Local governments across the United States and Canada are increasingly using online civic engagement tools to involve their communities in decision-making processes. Local officials know that using online tools can increase public trust in government, but only if the tools have the features to avoid common pitfalls of crowd sourcing. One of these common pitfalls is outsider influence. Outsider influence can occur when a government puts its public forums online. Once a forum is online anyone outside as well as inside the community can try to influence the conversation. Local governments want to focus on feedback from their constituents, not outside interests.

Best Practice

This outsider influence can be avoided or mitigated by using an online civic engagement service that has the following features:

• Participants must register in order to post their ideas or comments on the forum.
• Street address is included in the registration process (because zip code typically isn’t good enough for determining a participant’s jurisdiction).
• Each participant’s address is geocoded and not identified by individual.
• The local government is mapped.
• The feedback is placed on the map by location.
• The feedback can be analyzed and filtered.

Making these analysis tools available to the public as well as to government staff and officials is also a best practice because it promotes transparency.

Additionally, it is beneficial to be able to configure a topic so that it’s available to: (1) the public, (2) just the government’s employees, or (3) the e-mail list of a group, such as a neighborhood association or citizen focus group.

Case Study

Salt Lake City, Utah, has been using online civic engagement since October 2010. The city named its service Open City Hall, and departments throughout the city government have posted well over 100 topics and attracted over 33,000 online attendees. The service has a user satisfaction rating of 94 percent based on over 1,700 survey responses from users.

In early December 2013, the Salt Lake City government posted a topic that asked the public for feedback on proposed ordinance revisions that pertain to horse-drawn carriage regulations. Staff configured the topic for open-ended comments (not as a poll or survey).

The topic was open for public comment through early February 2014. Over that two-month period, more than 1,500 people attended the online forum, and 288 registered participants posted a comment. About 80 percent of those participants were not residents of the city. Apparently, across the country, people interested in animal rights discovered the topic and posted comments—many requesting a complete ban on horse-drawn carriages (not just a modification of the regulations). Participants came from 170 jurisdictions—including as far away as Anchorage, Alaska; Key West, Florida; and Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

While the comments from people living outside of Salt Lake City could be informative, the city’s residents, staff, and officials were able to use their online platform’s analysis and reporting tools to easily filter the feedback and focus on comments from constituents living in Salt Lake City. They were even able to drill down and analyze feedback by council district, within the downtown area as well as by gender, age group, and key words.

The city adopted the amendments, posted that outcome on the online forum, and sent an e-mail to over 2,100 subscribers to Salt Lake’s Open City Hall.

Summary

Although there is always the risk that non-resident participants will attempt to drive the conversation and influence the outcome, online civic engagement can increase public trust in government when implemented in ways that can eliminate or mitigate this type of problem. Salt Lake City encountered this pitfall in its recent horse-drawn carriage topic but was readily able to filter the feedback and focus on constituents living in the city, ensuring them that it was their position that mattered to decision makers.

This article is adapted from a blog post submitted by Rob Hines, account manager, Peak Democracy, on October 17, 2014.