facilitation procedures for written online deliberation cyril velikanov (moscow)...
TRANSCRIPT
What kind of deliberation? Open participation in policy-making Potentially very large number of participants
(thousands or more) Every «deliberation room» devoted to
discussing a well-delimited subject-matter, or solving a well-specified problem
Participants' contributions may contain not only opinions, but also proposals
The goal is to converge a large number of initial proposals and opinions toward a limited number (say, 2 to 5) of final proposals («crystallisation»)
What kind of deliberation? (2) Online deliberation using a dedicated platform Only in written; asynchronous (no «chat»);
slow, thoughtful progression in problem solving Only «qualified opinion» counts; i.e. participants
should first acquire relevant information (provided presumably by experts in the field)
Self-regulation: no external staff of moderators or «facilitators» - Why?― Because mass participation would require a large
staff of facilitators, with their internal organisation...― Because many potential participants would not trust
those external facilitators and their organisation...
Deliberation within eParticipation Online deliberation is thus considered a central
stage of an eParticipation campaign Preceded by the steps of
Specifying the subject matter (either top-down, or bottom-up in a kind of «preliminary deliberation»)
Providing starting information package by experts(Who appoints or selects those experts?)
Leaving time for participants to study those expert surveys (A test or exam at the end, or no control?)
and followed by the steps of Final editing of final proposals Voting on final proposals (or their submission to...)
Problems with mass eDeliberation Thousands of active participants will post
thousands of contributions (opinions, proposals, comments...) - What to do with «crowd buzz»?
Solution: contributions need to be grouped according to their ideas or intent, and also ranked according to their quality
- by whom? By participants themselves. How to achieve impartiality of their appraisals?
How to combat «mob attacks» by a large number of «last minute participants»?
The opposite danger is «oligarchic ruling»
Problems with eDeliberation (2) A new participant posts a brilliant proposal —
how to make it noticed? («unknown genius») More generally, how to achieve that every
contribution is read and appraised by at least some among the participants?
How to combat creation of non-communicating groups, each group reading and commenting only their own writings?
Many participants would post contributions without reading those of others — how to impel them to read and appraise at large?
Problems with eDeliberation (3) Clearly, we need to install a system of
incentives for participants, gratifying them for their activity, fairness, purposefulness,... What kind of incentives would work? How those incentives could address specific participants as physical persons, not just as virtual beings?
Registering anonimously? Or, under real names? Or, under pseudonyms?
How to protect authorship of contributors? How to combat creation of fake participants?
By using controlled registration?
OUR SOLUTION
Pseudonymity and authorship Controlled registration under pseudonyms, e.g.
by using national register of ID card numbers, or certified registration agents
Obtaining a digital signature key at registration time; participant then uses it to sign every his/her deliberative action (increased responsibility, proof of authorship)
However, as we will see later, non-controlled registration would not lead to a disaster—because efficiently maintaining in parallel several fake participants «in good standing» would become too time-consuming
Mutual moderation and appraisal (1) We introduce 3 parameters on which a
contribution can be appraised by a participant: Acceptability – more or less formal rules Quality – an “intrinsic” informal characteristic Degree of agreement (of an appraiser with
opinions/ideas contained in the contribution) –a fully subjective judgment
Acceptability is to be assessed by one moderator, randomly selected from among the participants. No external moderators!
The other two parameters result from the contribution appraisal
Mutual moderation and appraisal (2) To enforce objectivity, (and combat creation of
“claques” by the authors) we introduce obligatory appraisal (= peer review) of contributions by randomly selected participants
To preserve openness, we invite other participants to make their discretionary appraisal of those contributions they have read
Quality grades assigned by discretionary appraisers count separately (and probably less than those assigned by peer reviewers)
Both the quality and the agreement grades are numeric values e.g. in the range from -3 to +3
Moderation and arbitration Every new contribution is subject to an
acceptability check (“moderation”). Acceptability is checked against a predefined set of more or less formal rules. Hence, it can be done by just one moderator.
Moderators are selected among participants themselves at random per each contribution
A moderator’s decision can be contested – by the author if unduly rejected, or by other participant(s) if unduly accepted
In such a case, arbitration is performed by 3 arbiters randomly selected among participants
Obligatory Quality Appraisal (1) If accepted, a contribution is then submitted to 3
appraisers, randomly selected among participants. This is the obligatory quality appraisal process, similar to “peer review”, but performed in several stages
Every appraiser must assign to the contribution a quality grade in the range [-3, +3] (and also assign it an agreement grade)
If the average quality grade is positive, then the contribution is further submitted to 1 to 3 additional appraisers (depending on the current average). Otherwise, appraisal process stops (it stops anyway after predefined number of steps)
Obligatory Quality Appraisal (2) As a result, a really good contribution will be
rapidly promoted to the top rank in the list of all contributions, where it would certainly be read by many or most of the participants,
…while the appraisal of a poor contribution would not take too much effort from the participants’ community.
In this way the “unknown genius” problem will be solved in most cases.
Unfairly low quality grades, assigned by one or more appraisers, can be contested, giving rise to an arbitration procedure as above
Participant’s Activity Counters How can we impel participants to perform those
moderation and obligatory appraisal tasks, which are more or less often imposed on them?
The principle is: “Want submitting your own writings? Please read and appraise writings of others”
Two activity counters are defined for every participant: the first counter is incremented with every moderation/appraisal action performed,
...the second is incremented with every own contribution sent. The first count should always be at least 2 x the second (i.e. perform two appraisals per each own contribution submitted)
Participant’s Availability To avoid unnecessary loss of time,
contributions should only be submitted for moderation or appraisal to currently available participants. The best way is to invite participants to notify their availability by themselves.
A participant who wishes to send a contribution, notifies the system about his/her availability, and soon receives one or more contributions for moderation or for quality appraisal
In performing those imposed actions, he/she increases his/her first activity counter, and can now (or later) submit his/her own contribution
Participant’s Trust Count (1) Each participant is also assigned a trust count.
It is incremented by 1 with every non-contested moderation/appraisal action of the participant, and by 2 with every accepted own contribution
It is decremented by 3 with every rejected own contribution, and by 5 with every contested imposed action that has been reversed by an “arbitration court”
Only those participants having their trust count at 10 or more can be selected as arbiters. An arbitration action further increments the arbiter’s trust count by 5
Participant’s Trust Count (2) With the trust count at 10 or more, participant’s
own contributions get “self-moderated”, i.e. sent directly to appraisers
Participants with a negative trust count are banned from sending new contributions (and also are not considered for performing moderation/appraisal actions). They can only passively read. The ban is not definitive, as a negative trust count is gradually compensated with time, up to achieving its initial value, say 1
This trust count procedure would mildly and gradually “teach” participants a more parliamentary behaviour
Discretionary appraisal After having passed the stages of moderation
and obligatory appraisal (or simultaneously with the latter) a contribution is made available to all participants for discretionary appraisal
The discretionary appraisal is quite similar to the obligatory one; it consists in assigning a contribution two distinct grades: its quality level, and the degree of agreement of the appraiser with the ideas expressed in it.
Aggregate characteristics of a contribution resulting from its obligatory and discretionary appraisal should count separately
Ways to promote impartial appraisal Those two parameters should be considered
orthogonal, though in practice a contribution agreed upon would often receive a higher quality grade
One possible method of de-correlating the two parameters consists in assigning heigher weight to appraisal grades of the types <+,– > (good, but disagree) and < –,+ > (bad, though agreeable), than to grades <+,+> and < – , – >
Another way is just to “flag” those participants who assign “correlated grades” much more often than others (maybe also to appropriately decrement their trust count, or put it on vote…)
Ranking and clustering contributions An aggregate quality grade of a contribution is
generated from the set of individual quality grades assigned to it by appraisers; it serves to rank all contributions according to their quality
The overall distribution of agreement grades, assigned by individual appraisers to various contributions, is used by the system to cluster contributions into groups of presumably similar or compatible ones
Participants can therefore see “the best contributions in each cluster”, instead of merely see “the best contributions”
Weight of participant’s voice Some aggregate characteristics of a participant
him/herself can be derived from his/her activity as appraiser and, most importantly, as author (as appraised by others)
We distinguish between a participant’s rating and his/her weight: The first is unbound, the second is limited by some maximum value (both are dynamic, and can also decrease)
Every participant’s vote is weighted, as well as every grade assigned to others’ contributions
In this way, we expect to achieve immunity from “mob attacks”, as voices of «newcomers» would count much less than those of «seniors»
Collaborative Development of Final Proposals
Incentives to participants should be installed: for taking into account critical comments for converging their opinions for creating online working groups to work out
common proposals Procedures should be defined for:
Version management (reassigning appraisal results to a next version)
Authorship preservation and sharing (for common proposals)
Increasing participants’ rating, weight, etc. as a result of collaboration
Collaborative Development of Final Proposals
Hence, the system to be designed will be much more sophisticated than “ordinary” online collaboration tools
Online rewards Every citizen can create his/her “virtual being”, or
“online person”, acting in an “online place” which is an eParticipation forum
The online persons are in one-to-one correspondence with the participating citizens, but the “ownership” of a given online person can be proved by the “owner” and by nobody else
In this way, any reward or merit received by the online person for his/her activity on the forum, will be attributed to the citizen if and when he/she decides to disclose his/her real identity
In contrast, if there were more penalties than rewards (for too biased appraisals, offending contributions, “flooding”, etc), then presumably the citizen would not be interested in uncovering his/her identity
“Real life rewards” “Real rewards” to participating citizens can be both
moral (public esteem and reputation, self-respect, etc) and material, e.g. in a form of “political pay” as in the ancient Athens
Highly scored participants could enjoy preferences when applying to an official position in the “real state”; they could be preferentially nominated by some political parties as their candidates for elections (this does not even require any legislative changes)
Further on, highest scored ones could be considered as elected, if the legislation is appropriately modified
In this way, participants would have “real” interest in acquiring high scores for their online activities, which in turn would serve for raising their sense of responsibility as participants.
Deployment Scenariosfor our online deliberation tool
1. School for future legislators
2. Two-stage referendum
3. Better using the legislative body
4. Expanding the legislative body
5. Replacing existing legislative body
(futuristic)
Scenario 1: School for future legislators
A “nursery” or school for future legislators and politicians, improving their preparation to conduct fair deliberation in real legislative activity.
A workshop for developing new political or social ideas and solutions, by enlarging the circle of participants to people outside established political, academic and administrative bodies.
May be used in school classes as an interactive tool for awakening interest to (and growing awareness of) various social issues,
and also in university / inter-university courses of social sciences.
Can also be seen as a game or contest („selecting the best legislator in the XXX University“...)
Scenario 2: Two-stage referendum
A self-appointed online commission to deliberatively define a set of questions (or options) to be proposed for a (local / national/...) referendum on a given theme. Its members/editors also prepare concise introductory/explanatory material. Optionally, a preliminary vote is held within the commission.
Then, the whole constituency votes on the proposed questions/options. Commission-submitted explanatory material helps other citizens making well-considered choice. Results of the preliminary vote in the online commission may be instructive for showing deliberatively defined preferences.
As an option for further study: citizens who have voluntarily passed an awareness test in the subject matter under consideration, may be assigned a heavier weight of their vote.
Scenario 3: Better using the existing legislative body
Option 1: Online deliberation tool is used within the existing legislative body, thus replacing or enhancing traditional parliamentary committes or ad hoc commissions. Participation is limited to legislators.
Option 2: (1) An open online deliberation forum develops a range of solutions on a given theme or problem, holds a preliminary vote, and submits the results to the legislative body (similar to the Scenario 2 for two-stage referendum). Participation is open to every citizen.
(2) The legislative body may further deliberate, and then takes a binding decision by (internal) vote.
Options 1 and 2 may coexist, i.e. some questions may undergo intra-parliamentary online deliberation only, while for other ones a large public online deliberation is first launched (followed or not by further internal parliamentary deliberation and/or vote).
Scenario 4: Expanding the existing legislative body
Open online deliberative thematic committees are created ad hoc by the existing legislative body, or via some ePetition means. Such an online committee deliberates as in other scenarios, but the members of the legislative body have larger rights (e.g. as moderators and/or editors), while everybody has the same „creative“ right (i.e. the right to propose a solution).
As for the final vote, it may be held :
Option 1: within the legislative body (i.e. excluding the “lay” participants). This option remains compatible with current national constitutions.
Option 2: including both legislators and lay citizens (though legislators may be given e.g. 100 times voting weight of a lay participant). This option implies changes into current national constitutions, in order to incorporate non-legislator voices into binding parliamentary votes.
Scenario 5 (futuristic): Replacing existing legislative body
This is a further, more radical development of Scenario 4.
It consists in:
- abolishing today‘s legislative body of „universal representatives“ elected for several years and for all legislative areas,
- and replacing it with a flexible system of open ad hoc committees where the „best participants“ advance towards a status of „would-be representatives“ owing to support of their current deliberative actions granted by other participants.
Such a development would indeed require deep changes to existing national laws and constitutions.
It could only be considered after years of successful experiments on a lesser scale, along the lines of Scenarios 1 to 4, or like.
CONCLUSIONS (1) An eParticipation forum should be populous
in order to be sufficiently representative. To populate it, we need motivated and
responsible citizens. This kind of people would appear on the
forum only if it is legally recognised as producing binding decisions, rather than simply consultative ones
BECAUSE responsible citizens wouldn’t participate in a powerless institution
CONCLUSIONS (2)
However, in order to be able to achieve such legal recognition, specific mechanisms and procedures for mass eParticipation should be well-studied, specified, implemented and tuned, to gain acceptance as really democratic ones
We firmly believe that only in this way participative (deliberative) democracy would become a reality