Building Public Trust in Government through Online Civic Engagement Building Trust Takes Time Trust sprouts when the parties come together in clearly defined roles. It grows as the parties get to know each other and discover shared interests. It blossoms when they realize common goals together. Government sponsored online civic engagement is fertile ground for growing trust. Staff, citizens and elected officials come together -­‐ in many cases for the first time -­‐ to understand each other's roles, to explore shared interests and to realize common goals. Let's examine the roles of each party, and how online civic engagement can bring them together to make great community decisions and build public trust in government. Defining Roles Staff provides facts and proposes options Official decisions do not occur in a vacuum. They are set in a complex framework of laws and regulations at the federal, state and local levels. They are vetted against the budget, the general plan and other initiatives crafted to protect broad public interests. They look more like the labored output of a committee process than brilliant flashes of creative insight. Most citizens, and many elected officials, do not master this complex framework, nor is it their job to do so. This is the job of professional staff, and nowhere is that job more important than in the guidance staff provides during the decision process. Staff crafts the feasible options that focus the community dialog in fact-­‐based productive directions. Citizens participating in fact-­‐based discussions witness the value that staff brings to the decision process. Through staff guidance, citizens know that their time is not wasted discussing irrelevant options that are beyond the local jurisdiction or that © Copyright 2013, Peak Democracy, Inc. Page 1 conflict with the law, the budget or other constraints. For many citizens, this is their first direct experience of the role staff plays in the decision process. Citizens give input Most citizens are too busy with family and work obligations to come down to city hall to participate in community meetings. At the same time, many citizens now expect to conduct every important aspect of their life online -­‐ whether banking, socializing, shopping, learning, working or participating in community decisions. Forward looking local governments are providing their citizens with online opportunities to participate in the decision process. Most citizens are too busy to come to city hall for meetings Online participation is more than just a reaction to citizen demand. It opens the door to broader participation from a more diverse cross section of residents. The voices of the usual few who participate in face-­‐to-­‐face meetings at city hall can now be augmented with input from residents, many of whom are participating for the first time. Elected officials decide Due to legal constraints, elected officials and their appointees generally do not participate in online discussion. Instead, they read the online discussion, treating it as one of several channels for public input that they consider as they deliberate at the end of the decision process. Nevertheless, online civic engagement affords elected officials and their appointees a new opportunity to demonstrate both the challenges they face as well as their commitment to upholding broad public interests. When citizens only hear the opinions of like-­‐minded friends around the kitchen table, they are less likely to hear the variety of input that elected and appointed officials hear. By contrast, when online civic engagement reveals a whole spectrum of public opinions, citizens can more easily appreciate -­‐ sometimes for the first time -­‐ the challenges faced by elected and appointed officials in representing broad public interests. © Copyright 2013, Peak Democracy, Inc. Page 2 Government Sponsored Clicktivism Not all civic engagement websites invite citizens to join staff and elected officials in the official decision process. Some empower a brand of web-­‐based activism called 'clicktivism': online petitions that enable citizens to quickly dominate the decision process through their own social networks. Government sponsored clicktivism has problems. For example, the White House sponsors a site called 'We The People'. Until recently, any petition that gathered more than 25,000 signatures would merit an official response from the White House. Without guidance from professional staff, many of these petitions have been ludicrous. One petition suggested that an Should each of the 50 states select their own Pokemon to represent them? official Pokemon character represent each state. The threshold was recently increased to 100,000 signatures when another petition to build a death star received 34,435 signatures. Clicktivism on serious government issues can be even more problematic. A few local governments have asked residents to vote on an actual agenda item going before a commission or council. Sensing an opportunity to pressure officials, a few activist organizations 'packed city hall' by recruiting several hundred friends and followers to click-­‐up their preferred outcome. In several cases, the decision makers rejected the online vote, and countered by arguing that those participants were less than one percent of the total population and their opinions did not represent broad public interests. Government sponsored clicktivism squanders an opportunity to build public trust in government. Bypassing the official decision process, clicktivism does not promote the interactions between citizens, staff and elected officials that build trust. Even more troubling, in many cases government sponsored clicktivism actually erodes public trust. Many citizens expect the results of the online petition to dictate the final decision. But real decisions are rarely made by clicktivism. Real decisions are usually made through the official decision process involving staff, citizens and elected officials. When the outcome of government sponsored clicktivism does not match the official government decision, citizens can feel betrayed. Anticipating these problems with clicktivism, many local governments have chosen instead to invite residents to participate online in their official decision process. One of them is Salt Lake City. © Copyright 2013, Peak Democracy, Inc. Page 3 Salt Lake City: A Case Study in Building Public Trust In March of 2012, the Salt Lake CityWeekly awarded the Salt Lake City Government the ‘Best E-­‐Government’ award for being “serious about getting the public engaged in every planning and zoning meeting, city-­‐council meeting, public open house, workshop and public hearing possible.” This was a remarkable turnaround from a publication with a long history of being highly critical of the City Government's lack of transparency and responsiveness. The CityWeekly cited Salt Lake City's use of Peak Democracy’s Open City Hall platform as the main reason for the award. In November of 2012, the Center for Digital Government awarded the Digital Cities Survey top award for cities between 125,000 and 249,999 population to Salt Lake City. Underwritten by AT&T, McAfee, ShoreTel and Sprint, the award listed Open City Hall at the top of the City’s accomplishments. Since Salt Lake City launched Open City Hall in July 2010, it has garnered a 94% satisfaction rating from nearly 19,000 online attendees. Salt Lake City has opened almost 100 forums on topics ranging from specific development projects to strategic initiatives from city council. Let's take a close look at a sample topic. Walmart Rezoning In 2011, the City received petitions from Walmart for rezoning and master plan amendments to enable a new building at 2705 E. Parleys Way. Staff launched an Open City Hall topic, introducing it with an overview of the proposal, links to the applications and to the community master plan, and periodic updates of the application process and associated public meetings. The forum was embedded in the official government website to clarify that it was an official government When staff opened the forum to decision process. public comment, they configured it to closely mirror the official public comment process. • Each person was allowed to post one comment (though they were permitted to edit that comment anytime before the deadline). • The forum was monitored for civility (no uncivil comments were found). • Participants were not invited to vote on Walmart's application. • Participants were not invited to vote on other participants' comments. © Copyright 2013, Peak Democracy, Inc. Page 4 •
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Participants were given share buttons to invite their friends to participate in the topic, but not to vote on individual comments. The forum was embedded in the official Salt Lake City government website (to further clarify that residents were participating in the official government decision process). More than 1,000 residents visited the site, and 359 posted comments. The Open City Hall platform provided a series of analytic tools to help decision makers glean insights from these comments. In the interest of transparency, the City provided the same set of tools to the general public. These included a clickable heat map that enabled readers to select comments based on distance from the project. Staff used this extensively in their Council report, which correlated citizen opinion with the citizen's distance from the project. The Council indicated that the To maximize transparency, all readers had analytic tools including heat maps that correlated opinion with distance comments and associated analysis from project were extremely helpful in understanding citizens' opinions. Their 6-­‐1 vote against the proposal was recorded on Open City Hall and emailed to Open City Hall subscribers. More than 62% of the participants were participating for the first time. For many of them, it was their first direct participation in an official decision process -­‐from staff report, to reading other citizens' opinions, to posting their own opinion to receiving the official decision delivered to their inbox. Every single participant expressed an interest in remaining involved by subscribing to receive updates on future Open City Hall topics. © Copyright 2013, Peak Democracy, Inc. Page 5 Measuring Trust Measuring trust is hard. How do we know if online civic engagement builds public trust in government? After an initial interaction, parties that trust each other tend to continue to interact and report a positive experience after their first interaction. Conversely, when trust breaks down, so, generally, does communication, and many report a negative experience. This suggests that we can measure trust by looking at the percentage of users who subscribed to receive updates about the topic, as well as the percentage that report a positive experience. Measures of Trust Percent of users who Reported a positive experience Subscribed to receive updates 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% A careful analysis of the database of participation on 900 Peak Democracy forum topics in 50 towns, cities and counties across the US provides some insight into those metrics – and the results are encouraging. Of the 9,015 users who participated in at least one topic, 82% subscribed to receive updates while 95% reported a positive experience. While not conclusive, this evidence supports the notion that having residents interact with staff and elected officials in an official government decision process builds public trust in government. We look forward to building more. © Copyright 2013, Peak Democracy, Inc. Page 6