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As a marketer I find the internet a dream channel for monitoring customer sentiment and concerns.
Social media and search engines can be easily and cheaply tracked to provide fast feedback on various initiatives. This helps organisations shape their campaigns and responses to external events.
I'd recommend that this is equally of enormous value to government, where perception and citizen sentiment can strongly influence political views and processes.
If your department isn't keeping an eye on what people are saying about you and your key topic areas (and Minister) online, then you may be missing an enormous opportunity to get early warnings on potential growing issues, to adjust campaigns and programs to take advantage of trends or to tap into popular sentiment to shape new ideas.
One example of effective use of social media monitoring is from the US Army, who closely monitor blogs and social networking sites to track the public response to various events.
The article, Air Force checked blogs, Twitter to gauge New Yorkers' anger about flyover, from NextGov, discusses how the US Army used online monitoring to track and respond to the public anger resulting from their fly-over of New York in April.
Within an hour of the flyover the Army knew it had the makings of a public relations disaster on its hands and was able to begin putting in place a response.
The Army has also used the learnings from this experience to educate further activities and use online media to ensure that citizens are receiving the facts about events.
This type of approach has many applications across government, from emergency management through to reviewing the response and level of accurate coverage of ministerial announcements.
So if you're not yet using the online channel to track citizen sentiment you may be doing your department and Minister a disservice.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Do you monitor social media conversations about your department? | Tweet |
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
eGovernment Resource Centre launches eGovernment Forum | Tweet |
Victoria's eGovernment Resource Centre has launched an eGovernment Forum to support the online discussion of eGovernment topics by Australian public servants and interested parties.
At discussed at the site, the eGovernment Forum invites,
open participation and diverse viewpoints to be shared with others relevant to the topic of eGovernment, Government 2.0, Web 2.0, Government website best practice and related disciplines.The forum can only be posted to by registered members, however posts are visible to the general public.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
New Zealand online consultation on student loans | Tweet |
The New Zealand's Inland Revenue department has launched an online consultation around proposed changes to student loans - with the main topic being around totally web-enabling the process for managing student loan accounts.
The consultation is at studentloanforum.taxpolicy.ird.govt.nz and might be a useful example for other government departments who might be considering online consultation.
The comments made are visible within the forum once logged in - which may be a useful way for other jurisdictions looking at student loans to also gather ideas.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Global Intranet report found that organizations without a 2.0 strategy risk outright failure | Tweet |
Prescient Digital have released the results of their Intranet 2.0 Global Survey, reporting that organisation without a 2.0 strategy risks being left behind, or outright failing.
The survey, with 561 responses globally (13% from government), found that Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in North America, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand.
Toby Ward, CEO of Prescient Digital Media & author of the Intranet Global Survey said in a press release that,
“Employees want to work for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0 environments from employers of choice.”
The survey found that organisations that had deployed Intranet 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs and forums had spent very little doing so, with 46% having spent less than US$10,000 and only 19% having spent US$100,000 or more.
A summary of the Global Intranet 2.0 report is available freely online.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Government 2.0 initiatives in Australia Part 2 (Public Sphere Camp series) | Tweet |
Following on from my post on Wednesday, below are some of the federal and non-government initiatives in the Government 2.0 space.
Federal
ABS CData
The Australian Bureau of Statistics is responsible for collecting and providing access to a large proportion of data collected by government in Australia.
Before the internet the reports produced by the ABS were available on paper, floppy disk or CD to help business and other government agencies understand and manage the changes occurring in Australia.
With the arrival of the internet the ABS took its data online, providing downloadable data tables as well as reports, initially at a cost but finally free.
Recently the ABS took the next few steps, introducing Creative Commons licensing to permit greater flexibility in the reuse of its data and launching the CData system, which allows individuals and organisations to delve deeper into the ABS's census data, creating and customising their own data tables for viewing online or free download.
The system is a large step towards totally automating machine readable government data and making it freely available for reuse. While only census data is available at present, it would not be an overwhelming challenge to expand the data sets over time, providing employment, economic activity, industry and other subsets.
Openly accessible machine-readable data is one of the most commonly cited government 2.0 characteristic as it supports government openness while stimulating innovation. The ABS's efforts are a giant step in supporting Australia in achieving these goals.
ABS BetaWorks
One of the hardest steps for any organisation to take is to expose some of its inner decision-making processes to external scrutiny. However that is what the ABS has done with BetaWorks.
ABS BetaWorks is a collaborative design site the ABS is now using to support the ongoing development of the ABS website. The site contains a selection of the projects the ABS is considering, or has underway, and encourages visitors to participate by providing their thoughts, suggestions and ideas for how the ABS could improve various website features.
While not fully collaborative - as you cannot hold conversations through the site in anything approaching real time - the comment approach helps the ABS build a better picture of how people use their site and would like to see features developed. This in turn helps the ABS better serve it's customers.
Non-government
Government 2.0 initiaitives are not limited to being created by governments. In many instances independent individuals and organisations are also creating online services that support the government 2.0 approach.
OpenAustralia
A particularly good example is the OpenAustralia site which replicates the Hansard record for Federal government in a much easier to read, search and comment format. This allows people to subscribe to receive email notices when a particular MP speaks or to make comments on specific debates for others to reflect on.
The site also includes the register of members' interests - which previously was only available on paper from a specific office in Canberra. Not many people had the inclination to travel to Canberra to view this list - or even knew how to access it - so placing it online has enormous utility for citizens who wish to know a little more about their parliamentary members.
The site, similar to the UK site it was based on, lowers the barriers for citizens to scrutinise parliamentary debates and increases their ability to learn about specific MPs, effectively raising the transparency in our democracy.
It also has been supportive in identifying inaccuracies in the official Hansard record, as noted in News.com.au's article Open Australia highlights parliamentary errors.
Open Forum
Open Forum is a platform for presenting information and discussions around political topics.
It supports a blog mechanism, used by many politicians, which provides a way for them to provide their thoughts and insights without the filter of the media. It also provides an online forum, or bulletin board, feature which allows community discussion on specific topics, such as on human rights.
By providing an independent venue for discussion outside of government control, Open Forum is an important site for enabling online democratic conversations across Australia.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Department of Broadband consulting teens and pre-teens online | Tweet |
Around four weeks ago the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) launched its first online consultation with 11-17 year old children on the topic of Cyberbullying.
Announced via the Australian Labour Party's website back on 4 May, Youth to advise on cyber-bullying and cyber-threats, the consultation involves 15 schools and 305 students from across Australia in a secure moderated forum.
I haven't seen this consultation get much attention from the media or across various government sources, which is an enormous shame given how groundbreaking this work is for Australia.
If the Australian government is now able to consult minors online, surely we're able to establish online consultative forums for other groups in the community.
Hopefully a case study on this consultation will be released and provide other departments with details on how the DBCDE has gone about securing and moderating the forum.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Australian Government launches Human Rights Online Consultation by forum | Tweet |
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) has launched an online forum allowing Australians to provide their views and ask questions about human rights in Australia.
Hosted by Open Forum, the discussion forum is open until Friday 26 June 2009.
29/05/09
CORRECTION: Per the comment from Leon below, this discussion forum is not being operated by the Australian Human Rights Commission (former HREOC), it is being operated by the National Human Rights Consultation.
Monday, March 23, 2009
US Business.gov launches small business community | Tweet |
The US business.gov website has launched an online community for small business owners, providing a place where they can discuss business-related issues across a range of topics.
While there is a slant towards topics related to business engagement with government - from registration processes through to how to successfully do business with government, the topics are far broader as US small businesses discuss the current business environment, their planning processes and procurement strategies.
I see this as a very valuable public good for a government to provide for small businesses. A government can provide a fair and effectively moderated environment, without commercial bias. This supports smaller businesses in expanding their network of contacts, building their knowledge and sharing experiences to reinforce the individual commitments of owners to success.
Besides the benefits in helping small business to grow, thereby employing more people and expanding the economic basis of a country, there are benefits to a government in having a close finger on the pulse of one of the largest contributors to national economic growth.
Rather than relying on business 'interest groups' and peak bodies, who may on occasion not fully represent the diverse interests of their members, a government can form a broader view of the outlook of businesses, gauging sentiment and identifying blockers to growth which could be addressed in legislation or policy.
It also provides access to a group able to critique proposed policies and initiatives, to help fine-tune them to deliver greater value - therefore greater return on investments from the public purse.
The benefits above to business (or communities) and to governments is not limited to this particular segment of the community.
Online communities form around interests - from child care to transport - and can be tapped into or facilitated by government to inform and support policy creation, service delivery, communications and consultations. Effectively they are 'aggregators' which can be used to both build discussion and to improve awareness of services.
They can also provide a 'blackberry' for politicians to keep touch with their constituents where otherwise they may become isolated from market concerns due to workload and minding.
Note that it is not easy to build a community from scratch and often government is best served in participating with existing communities rather than trying to create its own, however there are circumstances where government is best placed as the facilitator rather than simply as an involved party.
Monday, January 19, 2009
A place to start for those totally new to Web 2.0 | Tweet |
A great resource has been released via the Public Works Group to support people totally new to the concepts of Web 2.0 or social media.
Named, Your Social Media Journey Starts Here, the publication provides a basic guide to the latest online trends and how people are using the web to achieve their business and community goals.
Written by a public servant, it has very useful information for anyone in the public or private sector trying to get an understanding on online media.
The publication has been released under a Creative Commons copyright, meaning that you can modify it for use within your own workplace provided the author, Pam Broviak, is credited.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Selecting the right online tools for community consultation | Tweet |
The International Association for Public Participation has developed a Community Engagement Spectrum (PDF) to assist public servants in selecting the right approaches to use in different forms of public engagement.
The Online Community Consultation blog has built on this, with a post, Which Online Tools are Right for your Project? detailing a chart of some of the online tools that can be used for different forms of community engagement.
While the post is slanted towards the features in 'Bang the table' it's still a useful guide as to which online tools are best used for particular engagement needs.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Involved in eProcurement? European eprocurement forum looking to build international ties | Tweet |
The European eProcurement forum (an initiative supported by the European Commission) is seeking to build international ties to improve its understanding and build collective knowledge about what is occuring in the eprocurement field, what works and what doesn't work in different jurisdictions around the world.
If you're involved or interested in eprocurement, check them out at the eProcurement Forum community.
Also of interest is the new eProcurement Map released by the forum, which is a map of activities having an impact on the development of European interoperable eProcurement solutions.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Small steps into online consultation for government | Tweet |
It can be a challenge for government agencies to get the level of buyin required to build or buy the infrastructure required for online consultation.
Questions get asked at senior levels around security and privacy, the risk of consultations being hijacked, the level of resourcing required, the concern about publicly getting few (relevant)responses or contrarywise the risk of getting to many and the risk of excluding groups who do not have access to the Internet.
Plus there may be resistance from IT, limited understanding of the medium (which gives rise to many of the earlier concerns) and the education curve required to lift senior executives to an appropriate level of understanding to feel comfortable with initiatives.
However there are approaches which take small steps toward online consultation that can aid in building organisation comfort. These are easier bite-size ways for government agencies to begin 'eating the elephant' that is online consultation.
Email feedback
One of the easiest steps is adding an email channel for feedback which allows interested parties to more readily respond with views on a service or program. This is a cheap and easy approach to introduce with limited management overhead as it simply http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmirrors a non-digital mail respond mechanism.
Online surveys
There is also the online survey approach, which asks visitors to a government website or email recipients their views on a given topic. Appropriately targeted and promoted this can provide valuable input,key audience insights and new ideas, aiding in setting the terms of a broader consultation.
These are reasonably easy to set up using commercially available products such as Surveymonkey or Questionpro.
User ratings
Next is the ability to ask audiences to supply their key priorities and then rank them communally, using tools such as Uservoice, which I have implemented on this site to give me guidance on the topics you'd like me to talk about (see the feedback tab at the left of the screen).
These systems can be moderated to manage user comments and can be used to gather a prioritisation of different approaches using a simple voting approach.
Participation in existing online communities
Next it is possible to engage with pre-existing external communities and ask them to ask their audience about your initiatives and programs. This is more confronting for a government agency as the moderation is left in someone else's hands - usually unpaid volunteers. However it can uncover some of the deep seated issues very quickly, allowing an agency to develop the material required to correct mistaken impressions or mitigate external fears.
This can also feed into other public debates, allowing the agency to provide Ministers and other spokespeople with appropriate pointers on how to address various concerns.
A key consideration is that these discussions are very much on the public record and outside the agency's direct control - which can be scary for many senior public servants and officials. However these discussions will happen regardless, therefore, in my view, it is better to turn over the rocks and develop an understanding of the real concerns before they are raised by the media or 'on the record' on the floor.
A key benefit of these discussions is that an agency can issue a 'thank you' at the end of the process, which makes people feel heard. This can also address some of the key issues or misunderstandings, thereby also placing the correct information on the record (provided it is in clear english).
Commercially moderated forums
The next approach is to use a commercially moderated forum, which provides some safety around how the moderation is managed, via an organisation such as Bang The Table.
This is a more controlled environment, but still out in public. Appropriately supported and managed it can provide a venue to elicit strong audience views with less control issues for government.
'Owned' forums
Finally agencies may create their own forums (which could be a blog, online forum, wiki, video feedback or other type of social media tool) to elicit feedback, as has been done with Future Melbourne.
This requires significantly more ongoing resourcing and commitment by an agency, and can also suffer from growth pains as many in the audience have to learn about and then build trust in a 'government mouthpiece'.
If these issues are handled well this can become a sustained community whereby the agency can converse with audiences, not just on spot consultations but over time.
Choosing the options
So clearly there are many different option for government to 'get its feet wet' which can reduce the risk, cost and commitment by agencies while they decide when, and if, online consultation will work for them.
Most important is to start using at least one approach and building some organisational knowledge, confidence, and small wins that aid in the future as departments are pushed to become more active in this space.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Obama becomes the first internet President | Tweet |
With the conclusion of the US Presidential race, commentators are turning their attention to an analysis of how a relative newcomer could first defeat a more experienced contender for the Democratic nomination (Hillary Clinton), and then achieve a victory over an even more experienced Republican candidate (John McCain), albeit on the back of extremely low approval ratings for George Bush and some missteps by the Republican camp.
One of the key factors being identified, as was identified earlier in the campaign, was the polished use of the internet by Obama's team to build voter engagement and raise funds. Drawing on the experience of people such as one of the founders of Facebook, Obama was able to utilise online social networks to create the largest electoral machine in history.
For instance, as reported in Wired Magazine, Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency,
Both Obama and Republican rival John McCain relied on the net to bolster their campaigns. But Obama's online success dwarfed his opponent's, and proved key to his winning the presidency. Volunteers used Obama's website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race -- and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web.
The Australian also commented on this in Obama surfs the web to the White House, where it states,
"No one's going to say Obama won the election because of the internet but he wouldn't have been able to win without it," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet.
"From the very beginning the Obama campaign used the internet as a tool to organise all of its efforts online and offline," Ms Germany said. "It was like the central nervous system of the campaign."
This type of campaign is not limited to political ones - it could as easily be used to build a sustained movement on topical issues such as global warming.
I wonder when we will see these tools used in Australia to influence a political outcome - or when government will begin to use them to its benefit (maybe next year).
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Building a catalogue of Government 2.0 best practice | Tweet |
A public wiki has been created to capture examples of best practice Government 2.0 initiatives from around the world.
It's just starting out but already has some great examples of how different governments are using tools like blogs, wikis, video and social networks to achieve their objectives and better service customers.
If you have an example to share, or want to learn from the experiences of other egovernment practitioners, visit the site at Government 2.0 - Best Practices
Friday, October 24, 2008
French government joins the online conversation | Tweet |
The French government has introduced a Web 2.0 portal featuring a forum, wikis and video to support debate on their digital strategy and encourage ideas outside traditional 'government-think' limits.
As discussed in The Connected Republic, the French site is at http://assisesdunumerique.fr/forum/.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Do collaborative online groups need to be successful? | Tweet |
I have been reading a paper by James Robertsen of Step Two entitled Successful collaboration requires support. It discusses the need for central support and nurturing of online collaboration within an organisation rather than simply a 'build it and they will collaborate' approach.
While I agree with James' points, I do not feel that it is necessary for all collaborative groups to succeed. Sometime failure can be more educational, or can provide an organisation with insights into the actual priorities of staff and management - or can simply be due to changing communities and situations.
Considering an organisation as an ecosystem, with different operational units being different niches, each with their own specific characteristics and environments, over time some groups will thrive, some will survive but with less success and some will fail (particularly as the environment changes).
I see collaboration as an intersection of communication and knowledge, therefore any collaborative community is keenly affected by changes in its composition, the people, the organisational environment and priorities.
For example if a community leader leaves, or is simply not present, a community may fail, or one or more people may step into these shoes and take a community to new heights.
Sometimes the community leaders are not the obvious candidates, those who make the most 'noise' (the most posts or the most controversial). Instead they are often people in the background who provides the 'engine' of the community - as a critical source of knowledge, as a mediator between strong personalities or by asking the questions that make others reconsider what they believe.
Equally when an organisation changes structure, direction or priorities, some communities grow in significance and interest and others will fade. This is a wholly natural progression in the 'life' of an organisation and does not represent failure by the leaders or administrators of collaborative communities. Nor does it imply that the concept of collaboration is flawed.
My personal experience of collaborative communities over more than ten years of operating and participating in them is that they all ebb and flow over time. Often only a few individuals are required at their core, however without a mosaic of participants, who often are transient or contribute little to the discussions, the communities do not provide the knowledge transfer of value to an organisation.
Therefore, in my view, the best way to foster collaborative communities and support an environment where they can be successful (based on their own characteristics and niche) is to expose them to as large a group of participants as possible, thereby enabling others to learn from and share their own experience - even if it is not directly relevant to their current job.
To make communities fail, the best approach is to restrict participation to a small group, avoid cross-fertilisation and suppress active discussion and left-field ideas.
In other words, collaborative communities, in my view, thrive in open systems and die in closed ones, just as trapping two spiders in a glass jar over several months is not conducive to having them thrive.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective | Tweet |
In August I analysed traffic to our agency's website in July 2008 using Hitwise's data measurement service, comparing our share of web traffic against the total to Federal government websites, other government websites and the top websites visited by Australians.
The results provided me with a view of how important government websites are in peoples' online lives - not very. Less than 2.5% of website visits were to government sites.
It also helped me form some ideas as to how Australian government departments can make their online channels more effective means of engaging citizens.
Reviewing Hitwise's reports from July 2008, tracking around 2.95 million Australians' visits to over 647,000 websites (using ISP logs), the total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.
Of these,
In comparison, Google.com.au and Google.com together accounted for 9.64% of Australian visits to all tracked websites, four times as much as the total government sector (Google.com.au, the number one site visited by Australians, accounted for 7.85% and Google.com for 1.79% of visits).
Facebook, the fourth most visited website, received 2.36% of total tracked visits - slightly more than the entire Australian government.
MySpace, the seventh ranked site, received 1.78% of total visits - almost 50% more than Federal government sites.
Only one government website regularly reaches Hitwise's Top Twenty list of Australian sites, the Bureau of Meteorology (coming in at 16th position with 0.51% of traffic in September 2008). In fact, this site alone accounts for almost a quarter of the visits to the total government sector.
To put these figures into perspective, I roughly estimated from my Agency's actual web traffic that each Australian web user in July 2008 made 270 visits to Hitwise tracked websites (note that at an average visit duration of 10 minutes, this is significantly less that the figure reported by Netratings in March 2008 (PDF) - of 13.7 hours/week online).
Of these estimated 270 visits,
Even if you discount my estimate and take another measure of the average number of website visits per Australian each month, the proportion based on Hitwise's tracked websites remains the same.
What does this mean for government?
Even a few visits per month by Australia's estimated 11 million plus regular internet users users adds up to a significant online audience for government in Australia.
However my conclusion is that Australian government departments should not rely on reaching our citizen audiences simply via our official websites.
We need to reach out and engage our customers via the websites they choose to use.
These non-Government websites account for over 97.5% of regular internet usage by Australian (per Hitwise's July 2008 figures).
If Australian government wants to effectively communicate with citizens online, our departments need to invest in understanding where our audiences spend their time, reaching beyond our official sites to engage them in the online communities they choose to frequent.
How do we engage citizens on their own turf?
There are many different ways that private organisations reach out to user communities, and government can learn and use many of these approaches, such as
Note
Hitwise checked the numbers drawn from their web reporting service (thank you Alex and Rebecca). The idea for this post, the conclusions drawn and any calculation errors are mine alone.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
How can we effectively share our egovernment successes and failures? | Tweet |
I find egovernment an exciting area to work in.
It offers benefits to citizens and businesses in reducing the time and cost of engaging with government
It offers benefits to taxpayers due to the cost savings achievable within the public sector and the ability to improve transparency in government.
It offers benefits to individuals and communities by providing new and effective ways to collaborate with community and advocacy groups, businesses, agencies from other jurisdictions, the community and individual citizens to deliver improved policy and service outcomes.
I find that many Australian public sector organisations are engaged in exciting experiments with digital web and mobile technologies to improve their engagement and service delivery. There are also many innovative individuals working in different areas to advocate the use of modern tools to improve the solutions to age-old issues.
However finding out about these initiatives and the lessons learnt in each case isn't easy.
There are limited forums for communication between public sector organisations and the means by which we share information is often limited by funding, time and bureaucratic overheads.
In the private sector competitors often keep secrets from each other as a may to build competitive advantage. In the public sector secrets are often necessary for customer privacy or state interest, however they can also reduce our ability to provide community benefit where they cross into restrictions on learning from mistakes or successes.
Lack of information sharing also results in duplication of work, very slow learning from mistakes and redundancy - which costs government and therefore taxpayers and service recipients time and money.
I'm working through approaches to improve communication across egovernment practitioners in Australia, drawing from New Zealand's excellent wikis, the online forums used in the UK and US and the European Union's fantastic community site.
Do others have any ideas they can suggest to me to help us share our information across all levels of Australian government in an appropriate way?
Saturday, October 11, 2008
The benefits of staff forums - two way communications with management | Tweet |
A challenge in any organisation is to foster two-way communications.
Many organisations have used suggestion boxes, 'chat with the CEO' email accounts, or other primitive tools to offer pseudo-two way communication, but without the immediacy or ability to readily expose discussions to the broader organisation.
These are often mistrusted by staff as they are essentially black boxes - suggestions go in from individuals and responses may come back, but there is no mechanism for others across the organisation to witness or participate in the conversation.
That's where staff forums can fill a major gap, providing a mechanism for organisations to unblock their communications channels, not only from staff to management, but between staff in different offices.
The following video illustrates how effective an online forum can be for engaging staff and improving customer service outcomes.
It is about British Airways, a 2008 Intranet Innovations Awards gold medal winner, who has engaged its 17,000 cabin crew in discussion around customer service and internal process issues via an online forum.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Participative budget edemocracy initiative in Brazil provides insights into the future | Tweet |
Brought to my attention by a reader, the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, has begun using evoting to support it's participatory budget setting process.
Documented in the research report, e-Participatory Budgeting: e-Democracy from theory to success? (PDF), the experience is a very interesting example of the use of evoting in increasing direct democratic participation by the public.
Belo Horizonte is a city of 2.3 million people and 1.7 million voters.
It has used a participatory budget setting process since 1993 to prioritise spending across a range of public works, with the budget directly allocated by voters growing to US$43. This works on the basis of voting in each of the city's districts for specific works within that district.
In 2006, the city launched a Digital Participatory Budgeting (e-PB) involving a fund of US$11 million in addition to the existing participatory budget.
The e-PB allowed registered voters to exclusively vote online for one out of four potential public works for each of the nine districts of the city.
Based on the research report,According to the administration, the launching of the initiative had three main drivers: i) to modernize its PB through the use of ICTs; ii) to increase citizens’ participation in the PB process and iii) to broaden the scope of public works that are submitted to voting.
The approach seems to have worked. While the traditional PB approach attracted around 1.5 percent of voter participation, the e-PB attracted close to 10%, greatly increasing the direct democratic involvement of citizens with the running of the city. It also allowed the PB process to consider public works of interest to all city citizens, rather than those only of interest to the inhabitants of a specific district.
As part of the e-voting process the city adinistration's website featured a forum where citizens could discuss the potential public works initiatives in a moderated environment.
The voting process took place over 42 days with voters able to vote separately for each district's public works - allowing them to vote up to nine times, once per district.
The security of the vote was managed by using unique voter IDs, termed electoral title numbers, which Brazil issues as part of a compulsory identification document to all voters.
Public voting points were established at 187 points across the city to avoid disenfranchising people without internet access. A mobile internet bus was also used, moving from place to place to between areas with the lowest internet access and those with the highest voter concentration (city centre).
While the IT involved in the initiative was significant, the research paper points out that significant factors in the success of the initiative were the communications campaign and ability for voters to interact online to discuss the public works.
The e-PB attracted 503,266 votes by 172,938 voters, or 9.98% of eligible voters.
While this might seem low by Australia's compulsory voting standards, it was seven times greater than the number of participants in the traditional participatory budgeting process, which only received 1.46% of voter participation in the same year.
Interestingly, the research report found that there was no correlation between socio-economic status and propensity to vote, meaning that the e-PB was not weighted towards more highly educated or richer voters (who are more likely to be internet users).
Also a minimum of 30% of votes were recorded from outside the city's limits. Given that only citizens of the city were eligible to vote, the research report found that the internet approach provided an effective avenue for residents who were not present in the city at the time to vote.
The research report has a lot of additional information on the IT systems and communications approaches used, as well as the use of the online forum.
It is an excellent read for any administration looking at introducing a level of electronic voting, either for offices or for policy or budget measures.
