Citizen Engagement in Practice - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 49

rather in whether the engagement has had some influence on shaping either
the technology, or the sociotechnical context.
Thus, the most important criterion to apply, given the theme of this
topic is the purpose or focus of the engagement process. By far the major-
ity of published examples of citizen engagement initiatives relate to engage-
ment in aspects of public planning or policy making. Some of the most
inspiring examples demonstrate the empowerment of citizens to shape
their own futures, to become “ makers and shapers ” rather than “ users and
choosers ” (Cornwall and Gaventa (2000) cited in Lister 2004). There are
also a number of examples where citizens have been involved in shaping
some aspect or features of a technical system - typically, in creating or in-
fluencing a web site or web pages. Such examples are much narrower in
scope, and are therefore likely to have limited impact or potential impact
on citizens' lives and quality of life than, by contrast, initiatives which en-
gage citizens in shaping their communities or developing national policies.
Rather harder to find have been well-documented examples which com-
bine both types of engagement, i.e. where citizens have been actively en-
gaged in the creation of sociotechnical systems.
The stages in the policy making process and the ICT design process are
actually very similar (Table 4.1). For the purposes of making comparisons
across case studies in both domains we have therefore produced a com-
bined model, as shown in Figure 4.1.

Table 4.1. Comparison of stages in policy making and ICT design process

Policy Making (OECD 2003) ICT Design
Agenda setting Concept specification

Analysis Analysis of requirements

Formulation Design & development of the system

Implementation Implementation

Evaluation and monitoring Evaluation and monitoring

Citizen engagement activities also vary according to a number of other
dimensions. The issue of who is engaged is critical to understanding the
nature of the process and in judging the effectiveness of the outcomes:
what kinds of citizens were involved, how many, and how were they
selected? Then there is the issue of duration - some initiatives are short
term, lasting a few weeks or months; others are longer term initiatives which
may last for several years. Regarding outputs and outcomes, the focus in
published reports tends to be on notable successes whilst scant attention
is generally paid to problems or shortcomings in the engagement process.
Finally an important parameter relates to evaluation - has this been carried