Inclusive policy making in a digital age: The case for crowdsourced deliberation

There’s been a surge of interest in online platforms for participation since the pandemic. In this post, Theo Bass makes the case for crowdsourced deliberation, an approach using digital tools and collective intelligence to bring more diverse public voices into policy making

In 2016, the Finnish Government ran an ambitious experiment to test if and how citizens across the country could meaningfully contribute to the law-making process.

Many people in Finland use off-road snowmobiles to get around in the winter, raising issues like how to protect wildlife, keep pedestrians safe, and compensate property owners for use of their land for off-road traffic.

To hear from people across the country who would be most affected by new laws, the government set up an online platform to understand problems they faced and gather solutions. Citizens could post comments and suggestions, respond to one another, and vote on ideas they liked. Over 700 people took part, generating around 250 policy ideas.

The exercise caught the attention of academics Tanja Aitamurto and Hélène Landemore. In 2017, they wrote a paper coining the term crowdsourced deliberation — an ‘open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self‐selected participants’ — to describe the interactions they saw on the platform.

Many other crowdsourced deliberation initiatives have emerged in recent years, although they haven’t always been given that name. From France to Taiwan, governments have experimented with opening policy making and enabling online conversations among diverse groups of thousands of people, leading to the adoption of new regulations or laws.

So what’s distinctive about this approach and why should policy makers consider it alongside others? In this post I’ll make a case for crowdsourced deliberation, comparing it to two other popular methods for inclusive policy making.

More deliberative than a consultation

Imagine a townhall meeting that’s totally silent. The only form of communication allowed is a note passed directly to the speaker. People can’t talk to one another and there’s no way of knowing whether the speaker is responding to the issues that matter most to people in the room.

Consultation is designed in a similar way, yet it’s one of the tools most used by governments for gathering public views. It only allows a single type of interaction, namely for the user to reply to pre-defined questions, and that interaction goes in only one direction.

Crowdsourced deliberation is different. It relies on collective intelligence, which is when a large and diverse group of people is collectively smarter than any individual.

With the help of well-designed digital platforms, conversations between participants generate rich insight into what people think and feel compared to receiving a survey response from a single person. A facilitator can quickly see which ideas are deemed good, and those which are easily debunked, by the group. They’ll see ideas that create tension or division, and maybe even those which can bridge divides.

Crowdsourced deliberation leads to better ideas too. In the Finnish example, Aitamurto and Landemore describe how the process led to more nuanced contributions. They found participants responding to each other which ‘complicated[ed] the debate in productive ways’. People exchanged viewpoints with counterexamples and conceptual distinctions which led to new proposals and helped move the conversation forward.

In short, using crowdsourced deliberation instead of consultation would lead to more useful insights for policy makers.

More open than a representative deliberative process

Recently the level of interest in representative deliberative processes has soared, as shown by the OECD. This includes methods like citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries and deliberative polls.

These processes bring together a representative sample of people to make judgements on complex or controversial policy issues, giving public bodies confidence to make decisions that reflect the public will.

But they can also limit the public’s influence in important ways.

Participants (usually around 100) are selected randomly. Because they have little prior understanding of the issue, participants are first shown information or evidence in the form of presentations, videos, scenarios or other stimulus materials.

These frame the discussions, but they’re often gathered in advance by facilitators and independently chosen experts, which means a small group of professionals can have strong influence on participants’ views.

Crowdsourced deliberation, by contrast, invites people with first-hand experiences or a stake in the issue to take part. Less time needs to be spent bringing them ‘up to speed’ and participants can drive straight into deliberation, often tackling more technical questions.

In other words, participants are the experts, they bring ideas, experiences, or technical knowledge from their lives to the table, which can contradict or add depth to existing evidence.

It’s also a more open process: anyone willing to share their view can contribute. In the Finnish example this included reindeer herders, fishermen, environmentalists, landowners, lawyers, professional snowmobile riders and hobbyists, and neighbours worried about the safety and noise of off-road traffic.

By thinking differently about citizen expertise, crowdsourced deliberation opens policy making to more diverse ideas and perspectives in ways other deliberative methods do not. But his doesn’t mean it should replace representative deliberative processes.

Representativeness is still important. It improves public perceptions of fairness, which is helpful when tackling highly controversial topics or where the public is asked to have the final say on an issue.

The added value of crowdsourced deliberation may be more modest. It’s a way of bringing the public into policy making at an earlier stage, from policy ideation, to collaborative drafting of proposals, or inviting public feedback and scrutiny of plans.

As I’ve suggested before it could also supplement representative deliberative processes, for example by helping set the agenda for citizens’ assemblies in more open and participatory ways.

Taking the crowdsourced deliberation agenda forward

Most guidance we use today to inform good practice deliberation was developed from observations of offline, face-to-face processes.

The online world may be conducive to a different style of deliberation than we’re used to. This means we need new, reliable design criteria that gives practitioners confidence to use approaches like crowdsourced deliberation.

To deliver on its promise, several issues need to be addressed about how best to design crowdsourced deliberation, from ensuring it’s inclusive and accessible to creating the conditions for participants (and the wider public) to trust the processes. Online deliberation also raises new questions around whether digital tools are transparent and align with democratic values.

Both the OECD and UKRI are exploring ways to support experimentation and learning in this area. UKRI has just announced a new project which will provide funding for several pilots for innovative dialogue on areas of emerging science, technology and research.

If you’re working on something like this, I’d love to hear from you. theo.bass@ukri.org or @Theo_bass.

Theo Bass is a Programme Manager in the Public Engagement Team at UKRI. His team supports Sciencewise, which enables policy makers to develop socially informed policy, with a particular emphasis on science and technology. Theo previously worked at Nesta where he was a Senior Researcher on democratic innovation, digital rights and collective intelligence.