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CHAPTER FIVE: PUTTING THE PILOT IN CONTEXT

Introduction

5.1 The pilot website was one of a range of Community Council ( CC) website initiatives in the UK. This chapter looks at comparator websites to locate the evaluation findings in the context of existing knowledge of, and research about, renewing local democracy through the use of IT in the UK.

5.2 This chapter draws on two sources of information. Firstly information was collected through an internet search to collate an inventory of community-level websites from across the UK. This included many examples of websites being used by community councils across Scotland. ( See Annex Three for the full inventory). Secondly three websites were selected as examples for further exploration, to provide guidance on the factors that were considered to make a project successful, and explore what were the problems and challenges during project development. These three were selected on the basis of similarities in functionality as well as the level of intended engagement. Care was taken to ensure that, as far as practicable, place-based activities were used as comparators. For example the Rural Gateway was considered, but not selected, since it appeared to be a centrally-maintained site with a strong "virtual community" element rather than being geographically-based. A key objective was to see whether the pilot project has developed its products within the context of emerging debates about citizen participation, democracy and governance. We have also referred to some of the research literature to help identify conceptual issues.

Advice from the research literature

5.3 When comparing the pilot website with other examples, the literature cautions against setting expectations that seek to generate high levels of participation, or dramatic increases in local democratic participation. Andrew Barry (Barry, 2001) warns that increasing channels for interactivity and participation may lead to risk of passive observation (or interpassivity, also known as 'lurking' - visiting participatory Websites without actually participating), especially where information overload is combined with demands and instructions.

5.4 The literature also suggests it is important to understand critically what people wish to do with their time. "Do people really want to participate fully or do they just want to have the choice to do so? …" Pieterse argues that it is too easily assumed that people have nothing better to do with their time than political participation (Pieterse, 2001). Consequently, many may be content with "good enough governance" (Komito, 2005) ³¹, particularly if they are not clearly convinced that their views will have an impact - this may be why some comments of forums are negative, because citizens feel that "embarrassment sanctions" (Griffin and Halpin, 2005) (negative comments) may elicit more response.

5.5 The literature suggests a need to understand that the changing nature of governance means different types of participation from different sectors:

• "the voluntary sector ('associative democracy' - the renewal of society from the bottom upwards);
• the local authority sector ('new localism' - the devolution of power away from the centre to front-line staff and local organisations);
• the national state ('democratic centralism' - debate and dissent is fundamental to the development of policy, but once a policy has been accepted by the majority everyone is expected to observe the policy); or
• the private sector ('neoliberalism' - the rejection or diminution of the role of the State in society and the economy)" (Somerville, 2005).

5.6 The literature also suggests that it is important to evaluate whether the application may "intensify the participation of those already involved". That should be set that against the potential of the technologies to "increase amounts of informal communication" and thereby to foster social capital in communities (Komito, 2005). Projects should be aware, however, of not having a sufficient investment in the creation of social capital: "Community technology projects often focus too narrowly on provision of equipment" (Warschauer, 2003).

5.7 There is a need for rigour in the derivation of relevant metrics. Rowe and Frewer (2004) state that projects should "establish a common definition of effectiveness (or at least, one definition for each theoretical perspective on what participation should entail to be effective) and to develop valid and reliable and usable ways to measure this". Then move to understand "which potential explanatory variables are responsible for the degree of effectiveness discovered" (Rowe and Frewer, 2004).

5.8 The use of ICTs will not necessarily create participation if the latent activity is not already evident, and too often it is just assumed that new participants will be brought into participation. Has the project enhanced the existing participatory democracy activities beyond the pre-existing state? (Chadwick and May, 2003)

5.9 Understand that you cannot assume that participants will be local, or even real (fake identities may be possible), or that participation will be meaningful or ethical. We accept that the approach taken by the pilot project was that anyone could use the website if they live, work or travel through the area and therefore have relevant comments to make/issues to raise. There is the potential for dialogue between communities, but there is still a powerful logic in knowing who is from the locality affected, who is from beyond, and importantly to know the demographics of the participants.

5.10 A community in Leven, Fife ³² stated on its website that the:

" Forum has now been removed. We intended doing this at the end of June if it wasn't supported by Leven, but have taken it off the website early because of a spate of American 'members' who were using it to advertise pornographic photos, etc. Such offensive posts were appearing faster than we could delete the posts and ban the posters; it is very sad to say that the number of forum users from the US using the forum to try to sell pornography was far, far more than the number of Leven users of the forum".

5.11 ITC's final report of this project indicated that the project team have effectively addressed most of these issues raised in the literature. However, while the issues have been addressed, they have not led to a robust and relevant set of metrics and measures, as discussed in chapter three. The RLD Final Evaluation Report sets out six indicators of success relevant to public awareness, take-up (including the issues of access and ease-of-use) and expectations of impact. Four of these indicators were "met", one was not and several "could not be assessed". The results were as follows:

• a survey of the Stirling Citizen Panel (1,300 members of the public), showed that 41% of those from areas participating in the pilot were aware of their e-community council.
• Visitor numbers grew by 17% between September and November and there were more visitors than there were to the community council pages of the Stirling Council website
• The six sites received 96 contributions between them during the pilot period, and e-communications exceeded those by traditional media in two areas Bannockburn and Cambusbarron.
• In the two participating areas tested (Bannockburn and Cambusbarron), 13 participants rated the sites positively, while Citizen Panel survey respondents identified lack of access as an important barrier to take-up.

Websites, their structure, and comparative evaluation

5.12 An inventory of local and community websites ( see Annex Three) was constructed from a range of web sources, and each website was examined to check its activity. We categorised the websites by looking at their aims and objectives, characteristics and functionality. They broadly fell into three groups, as follows.

Informational websites

5.13 First, there were the majority of the websites that were primarily informational, and which aimed to disseminate local information, including Council agendas, discussion papers, and minutes via the Web. This group of websites had limited interactivity, with a discussion forum being the most sophisticated activity, allowing an exchange of views, but with no clear statement of what will be done with the views, or how they may influence policy.

Sites that enhance democratic participation

5.14 The second group aimed to enhance democratic participation, and sought to link the views of citizens to local government, in a way that should clearly indicate that there was a feedback loop which convinces citizens that their views have been heard, and indicates how the views have impacted on policy development. This type specifically related to the pilot project and to the ODPM's www.e-democracy.gov.uk projects,

5.16 A recent report for the British Council in Germany produced a typology of participatory activities:

E-Participation Formats: Moderated, Synchronised Online Chat; Thematically Open, Un-moderated Discussion Forum; Thematically Defined, Un-moderated Discussion Forum; Moderated Online Dialogue with Thematically Fixed Objectives; Thematically Defined Online Survey; Comment Function; Political Simulation / Scenario Modelling; Online Petition; Online Voting; Online Rating; Direct Online Dialogue per E-mail or Contact Form; Community-Editing; Community-Builder; Campaign Platform; Digital Signature Collection ( POL- DI. NET, 2006).

5.17 In such activities there are questions that need to be answered so that democratic participation is legitimised. For example:

• are the respondents local citizens;
• are the respondents representative of the local demographics; and
• are the debates on a website being undertaken in a consensual manner that allows conflict resolution to be undertaken?

5.18 For example, the ODPM project in Barnsley (Turner, 2004b) focused on "the number of 'hits' on relevant web pages within the system to assess the level of citizen access to the system." They wanted to identify "the number of citizen contacts with them that can be directly attributed to the system". In addition, they noted that it was difficult to provide a benchmark, because there is "currently limited formal monitoring of public engagement in the Council's democratic process, other than recording public attendance at Area Forum meetings".

5.19 Guidance provided by Bristol City Council (O'Malley, 2004) stressed: "Develop indices that are relevant to the goals of the project. This is made much easier by formulating goals in specific terms. Possible indices include numbers of people reached; diversity of people reached; range and depth of suggestions received; influence on decision-making or policy".

5.20 However, while some websites focused on relevant metrics, others did not. The ODPM's Reading (Stoves and Thomas, 2004) project suffered from limited evaluation quantitatively, relying more on qualitative measures such as "the ease of use PortalMaster, and ease of navigation of the main Reading 2020 website". For the Wolverhampton ODPM project (Turner, 2004a), there were "no current benchmarks to measure the project success against", but they did aim to address "the benefits for citizens, the impact on practice and how the process works". The web usage statistics for the pilot project are examined in chapter three, but we would include this project in the group that did not focus on relevant and robust measures and metrics.

Organically developed participatory websites

5.21 The third group originated from websites that were largely informational, but which were low-cost initiatives that were developed organically (from the grass roots) to embrace participatory activities. Such websites included: Baldernock, Balfron, Broughty Ferry and Dennistoun in our inventory of websites.

Exploration of three examples

5.22 Three examples of websites were studied in more depth, focussing particularly on their aims and objectives, key characteristics and functionality. The following table 5.1 provides an overview of the three example websites and some of their key characteristics. They are then explored in turn below.

Table 5.1 Website comparison

Source: ECOTEC (2006)

5.23 The first example was from a website that is hosting some CCs in the Strathclyde area:

Strathclyde example

"The [web]site was established in 1999. It provides access to Council information, minutes, news, local directory information, and has a discussion forum. Individual Community Councils can edit their own pages. Website usage is monitored constantly by a web statistics script, and in recent months there were over 15,000 visits a month, though this was not classified. The funding required is minimal, and the local resident who established the [web]site pays for the hosting costs, and some sponsorship and advertising revenue is obtained". ³³

'Your Community Council'

5.24 The second comparator, 'Your Community Council' ( YCC) was funded by West Lothian, and 37 CCs have websites through this initiative ( YCC, 2006).

"Your Community Council was created by the West Lothian Association of Community Councils to promote the work of member organisations throughout West Lothian - in turn making them more accountable and accessible to local people. The [web]site was devised on the councils' behalf by The PR Store and Oldhand Media of Bo'ness and is hosted by Xcalibre Communications in Livingston, West Lothian".

5.25 A quick search through a selection of the YCC websites identified a very uneven level of activity, with no clear participatory function. An exchange of emails with Adrian Mahoney (The PR Store) produced the following information:

"When I last looked we were getting about 1000 unique visitors a month. Our total budget for phase one - partly down to our pro-bono support - has been just £2500 approx ... and this includes posters/leaflets. West Lothian Council subsequently gave the £3000 for phase two. The [web]site is designed to make it very easy to add on extra communities - as each area is a copy of the same microsite. It just takes a little bit of development time. Once live, each community can then use the content management system to upload their info. We do have a discussion forumwww.yourcommunitycouncil.co.uk/forum. This is aimed at community councils for the time being. To save money, we used an off-the-shelf PHP open-source forum. [The] cost of setting it up was £100. (It also hosts documents). We met our basic objective of getting community councils online and encouraging them to be open and responsive to the public."

'The Local Channel'

5.26 The third comparator was 'The Local Channel' (Local, 2006a), one of three companies owned by the Local Government Services Association. It states:

" For councils or community based organisations there are no initial set up costs, license fees or ongoing hosting costs required - it is all free of charge" ( LGSA, 2006).

5.27 The service states:

" The Local Channel is a national network of 23,000 community websites templated across the UK at the first tier of Government. The [web]sites are provided free to communities and there are additional free services offered".

5.28 The business model for the 'Local Channel' was predominantly an advertising revenue stream:

" Revenues are raised through both national and local advertising within the portal reaching appropriate, targeted and real audiences. A percentage of the advertising revenue is then paid back to the local communities" (Appligenics, 2004). "10% Cash back from The Local Channel from advertising shown to your community" (Local, 2006b).

5.29 The service also provided the embedded production of statistics:

" The Local Channel can report statistics on how your website is being viewed and used so that you can encourage greater activity in the lesser used parts of the [web]site" (Local, 2006C).

5.30 The 'Local Channel' maintains a rich set of support pages ³⁴, and the construction and development of a website was clearly outlined in the documentation.

Summary

5.31 There are several potential sources of advice for a CC that may wish to 'go alone' in website development. The 'Your Community Council' example indicates that a local organisation can undertake coordinated, and relatively low-cost, developments, but the take-up is uneven, and the functionality of the websites is more oriented to information delivery. The 'Local Channel' was the most interesting comparator, because it presents a CC with a zero-cost financial investment model, requiring only the investment of time by those developing the websites. It also offers some, if not all, of the functionality required by the councillors, such as discussion forums and document sharing. Both of these examples were operating on a much larger scale than the current pilot project.

5.32 Given the outputs and impacts of the pilot project (including the fact that further significant development appears to be required), it appears to be a relatively high-cost initiative that shed little new light on the ambitious aims to raise participation, and to enhance local democracy. The emergence of low-cost approaches now seems attractive, since if expectations are not met there is little direct finance that would need to be provided by potential funders. The case studies have also demonstrated that, despite potential reservations with respect to advertising, a revenue generating model is also worth exploration in the community sphere.

5.33 Continuing the funding of the pilot project at the same levels of before would now seem to be an expensive option while there are workable alternatives on the market. Instead, combining the unique aspects of the pilot project with some of the benefits of these alternative models may be a way forward.

5.34 5.34 At the very least, the Scottish Executive should require any future request for funding CC (and similar) websites, to provide a quantified and reasoned critique as to why other models, noted above, would not provide a satisfactory basis for development.

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