ChangeCamp Ottawa: Designing For Social Change

• What are the factors that can influence a person to take action on an issue of social importance?
• How can technology encourage societal change?
• What mechanisms are most appropriate for bridging the gap between citizens and their elected officials?

These are some of the broad-reaching questions that emerged on a rainy long weekend in Ottawa.

ChangeCamp Ottawa 2009: A meeting of citizens & public servants

A few members of the non~linear creations team participated this Saturday in a somewhat unconventional event held at City Hall… ChangeCamp Ottawa brought together “citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy makers, political players, change-makers and government employees to discuss participatory governance in a web-enabled world.”

The format of the event was distinctive. As an “un-conference”, the agenda for the day was not planned in advance; instead, participants pitched discussion topics in the morning and the agenda was formed as part of a collaborative process.

The general theme of the event was “re-imagining government and citizenship in the age of participation” but discussions reflected the diversity of the crowd - ranging from new standards for sharing data, to crowdsourcing solutions to public works issues, to tactics for measuring ROI of social media endeavors, to a meeting of web developers brainstoring the development of a new application. Anevolving wiki of session notes, video interviews, photos, and ongoing dialogue exemplify the quality of discussions that took place.

A worthwhile event with - hopefully - some worthwhile, long-lasting outcomes.

How User Experience (UX) Design can Influence Change

Members of the NLC User Experience team (Katral-Nada Hassan and I) were quite taken with the concept and format of ChangeCamp Ottawa and decided to share our recent thinking on how website design decisions can affect the level and quality of dialogue that takes place between government and the public.

Design-related decisions can drastically affect the visibility, adoption, engagement and ultimately the success of any communication effort - so it’s worth incorporating UX strategy early on in planning projects.

Leveraging the Hub & Spoke Model

Helen Overland recently blogged about the importance of a diversified, holistic approach to social media… She notes that it should not be a question of choosing between Twitter or Facebook or whatever other flavor-of-the-month is grabbing headlines but rather an appropriate mix of social media and other outreach tactics in accordance with the target audience. Popular communities should be viewed as a mechanisms for generating interest, inititiating (and maintaining) a dialogue and funneling visitors back to a centralized web-based “hub” of activity.

The benefit of this approach is obviously in the fact that once at the hub, there’s a much greater opportunity to establishing a long lasting, engaging relationship with web users. Barack Obama recently employed this approach with obvious great success in his recent election campaign (the hub and spoke approach used in Obama’s campaign is detailed in an excellent whitepaper by US-based digital PR agency, Edelman.)

Laddering Engagement

Upon attacting a visitor to the hub, there are a number of tactics that can be employed for engaging visitors. Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen occasionally speaks of the 90-9-1 rule; stating that 90% of web visitors will simply lurk, 9% will contribute marginally, and the bulk of community user generated content will be developed by a marginal 1%. With such a minimal ratio of contribution, it can be difficult to gain the momentum necessary to have any real impact on the government decision-making process. Every effort should be made within the design to persuade users to make the leap from lurker to contributor.

Within advocacy circles, the concept of a “ladder of engagement”, has been used for quite a while. The idea is to tempt lurkers into participation by offering simple, low-commitment actions - such as rating, bookmarking etc. As users take action, it’s possible to suggest more and more engaging activities; effectively pushing them up the rungs of the ladder. Shake the Pillars, an online advocacy-focused blog, suggests how this ladder could be crafted. They also note that it inevitably becomes more challenging to push participants up the ladder… but emphasize one way to increase activity at the top of the ladder is to promote activity at the base.

When developing a website, plan a spectrum of activity ranging from simple non-committal actions to more significant, high impact actions and consider how to persuade users from one step to the next. One possible mechanism for creating this movement is to incorporate slightly more challenging tasks within thank you pages upon the completion of an action.

Choosing the Right Tools for Reaching Government Decision Makers

When attempting to use the web to instigate change, it’s important to consider the most effective channels for dialogue between policy-makers and the public. The US-based Congressional Management Foundation conducted a 10-year long phased study on Communicating with Congress.

They examined the means in which the public attempts to engage their Members of Congress and how technology has changed this relationship over the years. They found that the influx of email-based communications has grown dramatically over the years; yet the number of supporting staff members in Congressional offices has stayed relatively stable. Because of the strain on the system in processing feedback, different types of communications were given different levels of attention and consideration. Duplicate templated form-letters sent en-mass had little influence over decision-making processes; Whereas high-touch personal phone calls or letters can have a major impact.

While we’ve come across little public-facing data to reflect these trends in Canada - many amongst the ChangeCamp discussion group felt that the level of influence of different types of communications might be similar.

The ChangeCamp group discussed the importance of balancing tactics that will generate a volume of feedback with tactics that would generate a higher quality (but inevitably smaller) response.

Clearly, the Tip of the Iceberg

Some interesting debate emerged from our ChangeCamp session (and many of the other session for that matter)… We believe that crafting sites with power to encourage action could merit a whole lot more discussion.

For those of you who did participate at ChangeCamp:

• What design strategies have you used to encourage participation, adoption and engagement?
• Which sites do you think effectively create a connection between citizenry and government and successfully maintain the relationship?
• What steps do you think are crucial to include in the engagement ladder?