OurSay.org
The following has been contributed by OurSay.org co-founders, Matthew Gordon and Eyal Halamish.
OURSAY.ORG IS AN INDEPENDENT DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT organisation revitalising democratic participation in Australia. OurSay works by inviting a leader inside an organisation such as a large business, university or government department to create online forums where communities can post a question or idea, vote and comment on submissions. The most popular submissions are then put to this person in power to be answered publicly either on film or at an event. The centralised moderation of public input and the innovative linking of social media to a physical engagement event is what drives OurSay.
In 2012 Hepburn Shire decided to create a four-year plan for the future direction of the council and looked for a new way to increase public participation. This led, in February 2013, to OurSay facilitating a project with the Hepburn Shire Council called ‘What’s the Big Idea?’ The Hepburn Shire Council promised that the top 10 democratically chosen ideas from the forum would be addressed on a night where the community, councillors and council officers would come together to negotiate the key themes to incorporate into the council plan. This important event occurred on March 26 in 2013.
This led Chris, who received a notification of the project with his council rate notice, to jump in his truck to make it to the meeting in Yandoit, a hamlet with a population of 308 on the northern outskirts of Hepburn Shire, 128 kilometres north of Australia’s second largest city of Melbourne. Chris didn’t know it yet, but about 15 others were showing up that night and this was one of 6 town hall meetings held around his community where citizens were asked what their big idea was for the future of the shire. The road network at Hepburn Shire had always frustrated Chris and the seemingly ever-growing false promises and lack of accountability of government, locally and beyond, meant he was on his last tether. ‘Heck, this is probably going to be a waste of time, but I’ll give them a piece of my mind,’ he had said to himself. At the local mechanics institute hall, Chris found himself among slick inner-city consultants milling around with the familiar faces of locals and neighbours who had each arrived with their issue in hand such as starting a new bus service for the hamlet or axing the annual junket to the shire’s sister city in China. Chris chimed in, ‘We need to fix the narrow shoulder on Daylesford-Newstead Road and clear the hanging branches where the bridge crosses Yandoit creek. I blew a tyre on my truck last week and it cost me $400 bucks. It makes you wonder why you even go to work!’ There was a pause, as the slick inner-city consultant looked vacant. ‘Do you even know where I’m talking about, mate?’
Two days later, in another township, this time to the west of the shire, a similar meeting was being held. This time, a group of well-informed, well-meaning citizens attended and politely explained how they would like the shire to fund a $25 million aquatic centre for their town of 3500 residents. Like all the town hall meetings hosted that week, people passionate about issues relating to the future of the shire were encouraged to register and promote their idea on an OurSay.org web forum set-up to prioritise ideas from the community.
After a full week of meeting Hepburn’s most passionate and highly involved citizens, the OurSay team had managed to encourage 50 residents to register their ideas on the web forum and then find as many people as possible to vote for their ideas. They were promised that if their idea ranked in the 10 most voted for ideas, it would inform the council’s four year plan and influence the direction of council. What happened next, was amazing.
After three weeks, the forum swelled to over 250 ideas coming from all ends of the shire, with 10 ideas emerging that were not merely important to any one individual or ratepayer but to the entire community. But the top 10 did not include the new aquatic centre, Chris’s idea to repair the narrow shoulder, or the axing of the annual junket to China. Instead, the community moderated and self-selected 10 big ideas such as creating a more family friendly and connected Shire; establishing a fair and equitable framework for rates and services; and transforming Hepburn into a net-energy producer using renewable energy technology. More than 10 per cent of ratepayers were involved in the process, leading to a broad level of awareness, understanding and satisfaction with the direction of council, as defined by the community. The web forum wrapped up with a ‘Conference of big ideas’ — a final town hall event where citizens participating in the web forum were invited to hear council officers and Councillors respond to the top 10 ideas. After two hours of sensible discussion, Chris from Yandoit came up to one of the facilitators and said, ‘Listen, I drove down here today thinking this was probably going to be a waste of my time. I’ve posted my idea for better roads on your online forum, but now I’ve seen my votes probably should have gone to the idea about childcare. I got grand kids, you see?’
Right now, governments are bamboozled by the use of social and collaborative mediums as a form of community engagement. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are now mainstream globally, and citizens are accustomed to the immediacy, interactivity and casual tone of social media. Businesses and governments recognise that these tools create valuable strategic opportunities to engage consumers and citizens in decision-making, but are challenged by the expectations of authenticity, timeliness and openness that social media channels command. This leaves operators in local government deciding between the benefits, and the risks that social media engagement will bring, such as negative reputation, loss of control, transparency and accountability of decision making. But while these are difficult decisions for local government democracies to make, doing nothing is the riskiest strategy of all. The challenge is cultural, not technical. Technology just makes a good process work well and on scale, as citizens’ demand and command control of the public policy environment.
When reviewing this project with Hepburn Council’s executive team, I inquired about how they felt during the process. Their answers:: stressed, because the strategy required them to share control with the community and this opened up their organisation to reputational risk; fascinated, because they could gain immediate insights from the community and see the community interacting on ideas typically dealt with by the council; and focused, because for the first time, citizens were recognising and understanding the complex trade-offs government decision makers need to make all the time. For a short time, everyone was on the same complex, muddy page. Sometimes leaders are just as confused as their followers. Why not share that complexity and frustration with citizens? Effective engagement using new tools like OurSay can help city leaders share dilemmas with community, promote local solutions and ideas and ultimately, build support for the decisions that need to be made.