I’m cross-posting this from a deep-dive series of working drafts I’ve been developing for The Open Data Institute, providing ground work for exploring potential future developments that could support data portals and platforms to function better as tools of civic participation. It provides a general history of the development of citizen participation, primarily in the UK context, that I hope may be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog, as well as setting this in the context of data portals as participation tools (possibly more of a niche interest..). You can find the full series of posts which talk a lot more about data portals, here.

A key cause of data portal dissatisfaction is the apparent failure of portals to provide effective platforms for citizen participation in government and governance. The supposed promise of portals to act as participatory platforms can be read into the 2009 Obama Open Government Memo on transparent, participatory and collaborative government, and the launch of data.gov.uk amongst the hackathons and experiments with online engagement that surrounded the Power of Information report and taskforce. Popular portal maturity models have envisioned them evolving to become participatory platforms [1] [2] and whilst some work has acknowledged that there are different forms of participatory engagement with the state, ranging from monitorial democracy, to the co-production of public services [3], the mechanisms by which portals can help drive participation, and the forms of participation in focus, have been frequently under-theorised.

In the current policy landscape, there is a renewed interest in some forms of participatory engagement. Citizens assemblies, deliberative fora, and other forms of mini-public are being widely adopted as ways to find or legitimate ways forward on thorny and complex issues. Amidst concerns about public trust, democratic control, and embedded biases, there are calls for participatory processes to surround the design and deployment of algorithmic systems in particular [4], creating new pressure on participatory methods to engage effectively with data. However, public participation has a long history, and these latest trends represent just one facet of the kinds of processes and modes of engagement we need to have in mind when considering the role of data portals in supporting citizen engagement. In this short piece I want to briefly survey the history of public participation, and to identify potential insights for the development of data portals as a support for participatory processes. My focus here is primarily on the UK landscape, although I’ll try and draw upon wider global examples where relevant.

A short history of citizen participation

In the blog post ‘A brief history of participation’, historian Jo Guldi explores the roots of participatory governance ideas, tracing them as far back as the early mediaeval church, and articulating ideas of participatory governance as a reaction to the centralised bureaucracies of the modern nation state. Guldi points to the emergence of “a holistic political theory of self-rule applicable to urban planning and administration of everyday life” emerging in the 1960s, driven by mass youth movements, mass media, and new more inclusive notions of citizenship in an era of emerging civil rights. In essence, as the franchise, and education, expanded, default models of ‘elite governance’ came to be challenged by the idea that the public should have a greater voice in day to day decision making, if not greater direct ownership and control of public authority.

In Guldi’s global narrative, the emphasis of the 1970s and 80s was then on applying participatory ideas within the field of International Development, particularly participatory mapping – in which marginalised citizens are empowered to construct their own maps of territory: in a sense creating counter-data to secure land rights, and protect customary resources from logging or other incursions. Guldi points in particular to the role of institutions such as the World Bank in promoting participatory development practises, a theme also found in Leal’s ‘Participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era’ [5]. Leal highlights how, although participatory methods have their roots in the emancipatory pedagogy of Paulo Friere and in Participatory Action Research, which aims at a transformation of individual capabilities alongside wider cultural, political and economic structures – the adoption of participation as a tool in development can act in practice as a tool of co-option: depoliticising critical decisions and offering participants only the option to modify, rather than fundamentally challenge, directions of development. Sherry Arnstein’s seminal ‘A ladder of citizen participation’ article [6], published in 1969 in an urban planning journal, has provided a reliable lens for asking whether participation in practice constitutes decoration, tokenism, or genuine citizen power.

In the UK, whilst radical participatory theory influenced grassroots community development work throughout the 1980s, it was with the election of the New Labour Government in 1997 that participation gained significant profile in mainstream policy-making: with major initiatives around devolution, the ‘duty to consult’, and an explosion of interest in participatory methods and initiatives. Fenwick and McMillan describe participation for New Labour as ‘something at the heart of the guiding philosophy of government’, framed in part as a reaction to the consumer-oriented marketised approach to public management of the Thatcher era.  Yet, they also highlight a tension between an ideological commitment to participation, and a managerial approach to policy that sought to also ‘manage’ participation and its outcomes. Over this period, a particular emphasis was placed on participation in local governance, leading top-down participation agendas to meet with grassroots communities and community development practices that had been forged through, and often in opposition to, recent decades of Conservative rule. At its best, this connection of participatory skill with space to apply it provided space for more radical experiments with community power. At its worst, and increasingly over time, it led to co-option of independent community actors within state-directed participation: leading ultimately to a significant loss of both state-managed and community-driven participatory practice when the ‘era of austerity’ arrived in 2010.

The 2000s saw a proliferation of guides, handbooks and resources (e.g.) outlining different methods for citizen participation: from consultation, to participatory budgeting, citizens panels, appreciative inquiries, participatory research, and youth fora. Digital tools were initially seen broadly as another ‘method’ of participation, although over time understanding (albeit still relatively limited) has developed of how to integrate digital platforms as part of wider participatory processes – and as digital development has become more central in policy making, user-involvement methodologies from software development have to be critically considered as part of the citizen participation toolbox. Concepts of co-production, co-design and user-involvement in service design have also increasingly provided a link-point between trends in digital development and citizen participation.

Looking at the citizen participation landscape in 2021, two related models appear to be particularly prominent: deliberative dialogues, and citizens assemblies. Both are predicated on bringing together broadly representative groups of citizens, and providing them with ‘expert input’, generally through workshop-based processes, and encouraging deliberation to inform policy, or to generate recommendations from an assembly. Notably, deliberative methods have been adopted particularly in relation to science and technology, seen as a way to secure public trust in emerging scientific or technological practice, including data sharing, AI and use of algorithmic systems. Whilst deliberative workshops and citizens assemblies are by no means the only participatory methods in use in 2021, they are notable for their reliance on expert input: although the extent to which direct access to data features in any of these processes is perhaps a topic for further research.

By right, or by results

Before I turn to look specifically at the intersection of data and participation, it is useful to briefly remark on two distinct lines of argument for participation: values or rights-based, vs. results based.

The rights-based approach can be found both in theories of participatory democracy that argue democratic mandate is not passed periodically from voters to representatives, but is constantly renewed through participatory activities engaging broad groups of citizens, and in human-rights frameworks, including notably the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which establishes children’s rights to appropriate participation in all decisions that affect them. Guidance on realising participation rights adopted in 2018 by the UN Human Rights Council explicitly makes a link with access to information rights, including proactive disclosure of information, efforts to make this accessible to marginalised groups, and independent oversight mechanisms.

A results-based approach to citizen participation is based on the idea that citizen engagement leads to better outcomes: including supporting more efficient and effective delivery of public services, securing greater citizen trust in the decisions that are made, or reducing the likelihood of decisions being challenged. Whilst some user and human-centred design methodologies may make reference to rights-based justifications for inclusion of often marginalised stakeholders, in general, these approaches are rooted more in a result-based than a rights-based framework: in short, many firms and government agencies have discovered projects have greater chance of success when you adopt consultative and participatory design approaches.

Participation, technology and data

Although there have been experiments with online participation since the earliest days of computer mediated communication, the rise of Web 2.0 brought with it substantial new interest in online platforms as tools of citizen engagement: both enabling insights to be gathered from existing online social spaces and digital traces, and supporting more emergent, ad-hoc or streamlined modes of co-creation, co-production, or simply communication with the state (as, for example, in MySociety’s online tools to write to public representatives, or report street scene issues in need of repair). There was also a shift to cast the private sector as a third stakeholder group within participatory processes – primarily framed as originator of ideas, but also potentially as the target of participation-derived messages. As the Open Government Partnership’s declaration puts it, states would “commit to creating mechanisms to enable greater collaboration between governments and civil society organizations and businesses.”

With rising interest in open data, a number of new modes and theories of participation came to the fore: the hackathon [7][8][9], the idea of the armchair auditor [10], and the idea of ‘government as a platform’ [11][12] each invoke particular visions of citizen-state and private-sector engagement.

A focus in some areas of government on bringing in greater service-design approaches, and rhetoric, if not realities, of data-driven decision making have also created new spaces for particular forms of participatory process, albeit state-initiated, rather than citizen created. And recent discussions around data portals and citizen participation have often centred on the question of how to get citizens to engage more with data, rather than how data can support existing or potential topic-focussed public participation.

In my 2010 MSc thesis on ‘Open Data, Democracy & Public Sector reform: open government data use from data.gov.uk’ I developed an initial typology of civic Open Government Data uses, based on a distinction between formal political participation (representative democracy), collaborative/community based participation (i.e. participatory democracy or utility-based engagement), and market participation (i.e. citizen as consumer). In this model, the role data plays, and the mechanisms it works through, vary substantially: from data being used through media to inform citizen scrutiny of government, and ultimately discipline political action through voting; to data enabling citizens to collaborate in service design, or independent problem solving beyond the state; and to the consumer-citizen driving change through better informed choices of access to public services. In other words, greater access to data theoretically enables a host of different genres of participation (albeit there’s a normative question over how meaningful or equitable each of these different forms of participation are) – and many of these do not rely on the state hosting or convening the participation process.

What is notable about each of these ‘mechanisms of change’ is that data accessed from a portal is just one component of a wider process: be that the electoral process in its entirety, a co-design initiative at the community level, or some national market-mechanism supported by intermediaries translating ‘raw data’ into more accessible information that can drive decisions over which hospital to use, or which school to choose for a child. However, whilst many participatory initiatives have suffered in an era of austerity, and enthusiasm for the web as an open agora for public debate has waned in light of a more hostile social media environment, portals have persisted as a primary expression of the ‘open government’ era: leaving considerable pressure placed upon the portal to deliver not only transparency, but also participation and collaboration too.

Citizen participation and data portals

What can we take from this brief survey of citizen participation when it comes to thinking about the role of data portals?

Firstly, the idea that portals as technical platforms can meaningfully ‘host’ participation in its entirety appears more or less a dead-end. Participation takes many varied forms, and whilst portals might be designed (and organisationally supported) in ways that position them as part of participatory democracy, they should not be the destination.

Secondly, different methods of citizen participation have different needs. Some require access to simple granular ‘facts’ to equalise the balance of power between citizen and state. Others look for access to data that can support deep research to understand problems, or experimental prototyping to develop solutions. Whilst in the former case, quick search and discovery of individual data-points is likely to be the priority, in these latter cases, greater understanding of the context of a dataset is likely to be particularly valuable, as would, in many cases, the ability to be in contact with a datasets’ steward.

Third, the current deliberative wave appears as likely to have data as its subject (or at least, the use of data in AI, algorithmic systems or other policy tools), as it is to use open data as an input to deliberation. This raises interesting possibilities for portals to surface and support great deliberation around how data is collected and used, as a precursor to supporting more effective use of that data to drive policy making.

Fourth, citizen participation has rarely been a ‘mass’ phenomena. Various research suggest that at any time less than 10% of the population are engaged in any meaningful form of civic participation, and only a percentage of these are likely to be involved in forms of engagement that are particularly likely to benefit from data. Portals should not carry the burden of solving a participation deficit, but there may be avenues to design them such that they connect with a wider group of active citizens than their current data-focussed constituency.

Fifth, and finally, citizen participation is not invented with the portal – and we need to be conscious of both the long history, and contested conceptualisations, of citizen participation. The government portal that seeks to add participatory features is unlikely to be able to escape the charge that it is seeking to ‘manage’ participation processes: although independently created or curated portals may be able to align with more bottom-up community participation action and operate within a more emancipatory, Frierian notion. Both data, and participation, are, after all, about power. And given power is generally always contested, the configuration of portals as a participatory tool may be similarly so.

[Summary: notes for a workshop on local democracy and open data]

At the Local Democracy for Everyone (#notInWestminister) workshop in Huddersfield today I led a session titled ‘20 ways to connect open data and local democracy‘. Below is the list of ideas we started the workshop with

In the workshop we explored how these, and other approaches, could be used to respond to priority local issues, from investing funds in environmental projects, to shaping local planning processes, and dealing with nuisance pigeons.

Graphic recording from break-out session by [@Jargonautical](http://www.twitter.com/jargonautical]

There is more to do to re-imagine how local open data should work, but the conversations today offered an interesting start.

1. Practice open data engagement

Data portals can be very impersonal things. But behind every dataset is a council officer or a team working to collect, manage and use the data. Putting a human face on datasets, linking them to the policy areas they affect, and referencing datasets from reports that draw upon them can all help put data in context and make it more engaging.

The Five Stars of Open Data Engagement provides a model for stepping up engagement activities, from providing better and more social meta-data, through to hosting regular office-hours and drop-in sessions to help the local community understand and use data better.

2. Showing the council contribution

A lot of the datasets required by the Local Government Transparency Code are about the cost of services. What information and data is needed to complete the picture and to show the impact of services and spending?

The Caring for my Neighbourhood project in Sao Paulo looked to geocode government budget and spending data, to understand where funds were flowing, and have opened up a conversation with government about how to collected data in ways that make connecting budget data and its impacts easier in future.

Local government in the UK has access to a rich set of service taxonomies which could be used to link together data on staff salaries, contracts and spending, with stats and stories on the service they provide and their performance. Finding ways to make this full picture accesssible and easy to digest can provide the foundation for more informed local dialogue.

3. Open Data Discourses

In Massachussetts the Open Data Discourse project has been developing the idea of data challenges: based not just one app-building, but also on using data to create policy ideas that can address an identified local challenge.

For Cambridge, Mass, the focus for the first challenge in fall 2014 was on pedestrian, bicycle, and car accidents in the City. Data on accidents was provided, and accesed over 2,000 times in a six-week challenge period. The challenge resulted in eight submissions “that addressed policy-relevant issues such as how to format traffic accident data to enable trend analysis across the river into Boston, or how to reduce accidents and encourage cycling by having a parked car buffer.”

The challenge processes culminated in a friday evening meeting that brought together community members who had worked on challenge ideas, with councillors and representatives of the local authority, to showcase the solutions and provide an award for a winning idea.

4. Focus on small data

There’s a lot of talk out there about ‘big data’ and how big data analytics can revolutionise government. But many of the datasets that matter are small data: spreadsheets created by an officer, or records held by community groups in various structures and formats.

Rahul Bhargava defines small data as:

“the thing that community groups have always used to do their work better in a few ways:

• Evaluate: Groups use Small Data to evaluate programs so they can improve them
• Communicate: Groups use Small Data to communicate about their programs and topics with the public and the communities they serve
• Advocate: Groups use Small Data to make evidence-based arguments to those in power”

Simple steps to share and work with small data can make a big difference: and keep citizens rather than algorythms in control.

5. Tactile data and data murals

The Data Therapy project has been exploring a range of ways to make data more tactile: from laser-cutting food security information into vegetables to running ‘low tech data’ workshops that use pipe-cleaners, lego and crayons to explore representations of data about a local community.

Turning complex comparisons and numbers into physical artefacts, and finding the stories inside the statitics can offer communities a way into data-informed dialogue, without introducing lots of alienating graphs and numbers.

The Data Therapy project’s data murals connect discussions of data with traditional community arts practice: painting large scale artworks that represent a community interpretation of local data and information.

6. Data-driven art

The Open Data Institute’s Data as Culture project has run a series of data art commissions: leading to a number of data-driven art works that bring real-time data flows into the physical environment. In 2011 Bristol City Council commissioned a set of art works, ‘Invisible Airs‘ that included a device stabbing books in response to library cuts, and a spud gun triggered by spending records.

Alongside these political art works that add an explicit emotional dimension to public data, low-cost network connected devices can also be used to make art that passively informs – introducing indicators that show the state of local data into public space.

7. Citizen science

Not all the data that matters to local decision making comes from government. Citizens can create their own data, via crowdsourcing and via citizen-science approaches to data collection.

The Public Lab describes itself as a ‘DIY Environmental Science Community’ and provides How To information on how citizens groups can build their own sensors or tools for everything from arial mapping to water quality monitoring. Rather than ‘smart cities’ that centralise data from sensor networks, citizen science offers space for a collaboration between government and communities – creating smart citizens who can collect and make sense of data alongside local officials.

In China, citizens started their own home water quality testing to call for government to recognise and address clean water problems.

8. Data dives & hackathons

DataKind works to bring together expert analysts with social-sector organisations that have data in order to look for trends and insights. Modelled on a hackathon, where activity takes place over an intense day or weekend of work, DataDives can generate new findings, new ideas about hwo to use data, and new networks for the local authority to draw upon.

Unlike a hackathon where the focus is often on developing a technical app or innovation and where programme skill is often a pre-requisite, a Data Dive might be based around answering a particular question, or around finding what data means to multi-disciplinary teams.

It is possible to design inclusive hackathons which connect up the lived experience of communities with digital skills from inside and outside the community. The Hackathon FAQ explores some of the common pitfals of holding a civic hackathons: encouraging critical thought about whether prizes and other common features are likely to incentivise contributions, or distort the kinds of team building and collaboration wanted in a civic setting.

9. Contextualised consultation

Too often local consultations ask questions without providing citizens with the information they might need to explore and form their opinions. For example, a online consultation on green spaces, simply by asking for the Ward or Postcode of a respondent, could provide tailored information (and questions) about the current green spaces nearby.

Live open data feedback on the demographics and diversity of consultation respondents could also play a role in incentivising people to take part to ensure their views are represented.

It’s important though not to make too many assumptions when providing contextualised data: a respondent might care about the context near where their parents or children live, as much as their own for example – and so interfaces should offer the ability to look at data around areas other than your home.

10. Adopt a dataset

When it snows in America, Fire Hydrants on the street can get frozen under the ice, and so its important to dig them out after snowfall. However, the council don’t have resources to always get to all the hydrants in time. Code for America found an ingenious solution, taking an open dataset of fire hydrants, and creating a campaign for people to ‘Adopt a Hydrant‘, committing to dig it out when the blizzards come. They combined data with a social layer.

The same approach could work for many other community assets, but it could also work for datasets. Which dataset could be co-created with the community? Could walkers help adopt footpath data and help keep it updated? Could the local bus user group adopt data on accessibility of public tranport roots, helping keep it updated?

The relationships created around a data quality feedback loop might also become important relationships for improving the services that the data describes. ?

11. Data-rich press releases

Local authorities are used to putting out press releases, often with selected statistics in. But how can those releases also contain links to key datasets, and even interactive assets that journalists and the public can draw upon to dig deeper into the data.

Data visualisation expert David McCandless has argued that interactivity plays an important role in allowing people to explore structured data and information, and to turn it into knowledge. The Guardian Data Blog has shown how engaging information can be created from datasets. Whilst the Data Journalism Handbook offers some pointers for journalists (and local bloggers) to get started with data, many local newspapers don’t have the dedicated data-desks of big media houses – so the more the authority can do to provide data in ready-to-reuse forms, the more it can be turned into a resource to support local debate.

12. URLs for everything – with a call to action

Which is more likely to turn up on Twitter and get clicked on:

“What do you think of new cycle track policy? Look on page 23, paragraph 2 or report at bottom of this page: http://localcouncil.gov/reports/1234”? or

“What do you think of new cycle track policy? http://localcouncil.gov/policy/ab12”

Far too often the important information citizens might want might be online, but is burried away in documents or provided in ways that are impossible to link to.

When any proposal, policy, decision or transaction gets a permenant URL (web address) it can become a social object: something people can talk about on twitter and facebook and in other spaces.

For Linked Data advocates, giving everything in a dataset its own URL plays an important role in machine-to-machine communication, but it also plays a really important role in human communication. Think about how visitors to a data item might also be offered a ‘call to action’, whether it’s to report concerns about a spending transaction, or volunteer to get involved in events at a park represented by a data item.

13. Participatory budgeting – with real data

What can £5000 buy you? How much does it cost to run a local carnival? Or a swimming pool? Or to provide improved social care? Or cycle lanes? Answers to these questions might exist inside spending data – but often when participatory budgeting activities take place the information needed to work out what kinds of options may be affordable only comes into the picture late in the process.

Open Spending, the World Bank, NESTA and the Finish Institute have all explored how open data could change the participatory budgeting process – although as yet there have been few experiments to really explore the possibilities.

14. Who owns it?

Kirlees Council have put together the ‘Who Owns My Neighbourhood?’ site to let residents explore land holdings and to “help take responsibility for land, buildings and activities in your neighbourhood”. Similar sites, with the goal of improving how land is used and addressing the problem of vacant lots, are cropping up across American cities.

These tools can enable citizens to identify land and government assets that could be better used by the community: but unchecked they may also risk giving more power to wealthy property speculators as a widely cited case study from Bangalore has warned.

15. Social audits

In many parts of the developing world, particularly across India, the Social Audit is an important process, focussed on “reviewing official records and determining whether state reported expenditures reflect the actual monies spent on the ground” (Aiyar & Samji, 2009).

Social Audits involve citizens groups trained up to look at records and ‘ground truth’ whether or not resources have been used in the way authorities say. Crucially, Social Audits culminate in public hearings: meetings where the findings are presented and discussed.

Models of citizen-led investigation, followed by formal public meetings, are also a feature of the London Citizens community organising approach, where citizens assemblies put community views to people in power. How could key local datasets form part of an evidence gathering audit process, whether facilitated by local government or led by independent community organisations?

16. Geofenced bylaws, licenses and regulations: building the data layer of the local authority

After seeing some of the projects to open up the legal codes of US cities I started where I would find out about the Byelaws in my home town of Oxford. As the page on the City Council website that hosts them explaines: “Byelaws generally require something to be done – or not done – in a particular location.”. Unfortunately, in Oxford, what is required to be done, and where is locked up inside scanned PDFs of typewritten minutes.

There are all sorts of local rules and regulations, licenses and other information that authorities issue which is tied to a particular geographic location: yet this is rarely a layer in the Geographic Information Systems that authorities use. How might geocoding this data, or even making it available through geofencing apps help citizens to navigate, explore and debate the rules that shape their local places.?

17. Conversations around the contracts pipeline?

The Open Contracting project is calling for transparency and participation in public contracting. As part of the UK Local Government Transparency Code authorities have to publish the contracts they have entered into – but publishing the contract pipeline and planned procurement offers an important opportunity to work out if there are fresh ideas or important insights that could shape how funds are spent.

The Open Contracting Data Standard provides a way of sharing a flow of data about the early stages of a contracting process. Combine that information with a call to action, and a space for conversation, and there are ways to get citizens shaping tenders and the selection of suppliers.

18. Participatory planning: visualising the impacts of decisions

What data should a local authority ask developers submitting planning applications to provide?

For many developments there might be detailed CAD models available which could be shared and explored in mapping software to support a more informed conversation about proposed building projects. ?

19. Stats that matter

?Local authorities often conduct one-off surveys and data collection excercises. These are a vital opportunity to build up an understanding of the local area. What opportunities are there to work in partnership with local community groups to identify the important questions that they want to ask? How can local government and community groups collaborate to collect actionable stats that matter: pooling needs, and even resources, to get the best sample and the best depth of insight?

20. Spreadsheet scorecards and dashboards

Dig deep enough in most local organisations and you will find one or more ‘super spreadsheets’ that capture and analyse key statistics and performance indicators. Many more people can easily pick up the skills to create a spreadsheet scorecard than can become overnight app developers.

Google Docs spreadsheets can pick up data live from the web. What dashboards might a local councillor want? Or a local residents association? What information would make them better able to do their job?