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

• Author: Farina, Cynthia
• Position: III. Designing to Overcome the Barriers to Democratically Deliberative Public Participation B. Lowering Barriers to Public Participation and Supporting Deliberative Engagement 2. Information Overload through Conclusion, with footnotes, p. 1553-1580 - Smart Law for Smart Cities: Regulation, Technology, and the Future of Cities

2. Information Overload

   True deliberation requires information. Democratic deliberative exercises are always structured to include an educational component that prepares participants to discuss the relevant facts and issues, recognize the competing values at stake, and weigh alternatives from multiple perspectives. (78) In the contexts of land use planning and rulemaking, the challenge in moving public participation towards the democratic deliberative ideal is generally not a lack of information per se. Government decision makers typically generate, or pay consultants to generate, a mass of studies, analyses, and assessments during the process of developing a proposal. Unfortunately, even when this material is available to citizens, it is rarely comprehensible to them without help. Often voluminous and filled with technical, legal, or other jargon, such material is virtually always written from the "inside" perspective of the professional consultant, regulator, or planner--with little effort to present context, problems, constraints, and options in terms that make sense to ordinary people. (79)

   For this reason, efforts to make public participation processes more deliberative must include ways to present the information people need in forms that they are able and willing to consume.

   1. The McGill Online Design Studio

      Land use planning gives rise to several challenges relating to information overload. The first is legal. Planning law is elaborate, and is comprised of intricate and often technical statutes and regulations. Even apart from the law, planning is a complex activity that requires an understanding of the distinctive features of the land that is the object of a plan, the interactions of citizens in that space, and the aspirations of those who live in it. To make these information burdens more manageable, the MODS team used a set of strategies that mirror those of RegulationRoom (described below).

      For instance, the project team prioritizes the most relevant information from the primary planning documents. The statutory provisions that govern a site-specific plan are multiple, lengthy, and complicated. Moreover, a site-specific plan is meant to be responsive to the features of the relevant land and to the priorities of the local community with respect to that land; as such, these materials are also quite extensive. To reduce informational burden on participants, the team focuses attention on the particular features of the Bellechasse site that the community has identified as important, and highlights the regulatory outcomes the site-specific plan aims to achieve. Furthermore, the project website organizes information in a way that enables the user to identify what the site-specific plan has proposed regarding the community's priorities in the Bellechasse site, and to explore (or discover) and comment on what the user finds significant about that element of the site. The website does so by presenting a map that, through a collection of markers, identifies the specific geographic locations on the site that consultations revealed to be areas of interest to the community (Figure 4). Each marker, when clicked, navigates users to a page containing a condensed version of the site plan's proposals for that area, coupled with a variety of pictures, maps, and hyperlink resources that enable the individual users to identify and explore their own preoccupations with the Bellechasse site (Figures 1, 2).

      The statutory language of planning law and the jargon of planning professionals can appear to the layperson to be impenetrable or inaccessible. The project website responds to this obstacle by translating complex statutes into comprehensible text and maps. Similarly, the website makes the expertise of planners accessible through a combination of clear and simple descriptions and analyses, as well as through design proposals that are presented visually. Finally, the MODS project website allows users to navigate to and explore information at the level of detail they choose. For example, an individual user can decide to engage the Bellechasse project exclusively through the design drawings and short descriptions of the design proposals. Those who want a more in-depth understanding of the project can seek the relevant information in links that are labelled "supplemental information." There, the user can find more detailed descriptions of and rationales for the proposals, as well as explanations of the sources of the designers' inspiration. This layering of information seeks to make information manageable by tailoring it to the user's own level of interest and capacity.

   2. RegulationRoom

      Rulemaking is an especially challenging context for providing citizens with necessary information in a comprehensible form. A combination of reasons--including statutes and Executive Orders that require various impact analyses as well as the risk of judicial reversal for failure to adequately support or justify a new regulation--have produced rulemaking documents of formidable length and complexity. Even the consumer debt collection ANPRM (which, as a pre-rulemaking document, was subject to many fewer legal requirements (81)) was 150 manuscript pages in length written at the readability level (82) of a college freshman.

      Regulation Room uses a combination of human effort and design strategy to lower the barrier of information overload. Information triage is the first step: the team assesses the relative importance of information in the principle rulemaking documents and identifies what participants most need to know in order to comment effectively. The resulting, substantially reduced content is organized into the topic posts (Figure 3). Providing signposts is accomplished through website design. The list of informatively titled topic posts allows participants to quickly assess the scope of possible discussion, while informatively titled subtopic sections within each post allow users to identify and proceed to the specific issues that interest them most (Figure 5).

      Translation occurs when the team restates the information from the rulemaking documents in shorter, less complex sentences that avoid jargon and technical terms as much as possible. Presenting participants with dense, convoluted, bureaucratic-sounding text not only excludes those with limited English-reading skills, but also, more broadly, undermines the message that government wants genuine public participation. Finally, information layering uses the Web 2.0 functionalities of hyperlinking and glossaries to structure information in a way that allows users, at their individual choice, to find deeper or broader information--or, conversely, to get more help than triage and translation has already provided (Figure 6).

      Through creative information layering, the team can embed all the information from the original rulemaking documents in a way that is accessible to any participant who wants it without overwhelming others. In the consumer debt collection engagement, users visited the ANPRM text 506 times, spending an average of four minutes and thirty-eight seconds on-page--a lengthy amount of time for Internet reading. (85) Finally, when the discussion is open, moderators are available to point participants to information that answers questions, corrects misimpressions, encourages further discussion, etc.

3. Low Participation Literacy

   Democratic deliberation stands in sharp contrast to a decisional process in which each citizen privately casts her individual vote and the government simply tallies the ballots. (86) Moving public participation processes toward the deliberative ideal means providing participatory structures and guidance that nudge citizens towards being active and engaged problem solvers, willing to work with those who have different interests and values, to exchange knowledge and experiences, and to discover solutions.

   This kind of public participation is most likely to produce outputs of value to government decision makers. But it is also much less familiar to most citizens than voting, responding to an opinion poll, or signing a petition. Many people will need help in understanding why merely voicing outcome preferences is not an especially effective form of participation in planning or rulemaking. Further, they may require support and encouragement to offer facts or data, give reasons, consider competing arguments and claims, make suggestions, and discuss alternatives.

   Deliberative democracy practitioners have shown that ordinary citizens can achieve this kind of participation literacy. (87) However, in a public participation process open to all comers, even the best process design will not achieve a level of deliberative output comparable to what can be attained in a well-constructed deliberation exercise with a closed set of invited participants. Deliberation is hard work. Even when resources and support are offered, many people will engage in more limited or superficial ways. Still, thoughtful participation design can produce more deliberative public input than what planners and rulemakers get from conventional public hearing or notice-and-comment processes.

   1. The McGill Online Design Studio

      Several elements of the MODS project enable and facilitate informed and thoughtful citizen engagement. Consider first some aspects of the offline consultations that encourage deliberative exchanges among citizens. In activities such as exploratory walks, participants are invited to reflect on their and others' perceptions of the Bellechasse sector. Similarly, when the research team presents the project's design proposals to community members for live comment, they make clear that the objective is a reasoned conversation that allows proposals to be cooperatively refined.

      The design of the website reinforces these deliberative aims. The juxtaposition of design proposals and their rationales with precedent images and their explanatory texts makes transparent the...