Future Here Now: Do better public engagement, Part 1
Coming Soon
As I mentioned last week, I am heading to Denver next week to lead a Learning Lab on Digital Public Engagement at the National Planning Conference, and in conjunction with that I’m releasing my next book, Online Public Engagement. So this week I’m going to share a few selections from that book.
Public engagement is historically something that only government wonks worry about. But I don’t think that should be the case. Good public engagement is central to having the kinds of communities that we want to live in — but too often, we as residents and business owners have accepted the scraps and crappy experiences that government agencies have handed us, assuming that there was no other option.
The key message of my public engagement work, over the last 20 + years, has been that no one should be settling for the antiquated, elitist, useless public engagement that we have been getting for generations. Given our technology, our information access and our expectation that our opinions matter, it’s unreasonable to think that anyone should be satisfied with a three-minute screed at a mic in a council chamber.
If you’re a planner or a city government official, your bad public engagement is making your job harder and more miserable. If you’re an economic developer, your lack of public engagement is setting you up for disaster. If you’re a business owner, nonprofit manager, or a Person Who Gives a Damn of any types, your community’s bad public engagement is undermining every element of your community, and making it all the harder to build the kind of future you want. And if you’re not getting good public engagement opportunities, online and in person, you should fight for it, now more than ever.
This selection from Online Public Engagement introduces one of the most common types of public engagement — those that Tell us about some plan or proposal, but don’t give us meaningful ways to correct errors or help shape the plan to better fit the places where we live and work. Telling public engagement leaves out some of the most important sources of information we have, and it makes all of us more cynical, more disillusioned, and more disconnected.
Telling efforts focus on sharing information. The primary purpose of the event is to make sure that the facts that have been deemed pertinent to the public have been expressed in a public format and have been made available for public consumption. Common information types shared in a Telling initiative include
Existing conditions
The professional administrators’ criteria for making decisions
An overview of the design options that have been developed and selected by the professionals, and
The legislative or administrative approval process.
This information is typically presented in a lecture or other narrative format, or through a self-guided review of maps and posters at an in-person meeting or web site.
A Telling format limits the public’s options for response, and especially for influencing the outcome of the initiative. In a conventional meeting format, attendees may (or may not) have the opportunity to ask questions in front of other members of the public. Depending on the question and the authority or knowledge of the presenter, the answers may be factual or vague, direct or obscuring, definitive or noncommittal — and the attendees may be anywhere from satisfied with to incensed at the quality of the results.
In an open house format, where maps and other information may be available for the attendee to review at their leisure, attendees may ask questions of project staff, typically one-on-one. That may enable more personal discussion, but it eliminates the opportunity to publicly challenge the project or its assumptions, or formally engage with other community members in evaluating the alternatives.
Perhaps most importantly, Telling public engagement is a one-way street. The emphasis on answering (or avoiding answering) questions carries the implicit assumption that, while the public must have every opportunity to make sure they understand, they are not necessary or active participants in the decision. If some kind of response is enabled (such as a generic comment form at the end of a presentation), there is no expectation and no structure that requires or enables those comments to influence the decisions.
This is an important point, and it’s a key source of the frustration, cynicism and anxiety that Telling public engagement very frequently creates. To the public, the experience can feel like a bait and switch.
Professionals often tell participants that “we want to know what you think!” and “your voice matters!” and other such truisms, but what typically happens to comments in a Telling situation falls into one of three categories:
1) The comments are not recorded or incompletely recorded - for example, they were spoken at a public meeting where there was no record being made, or they were spoken in semi-private or in front of a small group at an Open House and were not recorded. Any chance of that comment influencing the project’s outcome depends entirely upon whether it was interesting or colorful enough to stick out in the memory of the staff member who heard it. In most such cases, the comments simply vanish into the air.
2) The comments were recorded via video, transcript or a collection of participants’ written comments. The comments are dutifully collated and prepared as supplemental documentation — an appendix or auxiliary report. However, there is no requirement on the part of the decision-makers that they review the comments or give them any serious consideration. As a result, the largely unread supplemental document has no effect, except to indicate to a future planning student that the public had little actual say in the project.
3) The comments were fully recorded and reviewed by the decision-makers, but they do not know what to do with them. In many cases, the Telling has been done so late in the process that making any changes as a result of an issue identified by the public would require significant cost and negative publicity. In other cases, the decision-makers may not have any guidance for weighing the value of the public’s comments against the interests of other groups, such as a developers or political leaders.
At the core of this conundrum is the fact that the Telling process itself did not allow for the possibility that the public’s comments might shed significant light onto issues relating to the project. This is why I have termed this type of public engagement Telling: even if there is some ostensible comment opportunity, those comments are an afterthought, not important to the process and not the purpose of the effort.
Telling public engagement, at its core, is a one-sided process, with officials doing the speaking and the public taking the passive role of a listener.