Depending upon the scope and scale of the issue, the tractability of the participatory problem and the importance of the policy development process, the establishment of a project team and development of an eEngagement approach can occur quickly, or represent a stand-alone consultative process in its own right.
Exhibit 19: ‘Full Service’ Commercial eEngagement Providers
A number of private firms have begun to offer electronic research and consultation services, including the capacity to provide ‘full service’ provision of electronic consultations from conceptualisation through to implementation.
These providers can be useful where a public organisation may:
- lack the skills needed to undertake planning and implementation;
- be only interested in a one-off process and uninterested in developing organisational skills and infrastructure;
- look to partner with existing providers in the early days of developing eEngagement capabilities to increase their speed of learning; and/or
- be interested in a specific technology provided by a private firm.
Some examples of these types of providers would include:
- Insightrix, an online research and consultation service provider [http://www.insightrix.com/];
- Ezicomms, a provider of handheld devices which allow for interactive ‘town hall’ meetings [http://www.ezicomms.com/];
- BigPulse, a provider of ‘online opinion markets’ [http://www.bigpulse.com/];
- Securevote, a specialist provider of secure online voting systems [http://www.securevote.com.au/];
- Everyone Counts, a company that develops and provides online surveys, polls and elections [http://www.everyonecounts.com/];
- National Forum, a non-profit organisation with experience in developing interactive websites for government and political organisations [http://portal.nationalforum.com.au/]; and
- Social Change Online, another non-profit organisation that develops web-based services and provides moderation staff for public enterprises [http://online.socialchange.net.au/].
The combination of: (a) a relatively simple or straightforward policy issue, and (b) a clear fit between a target audience and particular channel, may encourage a relatively rapid concept development process. However, the establishment of any eEngagement process requires lateral and creative thinking in order to anticipate and consider the range of alternative approaches. The tendency for some online consultation and democracy projects to overemphasise available tool sets can sometimes lead to a process driven by available technologies, at the expense of approaches that might yield a better outcome.
Examples of concept development approaches (from the simple to the highly complex) include:
|
Issue |
Discover |
Invent |
Evaluate |
Survey |
|
‘How does the organisation respond to the community?’ (benchmarking current performance) |
(intensive brain-storming and idea generation) |
|||
|
Time → |
||||
a Adapted from: Vivian, Raelene 2004, Elements of Good Government Community Collaboration, Discussion paper no. 2, Australian Government Information Management Office, Canberra, <http://www.agimo.gov.au/publications/2004/05/egovt_challenges/community/collaboration>