Digital Forums for Remote Policy-Making

Foreword

The following is an 'Executive Summary' (1151 words) 0f the dissertation 'Digital Forums for Policy Making' by Guillermo Pablos Murphy. The dissertation's planning, research, and writing was undertaken between September 2023 and April 2024 as part of a Master of Arts degree in International Relations at the University of Glasgow.

This research was presented at the Political Studies Association UK (PSA) 2024 Undergraduate Conference on the 12th of April 2024 and is due to be presented at the PSAI-PDD conference 'Cross-border Transformations - Deliberation and Participation in Constitutional Politics' in Dublin, Ireland on the 9th of August.

The full paper (10,740 words) is available for download here:

Guillermo Pablos Murphy has also recorded a podcast about this research.

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Introduction

Digital organizations lack a clear method to collectively consult their community. Digital communities often use crude, time-consuming methods for collective decision-making. These methods do not use members’ time effectively, do not reach resolutions efficiently, and often generate division instead of consensus. Relevant literature suggests that by organizing existing digital tools around a formal forum, we can build spaces for genuine collaborative decision-making. This research tackled the problem of using existing digital spaces for collective policymaking and tested a formal forum process using existing digital tools for collaborative decision-making.

I collaborated with Tela Network to undertake this research.  Tela Network is a remote network for professional collaboration with a mission to protect and reward human attention through the Tela messaging app (tela.app). Tela Network has an interest in digital processes that platforms can use to consult their network on policy decisions. Tela wants to construct a platform that its users can influence.

Design

To address the policy problem, this research designed a deliberative exercise to be hosted on an existing digital platform with the objectives of facilitating participation, being perceived as democratic, and enabling consensus. Consequently, the research question is: To what extent can a digital forum for policy making facilitate participation, be perceived as democratic, and enable consensus? The deliberative exercise was designed as a formal procedure for discussing policy solutions to ‘Challenges’. It was designed to be hosted on an existing digital forum with features such as ‘Posts’, ‘Comments’, and ‘Likes’.  The exercise lasted eight days, with seven days for proposing and discussing solutions, and a final twenty-four hours to choose between the three most popular proposals.

To empirically evaluate the prototype, two tests were run on two private communities on ‘reddit.com’.

Key Findings

The tests ran successfully. Participants critically engaged with policy problems and each other’s proposals and voted on a resolution. Regarding the research question, the study empirically demonstrated the digital forum’s success in facilitating participation and being perceived as democratic. Furthermore, the digital forum succeeded in enabling consensus, although this success is comparatively tentative, with participants reporting mild feelings of consensus around resolutions.

Features

This report highlights some features of the forum exercise that the researcher believes contributed to its success in facilitating participation, being perceived as democratic, and enabling consensus. They are listed in no specific order.

Successful Features

1. Framing the forum around a clearly defined challenge. The discussions were about a specific issue, not a general question or hypothetical. The ‘Challenges’ used in the tests implied a specific, existing problem that participants could focus on: ‘How should the democracies tackle low voter turnout among young people?’ and ‘How should digital networks regulate their users’ speech?’. A third ‘Challenge’ that did not receive enough volunteers to form a group with asked ‘How should digital platforms implement a ‘legal due’  process?’. It’s failure to point at a specific problem may explain its lack of popularity.
2. Using an existing platform. Reddit.com’s user interface allowed participants to interact with each other and simulate a deliberative process using familiar and well-tested features.
3. Scheduling the exercise to last 8 days on a digital platform that was accessible 24/7. Given the choice between a longer or shorter duration for the process they engaged in, participants expressed a slight preference for an even longer duration of the exercise, but there was general approval of the chosen length.
4. Developing materials that served as marketing and reference materials. Studies suggested that providing moderated support facilitated participation. These marketing materials doubled as that support: a blog article, social media posts, an information webpage, a poster for public display screens, and printed flyers. In addition, infographics, screenshots of the forum with visual guides, summary diagrams of the process, and detailed guides on how to engage with the forum’s user interface were emailed to participants during the study.

Furthermore, the findings suggest that some features were less successful in facilitating participation, engendering a perception of the process as democratic, and enabling consensus. They are listed below in no specific order.

Less Successful Features

1. Relying solely on text exchanges for deliberation. Expressing ideas clearly and concisely is time-consuming, and deliberating over public text exchanges is slow and can feel pointless.
2. Suggesting that participants ‘Edit’ their proposals. The support materials suggested that participants should ‘Edit’ their proposals to reflect the discussions they generated. With posts competing for upvotes, the researcher hoped that edits would allow ideas to be compounded and proposals to be collectively constructed. This did not prove to be the case during the tests. No proposals were edited.
3. A final poll lasting 24 hours to vote on the preferred proposal. There was very limited turnout for the final polls, with less than a third of participants in each test casting their votes. Further study is needed to conclusively determine whether the time window was too short or whether such a feature is redundant.

Recommendations

Based on the above insights, I suspect that future deliberative forums will either be broad and shallow, which I will call ‘Consultative’, or narrow and deep, ‘Deliberative.’

A ‘Consultative’ forum has a large cohort of participants with a stake in the outcome but with no incentive or desire to spend large amounts of time exchanging reasons and coming up with solutions themselves. The main function of a ‘Consultative’ forum is to consult the population for approval or disapproval of policy or minor aspects of policy. A forum of this kind may include a large number of policy ‘points’ that participants can answer in the form of a ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’. This forum does not need to be run for long periods of time. The ‘Consultative’ forum therefore narrows the forum into a series of micro-decisions, essentially a series of referenda, out of which policymakers can determine popular legitimacy and support for aspects of policy. Such a process has already been implemented in Taiwan with Pol.is for country-wide consultation.

A ‘Deliberative’ forum has a smaller, motivated cohort of participants with a stake in the outcome and the incentive and desire to dedicate time and energy to the exchange of ideas and the compromise of perspectives. The main function of a ‘Deliberative’ forum is to create a digital space and formal process for traceable and transparent policy deliberation. A forum of this kind should involve methods of communication other than public texts. This forum should last at least a week but could be longer.

Both of these forums should address the successful features and less successful ones identified in this study. Future iterations could experiment with implementing Tela’s ‘monetize your inbox’ mechanism, where the commenter, upvoter, and post-er must make a micropayment alongside the in-forum action. Hopefully, this would reinforce careful behavior. Furthermore, incorporating both 'Consultative' and 'Deliberative' forums during the development of policy would allow a network's more invested cohort to lay out acceptable policy options, before opening the process for consultation with the wider network membership.

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