E-consultation design
The active citizenship site, http://wheel.e-consultation.org/wiki/index.php/Consultation, was built as a collective blog. This was because it was agreed to to collect, but not discuss, stories [Process and planning]. Weblogs (blogs for short) are usually used as public on-line diaries.
Individuals add entries to their blog, that others can read, be it the work of a local councillor, Mary Reid, or the sexual adventures of a Washington D.C. intern (Cutler, 2005). But if you let anyone post to a blog, they can also be used to collect entries from many people. The research team used Wordpress, open source blogging software, to run the site.
To make it easier for anyone to submit a story, Ashish Italiya modified the Wordpress software to accept submissions not just by filling in a form on the WWW, but also by e-mail, SMS text messages from a mobile ‘phone, and through voice mail. Two mobile ‘phones were connected to USB ports on a PC at Queen’s University Belfast (one with a Northern Ireland number, the other with an Irish one). Software on that PC picks up text messages sent to those ‘phones, and loads them on to the blog.
Or people could telephone a number and leave a message, which the Queen’s University voice mail system stored as a .wav file, and e-mailed it to us. This was then automatically converted to an MP3, and uploaded to the blog, so that people could click on a link and listen to the message. So even illiterate people could tell their stories (Once they knew the telephone number, that is). You can see the different ways of sharing your views in Figure 8.3.1.
The research team spent some time developing draft pages for this site, to try and make it easy for people to get the point of the consultation on active citizenship, and go on to submit their stories. Earlier experience from the Waterways Ireland consultation showed that registration can confuse some participants, so no registration was required. The cost of that is deleting spam every day or two from the site. This was later confirmed by usability tests run on the site in the offices of The Wheel.
The site was structured along the four themes The Wheel wanted to use in their report to the Task Force on Active Citizenship (see Figure 8.3.2):
- Who is an active citizen?
- What should the role of the state be in active citizenship?
- How can The Wheel facilitate active citizenship?
- Reflect on the terms of reference.
The research team spent a lot of time getting the words and images right for the explanations on the site. There were many iterations of writing, first within the team, between Letterkenny and Belfast, and then making corrections (To the spelling, grammar and sense) noted by staff at the Wheel. The end result of all that work was a site that reads much better than the Waterways Ireland one. You don’t need to be an experienced consultation respondent to follow it.
