Consult Your Community

Author: Tim Davies

What NEED does this meet?

There are a number of commercial ‘survey websites’ out there – but none which focus on supporting community groups and campaigning groups to carry out surveys or more in depth consultations in their local communities. Plus – when surveys and consultations are carried out – the results are often burried away in paper reports – or never made public at all – so that the rich information they hold gets woefully under-used.

By instigating local and rigorous consultations, community groups can gain both insight into how the problems they want to challenge are percieved and experienced – and the outcomes of their consultations – made public – can act to inspire community and local government / agency action.

What is the APPROACH?

Anyone who wants to consult on an issue can create a consultation. The website would step them through thinking about how to consult (e.g. collecting the right demographics, asking the right sorts of questions, making sure the sample is representative) and creating the basic questionairre for a consultation.

This is then made available online, and (optionally) printable (so that the consultation owner/organiser can circulate offline versions of the consultation and then gather in and input responses from paper records). Anyone registered to recieve information about local consultations near to them will be e-mailed with the change to respond – and the consultation can be mentioned on other areas of MySociety sites linked to the local area in question.

After a set period – the consultation will end – and the results (or a sub-set thereof if neccessary to maintain demographic anonimity) can be made publicly available for anyone to look at, analyse etc. Tools could be offered to help in their (e.g. comparing the demographics of the people surveyed with local demographic data to see if the sample is representative etc.)

The system would also create easy ways of giving feedback to consultation participants as to the results of the consultation – and what action might be taken as a result. (Failure to receive follow up information after taking part in consultations is a common complaint amongst the consulted…)

With the publicically visible consultation results (the particularly unique thing about this plan) – people can start pledges, write to their MP, create new action groups – based upon identification of real needs in their local community.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

If local authorities and other agencies could be encouraged to use such a platform for their consultations – then the increase in transparency could have a significant impact on holding authorities to account in their responses to consultation.

Further – if local community groups can consult a wide range of others in their area (not just those they are already in touch with) – they can operate on the basis of far better information – and can take action and campaign in far improved ways.

What is the COMPETITION?

There are a number of survey websites out there – but none that are focussed on local consultation – and none that offer the extra tools to support people in carrying out consultations which generate rigorous data that would stand up to criticisms. Most of these services also charge for surveys with any significant response rate (100+), are online only – and don’t offer enough tools for analysis.

This service would do two things:
1. Allow people to create local consultations for free
2. Allow people to find local consultations and engage in them (in could also link to other local consultations not being carried out through the system)

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

The build a site with all the features outlined above could take significant effort. Perhaps two developers and 6 months of development time to implement all the relevant features to make it really easy to build the surveys and to carry out analysis of the data.

However – once established the system should be relatively low maintainence – and branded versions of the system for local authorities, national organisations, and commercial organisations – could potentially generate revenue to cover the costs of building what is a relatively complex system.

It would be possible to develop a cut-down ‘consult your community’ which is essentially a public survey system linking surveys to local areas – and this could also have significant impacts… although I think the potential of the full system makes it worth investigation at least…. (all comments and thoughts welcome….)

4 Comments

  1. This is a fantastic idea – as far as I’m aware, (and I looked quite hard), no open source survey software exists.. this kind of service is much needed.

    The whole way that public consultation surveys are carried out – basically as coercive persuasion devices, could be transformed if groups and individuals could come up with good research based on a simple, open system that can generate reports, perform simple data analysis, and guide people through rigorous and well-researched consultation processes.

    An easy extension to this system would be to do ongoing evaluation after the fact. Consultation processes are often used to ‘rubber stamp’ policy and planning, which is then carried out (often without sticking to the plan that had been agreed on) with impunity. A post-consultation evaluation process that can re-open questions about how a solution is working, how a development or a policy is effecting people involved etc.. could be a powerful and unique tool.

    Make this one! The FOI one is so obvious and campaigny! I want to see more tools that innovate rather than just amplify the rah rah of Information Politics.

  2. Thanks for the comments Saul 🙂

    I definitely think the idea of follow up consultation is great. Getting people to think of consultation as an ongoing process and a process that creates transparent managed dialogue rather than opaque question and answer is really important.

    One more feature I would add to the above idea as well would be a ‘Clone This Consultation’ feature – so people browsing the site who found an interesting consultation in another locality, could easily copy it, edit it, and use it in their own community – without needing to write a similar consultation from scratch – a la the applications at Ning.com…

  3. I have set up a community portal for the Streatham community just over a year ago. Strethamlife.co.uk currently attracts over 40,000 hits a month and has got a good search engine listing after much work setting up websites/pages on Streathamlife.co.uk for local businesses and other organisations.

    It is possible to have an online poll using the excellent Xoops open source content management system. If you want to have a public consultation it is possible to install some sort of Questionnaire or simple poll and to guage the response. However there has to be some sort of incentive for people to give up there time to fill out another questionnaire or form.

  4. Dan, I’ll have to take a look at the Xoops survey system…. I’ve looked a range of different CMS survey modules in thinking about this idea – but have never found anything that is really intuitive or that looks easily adaptable into a full sollution for the non-techie… but there may be well be systems out there…

    Just wanted to drop in links to what could be thought of as the competition / potential collaborators from the TheyAskedYou.com idea:

    The Consultation Finder tool and Consultation Platform developed by Community People looks like it is along the track I was thinking in terms of what it provides for running a consultation: http://tinyurl.com/emqht / http://www.communitypeople.net/ – however, I think the ConsultYourCommunity idea still adds two key extra elements in terms of its transparency – and crucially, making sure that consultations can be initiated and controlled by those other than Local Government as well…

    In terms of incentives – in the ideal situation – the incentive should be that people can see something will change as a result of their input… as it seems to me that the ‘survey fatigue’ that many people feel is because after they have ticked a few boxes, they never hear anything more or see any change…