The document discusses two digital democracy exercises run by the UK government over the summer: Your Freedom and the Spending Challenge. Your Freedom allowed citizens to share and rate ideas online, receiving 500,000 visitors who contributed 15,000 ideas and 97,000 comments. The Spending Challenge had citizens propose and rate ideas for government savings, receiving 250,000 visitors and 43,000 ideas. Both exercises saw high engagement levels and spikes at launch but also crashed due to lack of server capacity. The government identified 3 ideas from the exercises to implement, costing a total of £25,000. Lessons learned included investing in server capacity and creating a compact participation process with defined timelines.

1. Part 1: Adventures in digital democracy @DelibThinks

2. Chris Lopez - Flickr What I did last summer Whilst I’d planned a 4 week road trip across the vineyards of France . . . Me in a vineyard

3. But new gov wrecks my holiday! Chris Lopez - Flickr The new Coalition government decide to run 2 different mass participation exercises over the summer.

4. Your Freedom explained Chris Lopez - Flickr The Your Freedom crowd-sourcing site allowed uses to share ideas Add ideas Search via tags Read and rate ideas

5. What people were saying Chris Lopez - Flickr ` There was a mix of general popularist ideas, together with useful niche actionable ideas.

7. What happened (in stats) Chris Lopez - Flickr On launch the site saw a massive spike in traffic on day one, and generally high-levels of engagement. 90,000 visits on day 1 1/5th of all participation. High levels of engagement

8. Massive spike + high participation Chris Lopez - Flickr Over 700,000 page views on day 1, and 4.2 million page views across campaign. 700,000 page views on Day 1.

9. How we generated such volumes Chris Lopez - Flickr A mix of launch PR, social media buzz, together with RSS content syndication across partner sites. RSS widget Embedded in key sites.

10. What happened in practice Chris Lopez - Flickr Due to spikes in traffic, in the first few days the site crashed - due to lack of server capacity.

11. Insights into the Spending Challenge Chris Lopez - Flickr The Spending Challenge used our Dialogue App - re-skinned to tackle this specific issue. Same format as Your Freedom

13. What people were saying Chris Lopez - Flickr Uses could rate . . . comment on . . . And tag The most useful ideas added were niche ideas. Beyond these there were lots of more general (and quite political) ideas like “Pull out of Afghanistan”.

15. Spending Challenge (in stats) Chris Lopez - Flickr The Spending Challenge had even higher levels of engagement compared to Your Freedom: over 15 page views and over 9 minutes on the site. Spikes related to launch of the 2 phases High engagement

17. . . . so what did this all cost? Chris Lopez - Flickr £25,000 total £0.45 per idea £0.03 per citizen The costs involved in running these processes was about £25k between them (N.B. certain server and design costs were shared)

19. Chris Lopez - Flickr + make sure it doesn’t clash with your holiday!

20. Part 2: Vision

21. An extreme vision of the future

22. A more practical vision: “Government as a participative platform” Chris Lopez - Flickr A more practical and achievable vision for government is the concept of “government as a platform” - where government can be fed ideas from relevant sources at relevant times via a layer of apps .

23. Part 3: turning vision into reality

24. UK’s *Citizen Space* 3-layer model Chris Lopez - Flickr UK government have developed Citizen Space - based around a 3 layer model: organising layer, engagement layer and understanding layer. The core aimed at get ting the basics right, so you can innovate on top.

27. Who uses Citizen Space Chris Lopez - Flickr 30+ Local and central government, to NGOs (like BBC), and it’s now being taken up by government in Australia

29. 1: Organise consultations Chris Lopez - Flickr All consultation information in one place

30. 2. Consult on complex policy documents Chris Lopez - Flickr Structure your consultation with as many sections as you like. For lengthy documents, divide into Chapters, and let people consult on specific sections Indication of whether you’ve responded to a Chapter or not

31. 3. Filter + analyse responses Chris Lopez - Flickr Filter response and create Cross-tabs of results, to dig In-depth into results. Export data for reporting and Further analysis.

33. Part 4: DIY digital democracy

35. 1) Get the basics right Chris Lopez - Flickr Implement some basic *consultation infrastructure* like Citizen Space to ensure you get the basics right.

36. 2) Innovate Chris Lopez - Flickr Once you’ve got the basics right, innovation (the exciting bit) is easy! Especially as there’s lots of low-cost tools available to use - e.g. Delib’s Dialogue App.

37. 3) Do it. It’s easy - and it works! Chris Lopez - Flickr Running citizen dialogues is really easy - even at a local level. It’s also a pretty cheap thing to do. For example Delib’s Dialogue app costs $8,000 a year, and you can run as many dialogues as you’d like. Broad age of participants Hyper-local Participation

39. www.Delib.co.uk www.CitizenSpace.com www.Dialogue-App.com [email_address] @DelibThinks