This article is written by Gabriella Capone, who drove the launch of GovLab's Crowd.Law and is an organiser of New York Legal Hackers.

Over the past ten years, open government has gone from a niche, wonky idea to the future of innovative policymaking. This has led to a rush for new models of citizen-government interaction that are as varied and exciting as they are numerous.

For what was once a farfetched idea, there is now a veritable library of playbooks to consult: from going digital, to launching an open data program, from implementing foundational open government methods, to bringing citizens into policymaking. Frankly, with so many ways to engage citizens, the question may not be how to engage, but rather which form of engagement to pursue and why.

To understand the power of open government, and what is at stake, we must appreciate what happens when there is a mismatch between what government seeks to achieve and how it engages citizens to that end.

How do you even begin to choose the right model?

For example, Madrid’s public participation platform Decide where citizens post and refine proposals to public issues, could only get two out of 20,000 proposals into a final review phase before coming before the government for approval for action. Had the city and advocates not been proactive and iterative in understanding how to fix this mismatch and channel submissions into action, it would have damaged the confidence of the nearly 30,000 participants on the ambitious platform.

Many public officials are already the ideal advocates for effective citizen engagement, with their institutional knowledge, connection to the community and eye for improvement

Likewise, pursuing citizen engagement simply to appear more open is not enough, and will not provide the framework to build a successful initiative. Crowd-washing, as Professor Beth Noveck and I have called it, focuses on “looking good” rather than on delivering results. Open calls are a fantastic example of this phenomenon: government will solicit ideas for what to work on from the community, and, when faced with thousands of responses, finds that openness requires a plan of action for how to utilise the public input. While novel methods are exciting and catchy, public officials are key to ensuring that such methods are performance-enhancing and not merely performative.

Public servants today have so many different models to choose from that the choice itself can be a challenge: how do you know which model to choose, orienting precious resources in order to achieve a goal?

Rather than focusing on particular models of, or benefits afforded by, openness, this discussion considers the choice of which model and why from the vantage of what the institution is looking to accomplish. The assumption being that if citizen engagement is to be truly effective, that it must meaningfully align with the work and goals of the institution, and not be considered as a satellite effort in open government.

Map the program type to your goal

With an appreciation for the power and pitfall of open government, we turn to how a particular form of openness — citizen engagement and participation — can elevate the work of a team, department, or institution.

Fortunately, many public officials are already the ideal advocates for effective citizen engagement, with their institutional knowledge, connection to the community and eye for improvement. At their disposal is over a decade of extensive practice, research, learning and experimentation in the open government field. Below are four examples of how citizen engagement can be used to deliver on four different public goals in exciting, capacity-enhancing ways.

1. Using engagement to deliver better services

First, engagement can improve service-delivery, providing institutions with critical feedback or information.

For example, Promise Tracker, devised by the MIT Media Lab, is a mobile application and process for Brasileros to track the implementation of policies, ideally towards promoting accountability and community action. Users tracking whether a policy “promise” had been fulfilled, were able to measure and provide feedback on healthy school lunches, towards ultimately ensuring that the final product matched the goal of the policy that provided for the lunches.

This model delivered on-the-ground information to policymakers, providing the direct type of policy outcomes monitoring that institutions may not always have the capacity to implement.

Citizens are more than equipped to engage wicked problems, and there is extensive research in crowd science towards this end

Citizens can bolster institutional information collection using powerful practices that have just as many public dividends to pay as they do in private, high-tech contexts. Air Louisville, a public-private partnership that tackled health-compromising air pollution in the city (among the worst in the United States), attached sensors to the inhalers of residents with respiratory issues to identify hotspots with poor, asthma-inducing air quality. This brought in data that had evaded the city for years, enabling uber-precise targeting to support citizens that needed better air quality most.

In cases where a public service or benefit delivery is sub-optimal, such tracking and feedback measures can help target limited resources towards making the highest bang-for-buck improvements. Further, they can do so based on rich, localised information that enables citizens to productively channel sub-optimal community experiences into real policy action.

2. Using engagement to hone government decisions

Next, engagement can inform government decision-making beyond traditional channels. Perhaps most exciting is CrowdLaw — participatory and tech-enabled law and policymaking — which injects citizen expertise into policymaking processes. Citizens might propose fitting topics for a legislature to address, provide examples and insight to inform the law, and track the implementation (similar to Promise Tracker).

On France’s Parlement et citoyens platform, citizens refine a policy problem, as well as generate and evaluate solutions to it. The consultation process, sponsored by a representative, consists of three to five such participation opportunities resulting in a policy position thanks to citizen-legislator collaboration. The Parlement platform — which could also similarly be executed via virtual town-halls, with strong moderation and participant preparation — shows how officials and legislators can tap localised information and collaboration towards improved policies (as well as community buy-in and transparency).

In addition to providing rich data to governments, these CrowdLaw platforms highlight how citizens can actually engage in policymaking processes, further improving the rationale, implementation and monitoring of government policy.

3. Using engagement to help governments prioritise

Third, it may be the case that an institution seeks input on prioritising the many potential problems it could tackle, or help in understanding the contours of those problems. In this vein, an open-call process that is tailored towards action can help source, understand and prioritise issues top-of-mind to the community.

Madrid developed their Decide platform by institutionalising Observatorio de la Ciudad (“City Observatory”); a citizen body that reviews submissions from the Decide platform for further exploration and, ideally, action. Such a body can both filter community submissions, as well as negotiate further action on them, with a review by the people themselves providing ample political cover to explore thorny issues.

Even in precipitous political environments and cash-strapped contexts, novel engagement models — notably open innovation and public crowdsourcing — can bear out significant benefits if properly aligned to institutional goals and are carefully implemented

Another simple design choice to open call submissions — which can come from a simple survey process and does not require a bespoke platform — is an institutional commitment to review and respond to the submissions it receives. A threshold for signatories on a petition is a similar mechanism here. Relatedly, the commitment of the Polish Citizens’ Assemblies to review proposals with at least 80% support ensures that participation is targeted towards a central prompt and sees government review. In many ways, the anonymity of online platforms is not ideal for such open calls, as it can reduce accountability and opportunities for engagement to learn from citizens on a given issue.

For all of the institutional constraints that public officials face, prioritisation that emanates from the citizenry can pave the way to making difficult choices, and do so knowing that the chosen path resonates with the community.

4. Using engagement to innovate and solve wicked problems

Finally, public problem-solving puts the community to task in solving the most difficult, wicked, politically-impenetrable of problems.

Early efforts in the space are extremely promising, though uptake in this space might be low because of reticence to put resources into difficult issues. Yet, the sheer difficulty of systemic issues, ranging from environmental to inequity in health outcomes, may be the ideal candidates for a new, community-driven approach. For example, in South Australia’s D3 Digital Challenges, interdisciplinary teams generate solutions to a pressing public problem.

Teams then pitch for funding for further development, which can lead to government implementation. Six challenges have been run since 2015 and, on average, one solution per challenge received funding. Four of these were ultimately adopted for government implementation with notable results.

As I’ve highlighted previously, citizens are more than equipped to engage wicked problems, and there is extensive research in crowd science towards this end. Public participation for problem-solving can help achieve all of the above goals and more. These models bring in new information, help to prioritise action, and, uniquely, design creative or even unprecedented solutions to tackle the problem at hand. This model is perhaps the most difficult to execute in terms of citizen-government collaboration but can have extremely high rewards if done properly.

Appreciate the tradeoffs between what exists and what to build

At best, governments can improve citizen trust and generate tangible impact and positive change through substantive participation programs. At worst, poorly-considered initiatives can sow disillusionment within and beyond the walls of government, creating barriers to iterating towards open government practices that are actually effective.

As with any other public program, open government initiatives require careful consideration of resourcing, institutional goals and communal needs. We are at a point where much has been tested, but there is not yet enough evidence to coalesce around a foolproof, one-to-one mapping of a participation model to the varied work of public institutions. This is why now, more than ever, civil servants are the linchpin for translating what is known about citizen engagement from examples around the world into an initiative primed for success in their community.

Even in precipitous political environments and cash-strapped contexts, novel engagement models — notably open innovation and public crowdsourcing — can bear out significant benefits if properly aligned to institutional goals and are carefully implemented. However, truly impactful citizen engagement is an ambitious undertaking that is not without risk, nor is it always the right course of action. Misaligning the program to institutional goals can lead to waste, deferred achievement, political instability and even disillusionment among officials and citizens as to the value of open government.

This is why, rather than focusing on the promise of open government, it is a great opportunity for public officials to bring the same level of rigour, investigation and thoughtfulness into deploying citizen engagement programs as they do to any other pursuit. — Gabriella Capone

(Picture credit: Unsplash)