Citizen Engagement in ICT Design: The Challenge - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 124

and services for the public. One costly consequence is the wastage associ-
ated with 'reinventing the wheel'. Many conscientious members of staff in
local councils and elsewhere are doing their best to engage the public
without the benefit of a framework and appropriate tools and techniques to
support them.
7.1.6 High Perceived Costs
While some of the barriers identified above relate to lack of awareness
about the need for, or the appropriate processes for citizen engagement, a
barrier for those who are contemplating citizen engagement can be the per-
ception that it is a costly exercise. There is evidence that this perception
does indeed discourage designers from pursuing user involvement in ICT
developments (e.g. Sims 2003).
There is no doubt that effective citizen engagement is likely to be time-
consuming and expensive. For example, recruiting people to participate in
trials of products or systems, or in consultation exercises, requires careful
design of the trial or exercise, careful selection of the sample of people to
be involved, detailed consultation with a range of stakeholders to set up the
processes and so on. Achieving longer term participation in a citizen panel
is even more difficult. Accessing certain 'hard to hear' groups (e.g. the
disabled, the elderly, young people etc.) in society presents particular chal-
lenges which have been explored in some depth in Chapter 5. To address
the difficulties successfully demands both expertise and experience rele-
vant to each group and, desirably, a 'champion' from within the participat-
ing group. However if care is taken to develop good relations with user
groups, then unseen advantages can be achieved. Eisma et al. (2004) re-
port: “ one lady (a project participant) was very pleased to speak on behalf
of older users at a seminar for Scottish Industry … another user volun-
teered to administer one of the project's questionnaires to her contacts ”.
The resource implications of such engagement activities are consider-
able. Earlier discussion noted the need for people with the relevant skills to
undertake the engagement process, and also for cultural and structural
changes in organisations to promote and accommodate engagement. Addi-
tionally, as mentioned earlier, there will be new and different roles and
functions to define. For instance, it may be important to blend the tradi-
tional skills of the designer with some of those of the market researcher or
customer service staff. New policies and procedures to ensure that en-
gagement becomes a routine part of planning and design projects will also
be necessary. These and other such changes take time, and rely on careful
planning, implementation and stakeholder involvement to be successful.