Hi everyone, my name is Jen Manuel, I am a final year PhD student
from Open Lab at Newcastle University. And, today I’m talking about my
paper ‘Place-Based Policymaking and HCI: Opportunities and Challenges
for Technology Design’ where we share some insights from a series
of workshops with citizens and city planners. Today I’m mainly
focusing on the fieldwork and discussion of that so I would
encourage you to refer to the paper for a more in-depth look
at the literature and methodology.
So to get started with a little bit of background, HCI has shown
a continued interest in technologies for democracy and participation
in all fields but I’m obviously focused on place and urban planning.
So, a brief to the literature and I focus on two key areas.
The first is HCI and policymaking and there has been a growing interest
and calls for more involvement in policymaking in HCI.
This has actually resulted in the creation of a forum in Interactions
which led to a range of work around social networking, e-government,
accessibility in the built environment and much more. More recently, there’s
been work done to show the boundary between HCI and policymaking showing
how research is currently translated to effect policy. However, there’s
still an issue in that much of the recent civic tech work focuses on,
for example, developing a new method to engage citizens, but then does
quite little to show how citizen’s voices carry through and affect
that policy. In terms of HCI and democratic participation, there's
an ever-growing body of literature that focuses on supporting interactions,
increasing civic participation in institutional decision-making and
the shaping of public services. In urban planning, there’s been a
focus for a number of years on e-gov and e-participation. But this
tends to aim to digitise service delivery, reduce costs and increase
efficiency but it often results in one-way tokenistic engagement.
Now, there has been attempts to move beyond this which is positive, but
the planning field tends to still lag behind in terms of the adoption
and the use of civic technology. In HCI, however, there has been a
civic turn which has aimed to support new interactions with place,
improve engagement practices, more citizen-led decision-making, activism,
grassroots movements and the empowerment of citizens.
It’s amongst this background that my work sits. I wanted to explore
how HCI could better support citizen-led policymaking and I used
the case study of neighbourhood planning for this. So just to
explain what that is briefly, it was created through the Localism Act 2011,
an act of parliament in the UK. This gave direct power to
citizens to create their own planning policy which would then be adopted
by the local authority and it would be used in decision-making. So, it
has statutory weight and it gives real power. The process for producing
a neighbourhood plan can be quite complex and it’s shown here on
the slides. To begin with, though, what usually happens is citizens
form a group which takes the plan forward and does all of the tasks
associated with that – so, engaging their community, gathering evidence
and writing the policy.
So to explore this space, I ran four workshops – 3 with citizens
involved in neighbourhood planning and 1 with city planners. Citizen
recruitment focused on neighbourhood planning groups that had either
finished the process or almost finished and this was so we could
have a good reflection on their journey of creating that policy.
The workshop with planners came from a long-standing relationship
with volunteer organisation. And they all came from different backgrounds,
so private and public sector, but importantly they had all either
worked in neighbourhood planning or had an interest in it. The
interactive workshops focused on creating a journey map and talking
through the process of how they got from, sort of, beginning to end.
More information on the methodology can be found in the paper.
So, what did I find? Well, firstly, here are the messy
journey maps which show the earlier diagram to be hugely simplified
and it shows that it’s not a realistic depiction of citizens’
experiences. You can see that each one is different and, ultimately,
it’s just very messy.
So, further to this, there were four main themes identified through the data
as well and the first of those is accessing policy processes.
So I found that in most cases, citizens had found out about neighbourhood
planning by accident or through word of mouth which points to a general
lack of awareness amongst communities about these policy opportunities.
It was also shown that citizens then moved online to try and find
out more information but that the information online was actually too
much, and not the right type of information. As a quick example,
one website actually had 25 pages worth of documents listed and each
document could be up to 30 pages long. So it was too complex, there
was too much of it, it was jargon-filled and also it didn’t really address
the ‘how’ of policymaking. It then meant that we have a group of citizens
embarking on a long, complex process with very little information as to
what it entails. So they didn’t feel that the path was clear, how
to move through the process, they didn’t know how long it would take
or how much work was involved.
The second theme was citizen-government relationships. And, citizens worked
with city planners throughout the process for advice and guidance.
This research was done within a local authority that was overall
supportive of neighbourhood planning which, politically, isn’t always
the case. But, despite this, there were still issues within that
citizen-government relationship. Citizens saw that their support from
the planners was too complex and that planners assumed citizens’
knowledge – they felt that they assumed they had this planning
knowledge that they simply didn’t have. In contrast, city planners felt they
gave the right level of support and they were conscious of providing
that support but allowing the plan to remain community-led. So, finally,
there were key issues highlighted with the conflicting nature of advice
that citizens received both from city planners and amongst different departments
of local government. So this conflicting advice caused issues for policy
development, particularly when the plan progressed to the final stages.
The third theme was engaging citizens and it was clear that citizen groups
felt that they valued the concept of engagement and they wanted to this well.
However, their practices didn’t match their values. So, there
was a reliance on traditional methods, which do have a place, but, they
reported only reaching the same 50 people. They also identified a key
issue that they were unable to engage young people in the production of
their policy. There was a keen interest by citizens and planners in using
technology to better engage citizens. But, when you look at the current
reality, citizens groups referred to their website as their only mode of
online engagement and, actually, this was just to share documents, like
minutes of meetings, with the public. It was also true that all of the
citizens groups only set their website up halfway through the process.
So, overall it’s not a great approach. One example that I do want to note
is that one group had used a map-based commercial tool that allows communities
to pin comments to a map and they’d done this to ‘modernise their consultation’.
What they didn’t do, however, is think about the affordances of the technology
they had chosen or the configuration of the participation. It was mainly
used for convenience and it resulted, actually, in reaching no new people.
The final theme is policy, evidence and translation in that access to
data and evidence, and the writing of policy becomes a significant
challenge for citizens. So, there’s firstly, a lack of understanding
of what constitutes evidence. Communities want to use opinions,
community opinions but city planners privilege the use of technical data.
Citizens felt they didn’t have access to existing technical data
even though the local authority hold a lot of that for their own
policy and processes. And, when they did have access to that data, they
couldn’t understand it and they couldn’t use it. They also didn’t
have any understanding or awareness of how they would go about collecting
their own data if there was evidence missing. Finally, the task of writing
the planning policy was significantly problematic. Both in terms of translating
the wishes of the community into a realistic policy but also using the
correct planning language to write those policies, something which the
city planners felt was incredibly important. In most cases, what
happened was, it required then significant support to re-write policy which
then undermines the community-led nature of the process.
So just as a key point from these findings. Something that stood
out was that these policy processes seem to have been replicated
from professional processes, those used by professionals in
planning. Which means that it follows some of the same issues
around poor engagement practices, for example, which have been
looked at for years. But, what I say is that why can’t policymaking
processes be more appropriate for citizens?
So, I want to put it to the HCI community that a change in approach
is needed. Through this paper we call for a more proactive approach
to our involvement in policy processes. So we’ve shown that civic policy
processes can be flawed from the outset so proactive co-design of
those with government and citizens could then help to develop new
approaches that are fit for use. They’re accessible, they’re navigable
and they’re appropriate. It could also then draw upon our skills around
participatory design, interaction design and designing through
technology, things that urban planners maybe don’t have the experience of doing.
There’s also an opportunity for HCI to consider the (re)design of
tools to be embedded within policy processes. So this would be as
opposed to tools that don’t consider policy at all or that
reactively respond to issues that are already situated in a problematic
process. So, we say that the HCI community should consider these
processes holistically and how tools affect it rather than
designing a myriad of tools that each seek to individually solve
a small part of a process.
Bearing this in mind, we then outline four ways tools could better support
policy processes. In the paper we build on existing work in all of
these areas but today we focus on our recommendations specifically.
So the first is collecting and understanding data. We suggest the
need for a working ontology of data in an accessible format for citizens
that could provide examples of common datasets, how they could be used and
in what circumstances, and also what data could be collected, why and how.
Toolkits could support the collection of data through educational material,
physical components and visualisation tools. And, we propose that these tools
should be flexible and adaptable to allow citizens’ experiences to sit
alongside that technical data.
The second suggestion is peer-to-peer support. So that would be tools that
could support interactions with legislation helping citizens understand
what policies and laws mean in practice. But, it would also be about
citizens sharing their learning, best practice and speaking with others
facing similar challenges. Which could also be relevant for policy
experts so they could share leaning, understanding and interpretations which
could help to improve the consistency and quality of the advice that they
give out. All of these tools should provide a space for debate which can
focus on specific policy questions so that discussion is then grounded in
real world problems.
The third area is citizen participation and there’s already a wealth of tools
and work on participatory technology but we want to suggest a broader
approach for the design of those tools. So, we propose (co-)designing
engagement methods with citizens to support capacity building and encourage
innovation, recognising, maybe, the need to use more familiar technology
where citizens are not tech literate. Through this, we could also look to
discuss the affordances of technology and how participation could be
configured to think through the consequences of the design decisions
that are made. Methodological toolkits could then support citizens to run
engagement activities with and through technology without the support of
external researchers or other experts. And finally, the development of open
source technology should be made accessible through toolkits and simple,
accessible documentation. This stems from an issue that there’s a lot of
open source civic technology out there but the level of skill that’s needed
to use, implement, maintain and manage this is generally not held by citizens
and government but a change in approach would mean we could have a more
sustainable long-term impact.
The final suggestion is crowdsourcing to use the knowledge of the crowd to
create a database of policy phrases to support policy writing and that
database should be ongoing, growing and continually updated to account
for and respond to the changing climate politically. These policy
phrases could be recorded to contain local context to avoid using generic
policy phrases that don’t apply locally.
Although our research has focused on neighbourhood planning, it could
have broader implications for other policy processes in planning and beyond.
But, ultimately, we have shown how place-based policymaking processes
are complex and difficult to access for citizens. We argue that HCI
researchers should become actively involved in supporting, innovating
and (re)designing policy processes, and to design tools embedded within
policy enabling citizen voices to carry through to decision-making in a real way.