Citizen Engagement in Practice - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 63

published examples of citizen participation/engagement explicitly in the
design and shaping of ICT. Although we found many such examples, the
scope of citizen involvement has tended to be rather limited. For instance,
there are many cases where citizens have been given the opportunity to de-
sign web pages, or to specify their needs of a website. We have included
just one example of this type of engagement in favour of describing cases
where the engagement has a broader focus, addressing ICT in the context
of social and community needs and contributing in some way towards de-
sirable digital futures.
4.4.1 Bundestag Website Design - Germany
This case provides an example of a consultative exercise carried out with
citizens by the Bundestag - the German parliament. The objective of the
consultation was to inform design of the national government website. The
respondents were self-selecting. Their names were sourced from four mail-
ing lists containing names of people who were interested in the work of the
parliament and who wished to receive regular e-mails informing them
about new developments. This gave an address pool of approximately
twenty thousand individuals.
The project used ICT for online consultation to find out what informa-
tion, functionalities and content offerings citizens of the German
Bundestag would like to see provided. “ The aim was to gain better knowl-
edge of the desires and criticisms expressed by users of the Bundestag's
website so as to be able to optimise the site's content based on this infor-
mation ” (Fühles-Ubach 2005).
The process used open ended questions. Two phases of development
were used, with feedback of findings from the first round given to partici-
pants who then had the opportunity to participate in response to these.
There were 493 participants in the first phase and 345 in the second phase.
At the end of the project, 242 participants responded to a short question-
naire evaluating the whole participatory process itself (Fühles-Ubach
2005).
This process of citizen engagement was regarded by the Bundestag as
highly successful, and resulted in numerous new suggestions from citizens
that could not have been identified by the previously-used methods of sim-
ple questionnaire surveys. “ The intention with these methods is to prompt
the target groups concerned into an active dialogue which then also helps
shape the planning and implementation of processes in whose progress
they are interested or even involved ” (Fühles-Ubach 2005).