Online deliberation: Opportunities and challenges
Lyn Carson in conversation with Graham Smith
The following is an edited transcript of the newDemocracy Foundation Facilitating Public Deliberation podcast, hosted by Professor Lyn Carson, Research Director at the newDemocracy Foundation, and produced by Nivek Thompson. The interview is with Graham Smith, Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and Chair of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development, about what we know and don’t know about transferring face-to-face deliberations to an online environment.
Carson: The reason I wanted to talk to you is because we’re having this discussion at the time of the Coronavirus pandemic. Quite a few people have been thinking about the research questions we’ll need to answer if we’re going to think about virtual mini publics like citizens’ assemblies and citizens’ juries. Questions like: can we apply the same random selection processes if we’re doing a virtual mini public? How we can ensure diversity and representativeness?
Smith: There’s a general point that I’d like to make at the start, which is that I don’t think there have been very good conversations in the past between people who’ve been in involved in face-to-face deliberative processes, and people who work in civic tech and digital engagement. I think they’ve been sometimes competing with each other, but often talking past each other. And what’s been interesting for me over the last few weeks, is that the shutdown has forced those conversations to be much more focused.
To your specific question about random selection, what has always interested me about the technology aspect of democratic engagement is that those people who are primarily technologists have thought less about who comes onto their platform, and more about how their platform functions. I don’t think there’s any philosophical or practical reason why you couldn’t apply random selection techniques to bring people into an online space. There have been lots of online spaces that are closed in the sense they’re closed to a particular community.
Carson: We’re going to have different skill sets, of course. But it’s only a potential problem if we don’t spend sufficient time with people to get to make them feel comfortable with the platform that we’re working with.
Smith: We can bring people onto a platform; once they’re on that platform, we’ve got a lot of work to do, which is very different from the kind of work that we would be doing in a room when we can see people face-to-face. If we use a civic lottery process to recruit people for online engagement, there are two issues. One is once somebody has that invitation, do they have access and the kinds of skills to use the technologies with confidence? And the other issue is facilitating the space. To ensure that we can enable the kind of inclusiveness that we ensure in face-to-face deliberation.
Carson: Yes. I was just talking to a facilitator who has been doing an online deliberation and another issue was raised. The government, the organiser, the decision maker, may very well insist on their own platform to use. They often have a very clunky platform that they might have used for direct input from citizens, which is just an aggregation of individual opinions, but they wouldn’t have necessarily been using a platform that enables anything that you and I might describe as deliberation.
Smith: I haven’t actually heard of that one and I must admit, that’s interesting. But in some ways, this reminds me of battles that we’ve had earlier, when public authorities were saying, “well, why aren’t my public hearings good enough? Why aren’t my consultation mechanisms good enough?” So maybe there’s an analogy and we’ll have to come in and say, “it’s not good enough for the same reasons that we had said we needed to do citizens’ juries or deliberative polls rather than your previous consultation mechanism.”
There’s a lot of solution-ism out there with a lot of people who say they’ve got the platform. It’s quite dangerous to have people saying that they’ve “solved” all the problems of online deliberation. “Here’s my app”. We’ve got to be quite careful about that.
Carson: Yes, we should remember to go back to the question of what is it we’re trying to do here? And what is it that we would actually want people to do? There can be a path dependency.
Smith: Indeed, with the number of things that are happening on Zoom at the moment, people are immediately saying, “Okay, so what’s the functionality? What are the affordances of Zoom? And how can I make my process more Zoomable?” There’s a sense we’re using it because we’ve used it before. They’re not asking “should we use Zoom?” We’re in an experimental phase in terms of which platform we should be using. We’re also experimenting when it comes to how we should facilitate the conversations on these platforms.
Carson: Yes. For me, it’s just a design challenge. We’ve always had design challenges in deliberative democracy. So, this is just another one, and I actually think it’s kind of exciting. How can we do this? How can we actually enable people to deliberate together and reach agreement together?
Smith: Much depends on the kind of process that you’re working on. We can learn from people who do online pedagogy about the best methods to learn online. We might be able to be more imaginative in terms of some of the materials that we’re able to use and provide.
The UK Climate Assembly, which had its last weekend postponed, is now going online over a series of shorter meetings. There was some learning planned for the start. I know they’ve delivered that through videos. I believe the facilitator of that process was quite pleased, because she was able to say “No, you didn’t do it right that time. Do it again!” So you might be able to get some of your witnesses to do better presentations.
With platforms like Zoom, people can go into breakout groups with an expert. And I’m sure you’ve had the problem of trying to get a good expert or witness to come along for a deliberative process and they can’t find the time in their diary. For virtual engagement, the time commitments are less. I agree that there might be some things which are more challenging, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily the learning aspects.
We did some work a few years ago on asynchronous platforms. We were looking at how people behaved when we provided information and there was a dialogue in a chat space. We found that people tended not look at the information and, instead, went straight to the chat space. There is a sequencing issue here.
In the kinds of processes that we’re used to where people are randomly selected, they buy in because they’ve been invited and they see it as a special thing to be doing. They are willing to spend that time learning. It is one of the challenges of online spaces that you don’t necessarily know that everybody has been going through the phases in the same way you would do in a face-to-face space where we can literally see what people are doing.
Carson: It seems to me that there’s a whole bunch of variations. There’s the synchronous where faces are visible. There’s the asynchronous where you don’t have a face that’s visible, the dreaded telephone, which may actually be useful in some circumstances. I guess you’ve got to take all that into account.
Smith: I think that’s right. I mentioned solution-ism earlier, where people are trying to find the app, or the platform that’s going to solve all of their issues. Deliberation isn’t a single thing. It’s a bunch of different things that happen; it’s the learning, generating ideas, listening, hearing and creating things together. I’m very suspicious of anybody who thinks that can all happen on one platform.
My guess is that we actually might need to sequence platforms. In face-to-face, we’re changing the tasks that people are doing all the time and we’re changing their relationships with each other and with facilitators. In a sense, it’s like we’re creating different platforms each time.
I wonder whether we might need, for example, platforms that are specifically good at generating ideas and helping us visualise the argument space, and other platforms that are very good for allowing us to have some sort of face-to-face interaction, in a way that you mimic some of the things that we do on a small table. We might need another piece of software to start doing some of the creative recommendation writing. We’re able to manage that in a room by changing the way we use the space. My guess is we may need to change platforms, which generates issues again in relation to the digital divide about people’s confidence in moving between platforms.
Carson: I know that in newDemocracy’s deliberative processes, when participants are writing reports and developing recommendations, they would typically be using Google Docs and the group would write this themselves. We’re very passionate about the group having the control of the report that emerges, but that actually lends itself beautifully to an asynchronous environment. There’s no reason why people can’t all collaboratively work on a Google Doc online at the same time.
Graham: That could be right. Although there are people who love being online and others who find it more of a chore. My concern is with the ‘keyboard warriors’. I think that’s harder to manage when you’re not with the people and able to offer support to those who may be a bit more reluctant.
Some of this is coming down to those things that we do in deliberative mini publics to support those people who are less confident. We’re able to much more clearly watch how people are interacting with each other and support those who are finding it challenging. I’m not sure that we can do that, where we’re only seeing a small picture of somebody, and we’re only seeing their face.
In face-to-face settings, we see how people are sitting, how they are moving around the room, when they go for a coffee, and whether people are smiling when they’re not at the table. I think people unfamiliar with participatory processes might underestimate, for example, how important social time is, how important looking at how people’s work is, how people are holding themselves. That is really hard to do online. There are all sorts of nonverbal actions that we’re observing. And this is true of the participants as well, of course. They get signals, which you just can’t get on Zoom or Skype or other platforms.
There’s also an upside to this. It may well suit people who are not particularly gregarious or outgoing or extraverted, and who may be reluctant to speak in a face-to-face environment. They may come into their own online. As with every advantage, there’s a disadvantage and vice versa.
People who talk about the digital divide in the academic literature are very clear that the digital divide can reinforce existing inequalities. When we move online, existing inequalities can be intensified, and in other ways, it can create new inequalities, divisions, or hierarchies.
Carson: On that, people are realising that when you’re in front of a screen, you also need to take a break occasionally. I think we have to be very aware that time on the screen is not the same as time face-to-face. What was interesting with the French Convention on Climate Change is they just recently had a weekend where they went online to discuss the impact of the COVID virus on climate change. And they had seven-hour days as far as I can tell.
Smith: Interestingly though, the people stuck with it. In the UK Citizens’ Assembly, the decision was not to do a full weekend. They’re going to do three- or four-hour stints and put those together. We may well have to use time differently online.
Carson: I think even four hours may be a bit much. You talked earlier about sequencing how this can happen over an extended period. We tend to do intensive sessions because there’s usually a cost impediment with bringing people to one central location. There are advantages to that kind of intensive work, but I also think there are tremendous advantages in doing it over a period of time and allowing people time to reflect, select, process, and do their own research.
Smith: Yes, I think that’s right. My only concern — and this is an empirical question that we have to experiment with and find out — is whether we’re going to get the same volume of activity that we get with the kinds of mini publics that we’re familiar with. The retention rate is typically amazing with those processes. But part of that, I sense is, is down to the social aspect; the fact that you’re working with and meeting new people; you’re building new relationships. I just wonder whether they’re going to be the same online. That’s an empirical question. I don’t know.
One of the advantages for the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate and the UK Climate Assembly is that they’ve done a bunch of weekends beforehand. So, these people are already committed and have developed a collective work ethos. Can we build that kind of ethos online from the beginning, such that people feel that commitment to the process? I have no answer at the moment.
A lot of experimental work has been done online. You tend to see a drop off in participation, but that tends to be for open processes where anybody can participate. We don’t really know if you select a representative group and you do the same kind of work that we would do with in-person mini publics (in terms of telling them how important it is and explaining the kind of relationship this will have with decision making, making it clear to them that they have been selected and that it’s a really special opportunity) whether that will be enough to hold them, or whether hanging out with people physically is actually important.
Carson: Another issue to be aware of is size. We’ve been working with groups of 35–45 in a jury-like process. And I suspect that’s too much when we go online, that we may be better off with 25. And as you say, it’s all experimental, we just don’t know until we actually do it.
Smith: It does allow you to be much more experimental. We’re used to bringing everybody together at the same time. There’s no reason why we can’t be bringing smaller groups together online at different times that are suitable to them. This is all about design, as we said before.
Carson: One facilitator told me that when he got to the end of an online session with some people who were very unfamiliar with the platform and needed a lot of support, he was surprised by the enthusiasm at the end of it. The participants were saying, “Actually, this was great for me, I learned something that I would have been resistant to learning.”
Smith: In face-to-face, people say the same thing. At the start we hear: “Why am I here, I’m not going to be able to do anything.” And at the end, they have a high degree of political efficacy.
One thing we didn’t mention is there are people who don’t have broadband; they don’t have the technology. So part of the process is that we have to expect to provide that connectivity to people and to be able to teach them to use the technology if necessary.
In both the French and the UK cases, they’ve done that. One of the things they found, for example, is that some people did have a computer in the house, but it was being used by someone else for work. There are new hurdles for us.
Carson: I think we’ve covered everything that I wanted to, but is there anything else that I’ve missed?
Smith: One of the things that I find quite exciting about online engagement is the use of argument visualisation platforms. We haven’t made the most of those face-to-face. We don’t always map all of the arguments that are out there. I think that can potentially lead to certain arguments being overlooked, not purposefully. There is a real possibility of crowdsourcing — what are the arguments in this space? This is an online technology that we could be using face-to-face. One of the interesting things that might happen here is that we do all this experimentation online and then bring some of it into our face-to-face work.
I have a prejudice that face-to-face is better in terms of deliberative processes. I’ve always had this suspicion about online engagement. Some of that is because of the dysfunctionality of online spaces, but some of it, I have to be honest, is also just my own prejudice based on my familiarity with face-to-face processes. What I’m finding really helpful here is trying stuff out, experimenting with things and thinking, “Actually, that’s really interesting. That works better than I expected.” So, to me, it’s going to be about that blending — how do we bring the online and the face-to-face together in more creative ways?
Carson: It was so good to hear Graham Smith’s views. He’s right that the pandemic has forced really focused conversations between civic tech people and deliberative designers in a really productive way. I like what he had to say about overcoming the digital divide, avoiding solution-ism, but also the fact that there are exciting experimentation possibilities.
Listen to the full podcast here.
Are you a practitioner delivering a representative deliberative process fully or partially online? The OECD has put together this survey for practitioners about what they are doing, how, and why. Answers are publicly available from the moment they are submitted in this viewable Airtable database (except for the name, job title and email of the individual filling out the form).
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Pablo Hilaire writes that by promoting conscious uses of digital technologies in favour of open justice, we have learnt that to facilitate and promote deliberation and participation online, we need to put citizens at the centre, from the design to the collection of data and feedback.
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