Online consultation

From DoWire Wiki

A participant had the following questions about online consultations strategies:

1. are these 'designed' outreach exercises, i.e. like focus groups?
   1. For us (Dialogue by Design) all consultation exercises need to be properly designed. At the moment people seem to be seduced by the idea that you can just stick a consultation on a website without making clear who should do it or what it is designed to achieve, and expect people to participate. They don't - which is why online forums and chatrooms and so on being somewhat random are less effective than properly designed processes.
2. are these legally mandated feedback from the public at large before a major decision?
   1. It depends: sometimes they are legally mandated; sometimes they are an exploration of opinion before decisions are taken; sometimes they can be to generate creative ideas at a very early stage. Not all consultation needs to be reactive.
3. how are participants validated/filtered?´´
   1. Stakeholder identification, analysis and recruitment is an essential part of the design process. How you do it depends on what you want to achieve. For example, do you want a representative cross-section of public opinion; the views of key stakeholders who represent nobody but themselves; or a group of experts who are bringing deep knowledge to something? It's a design question again, and everybody should be wary of anyone who proclaims there is a 'right' way and 'wrong' way to identify and involve participants: it depends, again, on what you want to achieve.

Someone wants an option of having a low level of involvement. In the other case, he is afraid of receiving lots of unwanted stuff, after joining a mailing list.