Democratic deliberation in the wild: the McGill online design studio and the RegulationRoom project.

• Author: Farina, Cynthia
• Position: Introduction through III. Designing to Overcome the Barriers to Democratically Deliberative Public Participation B. Lowering Barriers to Public Participation and Supporting Deliberative Engagement 1. Lack of Awareness, p. 1527-1553 - Smart Law for Smart Cities: Regulation, Technology, and the Future of Cities

ABSTRACT

Although there is no single unified conception of deliberative democracy, the generally accepted core thesis is that democratic legitimacy comes from authentic deliberation on the part of those affected by a collective decision. This deliberation must occur under conditions of equality, broadmindedness, reasonableness, and inclusion. In exercises such as National Issue forums, citizen juries, and consensus conferences, deliberative practitioners have shown that careful attention to process design can enable ordinary citizens to engage in meaningful deliberation about difficult public policy issues. Typically, however, these are closed exercises--that is, they involve a limited number of participants, often selected to achieve a representative sample, who agree to take part in an extended, often multi-stage process.

The question we begin to address here is whether the aspirations of democratic deliberation have any relevance to conventional public-comment processes. These processes typically allow participation that is universal (anyone who shows up can participate) and highly variable (ranging from brief engagement and short expressions of outcome preferences to protracted attention and lengthy brief-like presentations). Although these characteristics preclude the kind of control over process and participants that can be achieved in a deliberation exercise, we argue that conscious attention to process design can make it more likely that more participants will engage in informed, thoughtful, civil, and inclusive discussion. We examine this question through the lens of two action-based research projects: the McGill Online Design Studio (MODS), which facilitates public participation in Canadian urban planning, and RegulationRoom, which supports public comment in U.S. federal rulemaking.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction I. Deliberative Democracy vs. Democratic Deliberation: Conceptualizing Public Participation Processes within Government Decision Making II. Designing to Overcome the Barriers to Democratically Deliberative Public Participation A. Overview of the Projects 1. The McGill Online Design Studio 2. RegulationRoom. B. Lowering Barriers to Public Participation and Supporting Deliberative Engagement 1. Lack of Awareness a. The McGill Online Design Studio b. RegulationRoom 2. Information Overload a. The McGill Online Design Studio b. RegulationRoom 3. Low Participation Literacy a. The McGill Online Design Studio b. RegulationRoom 4. Motivational Barriers a. The McGill Online Design Studio b. RegulationRoom III. Lessons and Challenges A. Choosing the Best Opportunities: Missing Stakeholders and Situated Knowledge B. Online or In-the-Room? Moderated or Unmoderated? C. The Challenges of Success: Adapting to the Outputs of New Participation Conclusion INTRODUCTION

For more than thirty years, political philosophers and others have advocated a conception of democracy in which deliberative discussion among citizens (1) plays a key role in determining the course of public policy. (2) The possibilities for citizen involvement radically expanded with the emergence of the Internet and, over the last decade, thought leaders within and outside academia have urged governments to tap the potential "wisdom of the crowd." (3) Of course, not everyone has been persuaded. The deliberative democracy model has been criticized as utopian, elitist, and exclusionary. (4) Much online political engagement has been dismissed as low value "slacktivism," (5) or "click-through democracy." (6) Still, the lure of the digitally empowered citizen-participant has generated considerable pressure on governments--at all levels and all over the world--to make their policy processes more open, transparent, and collaborative with the help of new information and communication technologies. (7)

Here we describe two projects, both being conducted by university researchers, that use innovative technological tools to motivate and support broader, better citizen engagement in government decision making. One is a digitally-mediated community-based urban design studio. (8) A collaboration among law and urban planning faculty of McGill University and a Montreal community organization, this project aims to involve area residents in the redevelopment of a forty-five acre post-industrial site in Montreal's midtown Bellechasse sector. (9) The second is RegulationRoom.org, an online website that supports informed public participation in the process of making government regulations (rulemaking). (10) This project, created by the multi-disciplinary Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI) working in collaboration with several U.S. government agencies, has recruited and successfully engaged historically silent stakeholders in learning about and commenting on proposed new safety and consumer protection regulations. (11) Most recently, the RegulationRoom website hosted public comment on possible new regulations on consumer debt collection practices that would be promulgated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (12)

In some respects these two projects are very different. The McGill Online Design Studio (MODS) project involves land use planning in a Canadian city. (13) The researchers have employed a variety of online and off-line methods to reach out to and elicit participation from area residents, many of whom share social networks originating in community, occupational, religious, or other activities, and all of whom share the strong physical tie of place. (14) Participation has involved several stages, during which residents' priorities and preferences were voiced, discussed, refined, and translated into specific design proposals. (15) The RegulationRoom project involves national regulations being proposed by U.S. federal agencies. (16) Outreach and participation have been entirely online, and participants have been located across the country with few, if any, common bonds other than their status as members of a group (e.g., consumers, debt collectors) that will be directly affected by the proposed regulation. Participation involves a single, time-limited event: discussion of the agency's draft during a specified formal public-comment period.

Still, the projects share a fundamental commitment: creating technology-enhanced participation processes that tap the potential of broader public engagement in public policy decisions, while avoiding (or at least minimizing) the problems identified by critics. In other words, these are efforts to realize digitally-supported democratic deliberation on the ground. They aim to discover how the digitally empowered citizen-participant can be meaningfully engaged through processes designed to prime deliberative discussion and knowledge production, rather than mere voting and venting.

These projects are grounded in theory--indeed, in various theories from several disciplines. However, because they are what the field of human computer interaction calls "research in the wild," (17) they sacrifice the kind of control that typifies the social science experiment and instead wrestle with mapping the purity of theory onto the messiness of real people and situations. For this reason, some of what we describe and argue here may be unsatisfying (or worse) to deliberative democracy advocates or to partisans of crowdsourcing. For example, although participants in both projects sometimes engage in the reasoned argumentation prized in the deliberative democracy model, they often convey their knowledge and value preferences in the form of highly contextualized, experiential information communicated through personal stories. (18) We propose that this kind of public input can be a distinctive contribution of digitally-supported citizen deliberation, even though work remains to be done on specifying the appropriate uses of such situated knowledge and personal narrative as evidence in policymaking. (19) Similarly, although designing user-friendly participation...