Achieving a Culture of Participation and Engagement - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 189

sharing. This should reduce some of the duplication of effort currently in
evidence. For example, the move towards local e-government in the UK
means that every local council is having to discover for itself how to en-
courage citizens to use e-services, and especially how to reach the 'hard to
hear'. This is wasteful and unproductive as there is considerable well-
established practice and knowledge available; Lisl Klein captures the
essence of the issue: “ the challenge is to produce forms of institution-
alization that provide appropriate opportunities for development and
guard against inflexible and inappropriate application, but do not require
everybody to rediscover the wheel ” (Klein 1976). Sharing available
knowledge as described in section 10.2.1 could cut down some of the un-
necessary effort and reduce costs.
10.2 The Rewards for Changing the Focus of ICT Design
Achieving the shift in ICT design to embrace wider design principles and
citizen contributions will bring important and valuable rewards. In Chapter
3, we describe the high level functions and drivers for citizen engagement.
Some of these, e.g. narrowing the digital divide, increasing social inclusion
and enhancing democracy and citizenship, are benefits for society as a
whole. Others however bring rewards directly to those involved in ICT de-
sign and implementation, and indirectly to everyone else. These include:
1. an enriched knowledge base and pool of resources;
2. improved systems and services (i.e. better matched to citizen/user
needs);
3. faster adoption and more widespread use;
4. reduction in the risk of error or failure.
10.2.1 Enriched Knowledge Base
A significant benefit of the proposed shift in ICT design is the expanded
knowledge base that will become available to inform the entire design and
decision process. This will come in part from the integration of knowledge
from two particular domains. Earlier chapters have referred to two parallel
universes of discourse and activity, namely the ICT design domain on the
one hand and the public participation domain on the other. Both domains
are characterized by significant human endeavour, which has led in each
case to a considerable literature of published knowledge and information.
Both domains consume significant amounts of public funds through