Making sure those who have consulted by government (local and national) can know what has happened in response to what they said is important. Far too often groups are disaffected by the lack of feedback after participation processes.
The catch is, change does take a long time. And identifying the impact of this particular consultation on a decision that finally gets made a year later – and then telling everyone who inputted into the consultation about how their views have influenced an outcome (or not) – seems a near impossibility!
But as a contributor to an open source software project I've got access to an online system where: I can track how a call for proposals led to an idea being raised; I can see the initial discussion of that idea; I can see how a dialogue in the developer community decided not to priotise it right away, but to put the issue on hold till after other things were dealt with; I can track how it was then picked up again – combined with another outstanding issue – and assigned to an individual or group to work on more; and then, I can see when the issue is 'closed' – either having led to change, or because it's been decided it can't be pursued any further. I can even get automated e-mail updates on every stage of the process. (If you've not seen a good issue tracking system in action, follow this link through to see one example in action…)
It seems to me that an awful lot of local democracy is about raising issues and 'fixing bugs'. Which leaves me wondering where the local democracy issue trackers is…
seems like an opportunity to propose a trial – be great to set something up with a Parish Council somewhere and see how it works – especially if it could be available for people without home internet access – maybe through kiosks in supermarkets! I do slightly wonder though if the fear of a system like this would be that it would be too easy to make suggestions/requests!! I can imagine a lot of administrators stressing about the worry of having to deal with all that input which would be ironic given most are concerned with the opposite at the mo.
There would be some very interesting statistical stuff available through this – be interesting for example to track the percentage of priority given to young peoples input or to be able to track the take up of proposals put forward from people from particular areas etc. etc.
Thanks for the comments…
I would love to see a pilot of this somewhere…
I could see it being used both ‘internally’ for tracking what the council is already working on – and public facing to allow for direct public input.
It would be interesting to explore the different sorts of ‘workflow’ that different types of idea need. For example, a request for street furniture to be fixed can be dealt with quickly and easily… a request for a change to the street furniture that is provided might need to go through a different channel of debate and discussion…
Well designed – a system like this should increase the transparency of decision making – and help increase public awareness about the different parts of making a local democratic decision.
I love the idea of using stats to track how well the council is listening to different groups by the way… perhaps thats the bit that would be the most scary!
You should try Projistics Bug Tracker as well. It is a pure bug tracking tool and does not have much features for other project management activities.
http://www.projistics.com