Engagement has to be a two-way process

A well put post on Town Hall Matters says, of engagement and the public sector:

Satisfaction from participation comes from feeling that you have effected change on an issue about which you care. So perhaps what we need more than e-petitions, citizen juries and the like, is a shift in mindset in public institutions – a readiness to admit mistakes and to act on feedback; receptivity rather than engagement.

This point is spot on: engagement has to be a two-way process between an institution and the public. Changing mindsets is a large challenge but it isn’t the only one. The other is dealing with the lopsided numbers. It’s a similar problem to the ones politicians face: there are far more members of the public than there are politicians and their staff. Similarly, for a local council there are far more members of the public than there are council staff trying to engage with them.

Consider even a relatively small-scale issue that affects 500 people – a planning application or change in parking rules perhaps. Even one member of the council, working full time on just those 500 people and working a 40 hour week would need just over a week to get through giving just 5 minutes over to direct contact with each person. When you then factor in the sheer number of decisions, many of much larger scale, that a council makes a year and you quickly either need a huge bureaucracy (which in turns means those doing the consulting and engaging end up being divorced from the actual decision makers, even if they are in the same organisation) or you need to find ways to engage and respond meaningfully without relying too much on one-to-one personal conversation.

The internet can often play a very useful role in this, whether it is through blogs (which can be personally from one person, but don’t require you to write a separate piece of text for each reader) or through forums that let people respond to each other (which can be particularly useful where there are two sides, such as for and against a planning application, as that way views can be exchanged directly).

What surprises me though is how rarely people developing, touting or eulogising social media, Web 2.0 and the like offer up tools and developments explicitly designed to tackle the lopsided numbers conundrum. Here’s hoping more do in future.