Sensing better together
Informed decisions for public good
Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) is the Digital Minister’s office in Taiwan’s central government. It has 3 overarching missions: to advance Open Government, social innovation, and youth empowerment.
The primary value of PDIS is a commitment to build trust between citizens and the government. To achieve this, a cross-ministerial network of passionate civil servants called Participation Officers (POs) was established. The POs play a vital part in Taiwan’s public sector innovation ecosystem. They are deeply involved in the conversation with civil society, subject-matter experts, industries and governmental departments. In order to identify problems and create solutions, POs hold ‘Collaborative Meetings’ with this diverse range of people openly and collaboratively. Celebrating collective intelligence, embracing diversity, and rethinking governance by distributing decision-making powers and creating shared accountability are vital in order to work among assorted stakeholders — these are the values to advance open government.
The ‘noticing/sensing’ stage comes at the beginning of the collaboration meetings. This is where citizens place their attention on the day-to-day intake of information such as news, social media, and their own experiences. During these meetings, they then have the opportunity to share their experiences, perspectives and views with the government. PDIS has experimented with Collaborative Meetings to improve communication and collaboration between citizens and civil servants.
What problems appear at the noticing stage?
1. Lack of empathy between different perspectives
People think, act and make decisions differently based on varying sources of information and the ways of consuming them, therefore people establish different perspectives. The people we interact with and the areas we live determine our sources of information. All of us sometimes believe what we would like to believe, instead of searching for other perspectives that are also true, but undiscovered (figure 1).
It’s often called ‘bias’, but that’s not a problem. The reluctance to explore, acknowledge and empathise while not acknowledging our biases — that’s a problem. For example, in Taiwan, civil servants considered it was safer to not mix motorbikes with other vehicles on the improved section of the Suhua Highway, whereas the cyclists thought it would be safer to ride with the motorbikes on the improved section as falling debris on their old route was more dangerous. Both of these views are true.
2. Lack of capability to interpret information constructively
Bias is not just about the information people have. It’s also about how they interpret facts and experiences. Through our work at PDIS, we’ve found civil servants are often incapable of dealing with an overload of information due to lack of time among other duties. This can lead to the misinterpretation of the citizens’ original complaints and thus disrupting the whole process. They then either address the wrong problem or decide not to pursue the thread further.
During Collaborative Meetings, people tend to have conversations at a superficial level — synchronising and correcting information they know — instead of having a substantial and constructive conversation due to diverse perspectives based on what information they consume and their own experiences.
3. Power imbalance
As Marx said, “Only political superstition today imagines that social life must be held together by the state whereas in reality the state is held together by civil life.” People generally believe that power lies in the government, even in democratic societies. Why do people have this perception?
The lack of information is the lack of power. For example, internal meetings within the civil service — and within lobbying organizations — are not made apparent before public consultations. The knock-on effect is everyday citizens are likely to lose their opportunity to prepare and express their arguments better. In an inter-agency context, communication silos and perceived competition in both budget and personnel allocation, power further fragmented communication channels.
What we did
We experimented based on the hypothesis: if we create a space where people have equal opportunities and a willingness to share data and their interpretation of it collectively, then they are more likely to be well-informed and able to make better decisions and actions for all.
We experimented by designing an Issue Mapping digital tool (Alpha) which enables online and offline collaboration with a democratic approach. We found using this tool can help create a shared reality that encourages people to identify facts from diverse perspectives. The tool currently allows POs and PDIS staff to link different related facts such as core problems, current attempts, difficulties, stakeholders, and source links that belong to different social issues together. This is the first step to encourage civil servants across ministries to be transparent about what they know and the reasoning behind their decisions. This is also a step to build trust with citizens. The ‘reality’ of certain issues can then gradually be captured and shared. The Issue Mapper, and Issue Mapping Template are being tested, iterated with civil servants and in the civic tech community. The paper template has now been used for 2 years by civil servants across the ministries before conducting Collaborative Meetings.
Learnings from an early-stage experiment
Encourage empathy among different perspectives
If we commit ourselves to be more patient, thoughtful, and tolerant, we become more capable to seek out the biases that stifled collaboration in the past. Our experiment shows that once citizens can easily visualise a wide range of information, they are capable to reflect and act for the public good. They are supported by a feedback mechanism that allows citizens to deliberate between various perspectives.
Build capability to interpret information constructively
Numerous participants from our Collaborative Meetings have mentioned they find the real-time data visualisation and categorisation of data on our issue mapping board helpful. They find it helps them to be more empathetic and organised while they are sharing their views and experiences. Most of them feel it leads to more constructive discussions.
Balance power structures
Through radical transparency, we can address power imbalances head-on by distributing power and making sure people are well-informed. A new narrative of power is also needed. For example, positive power can come from trust and respect, whilst coercive power can come from inherited social status. PDIS uses ‘sli.do’ in almost every meeting and it allows civil servants from a lower hierarchy to be able to express their opinions anonymously and freely when they are sitting with senior officers.
Next steps
By exploring how to improve collaboration between citizens and government we found there is potential to co-create with our society and its collective wisdom. The Issue Mapper tool provides an opportunity to design based on evidence, measure progress based on raw data, and provide an environment for all to not only have a say, but also have an impact on future democracy and the society we envision.
We are going to use the Issue Mapper digital tool to transform the collaboration activities to be fully online/paper-free and we will also look to greatly reduce the overall time of completion as each ministry will be able to simultaneously input their data. Further to this, a wider goal is for all citizens to be able to contribute online in this way.
Starting from a commitment of openness from the public service, we’ve opened up the opportunity for the public to collaborate with government and inform decisions for the public good.
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Fang-Jui Chang is a designer at Dark Matter Labs, dealing with collaborative system change and a consultant at PDIS working on policy and service co-design.
