housing crisis in SE England
A team at the Deloite Datathon in Reading came up with the idea of an interactive consultation tool.
Citizens will go online to tell planners where they would like houses to be built, using all the data available over a large area. They can enter their conditions using sliders. As they change their preferences, more or less of the map will be removed, showing which areas meet their preferences. When hundreds of people have used the tool, planners will have information not only on where people prefer houses to build, but which criteria are more important to citizens.
Distributed conversations for collaborative decision-making
This is a proposal developed at the 2017 Online Deliberation Unconference.
Once upon a time America Speaks ran 21st Century Town Meetings, in which 600 tables of 10 people all talked about a problem. Using networked computers in a room, they collected ideas from the tables and synthesised recommendations.
Now that Internet video conferencing is more reliable, we can use the same model, distributed across a country or the world, where each group of 10 looks at a presentation to start their discussion, then discusses the issue locally (or with online breakout groups), feeding back ideas.
Who would like to join in setting up an experiment on this model?