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Deliberative Versus Collaborative

Public participation in government has traditionally been limited to deliberation, but Web 2.0 technology has created significant opportunities for collaboration and with the right push from top-level officials can lead to great innovation!

What are the main differences between deliberative and collaborative governance - with 10 steps to move towards more Collaboration.

Deliberative democracy encourages groups of diverse constituents to come together and have a civil discourse about the issues facing the community in order to put forth a representative public opinion of what government should or should not do. This public opinion might be used modify the existing work product, or perhaps inform the approach that professional staff will take in developing the work product. Hence, deliberative democracy places citizens directly in the role of discussant, with only an indirect role in decision making. 

This process requires diverse viewpoints and an agenda for orderly discussion.  It measures its success on equality of inputs and procedural uniformity, and it emphasizes self-expression.  It presents a problem on an abstract level before implementing a solution and is focused on discovering the general will or forming opinions or consensus.   

Collaborative democracy is about using Web 2.0 to bring together ordinary people to do extraordinary things. It requires both diverse viewpoints AND diverse skills and breaks down a problem into component parts that can then be assigned to citizens and administrators. It measures its success on the effectiveness of decision-making and outputs, and along the way, offers a number of opportunities for participation to create a culture of participation and improve the quality of decision-making.

Collaboration emphasizes participation of people who have “expertise” (and/or interest) in the subject in gathering information, evaluating and measuring the information, and developing specific solutions for implementation.

Moving Toward Collaborative Democracy

The traditional assumption in government has been that only professional staff or officials have the expertise to solve public problems. However, new social and visual technologies demonstrate that people can be effective at solving difficult problems when given the opportunity to come together as part of a network.

10 lessons for moving toward collaborative democracy by Beth Simone Noveck:

1. Ask the Right questions. The more specific the question, the more relevant the responses. Overly broad questions lead to irrelevant and unmanageable feedback.
2. Ask the Right people. Use self-selection to allow expertise to find the problem.
3. Design the Process for the Desired ends. Define the goal of the process upfront, and design the collaborative process to achieve that end.
4. Design for Groups, not individuals. Divide the work into smaller chunks, which can be distributed to members of a team. Group work allows participants to participate in short bursts of time and produces good results.
5. Use the Computer Screen to Show the Group to itself. If participants feel they are part of a group or movement, working across a distance will be more effective.
6. Divide the Work into Roles and tasks. Define the specific tasks that must be completed as part of each assignment. Use visualizations to define available roles in the collaboration so participants can choose their roles (e.g., contributor, reviewer, coordinator, etc.).
7. Harness the Power of Reputation. Allow group members to rate the effectiveness of their colleagues. Attention to reputation is essential to encouraging quality submissions.
8. Make Policies, not Web Sites. Look for opportunities to redesign process that are internal to the government in response to opportunities created by collaboration.
9. Pilot New ideas. Use pilot programs, competitions, and prizes to generate innovation.
10. Focus on Outcomes, not inputs. Pursue explicit performance goals and metrics.

Top-Down Decisions are needed to facilitate Bottom-Up Processes

Collaboration forces public officials to reexamine traditional ideas about public engagement and the role it plays in the decision-making process, as well as traditional notions of the expert-driven model of professional public administration.

Deliberative democracy may sell citizens short on what they can truly offer to help solve public problems. As such, public officials should consider how they might better collaborate with citizens to increase the value created for the public by government institutions, and how officials’ roles might change to place more emphasis on facilitating collaboration and enabling citizens to contribute their skills to the community.

Credit: Catherine Ripley, Shayne Kavanagh

Citizens | Collaboration | Crowdsourcing | deliberation | democracy | Gov 2.0 | Internet