This research is funded by the European Union’s Peace & Reconciliation Fund
Partners:
NIRSA (NUI Maynooth), Letterkenny IT, Queens Belfast.
View contact information.
Go to E-consultation Research Project website
Events:
E-consultation Research Project Workshops
April 7, 2006 @ Letterkenny IT
April 10, 2006 @ NUI Maynooth
April 11, 2006 @ Queens University Belfast
‘Close Out Conference and Exhibition’
HEA Cross border Programme for Research and Education Contributing to Peace and Reconciliation,
April 12, 2006 @ Armagh City HotelView details on HEA website
Report:
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E-consultation is the use of electronic computing and communication technologies in consultation and is complementary to existing consultation mechanisms. It is software used to support human mediation, negotiation and decision-making processes. Our aim is to turn e-consultation in Northern Ireland and the border counties from an experimental idea to a practical option for community, voluntary and public sector bodies. This will strengthen democracy through engaging citizens in governance and improving consultation processes.
Our objectives are:
1. To identify the social context and political implications of electronic forms of consultation and participation in Ireland, North and South.
2. To identify the e-consultation technologies and processes that are most appropriate to the needs of local communities and to determine the best ways to apply these technologies and processes, focussing on the identified needs.
3. To advise, help, study and evaluate at least two electronic consultation exercises over the project period, and report on what has been learned from them.
4. To disseminate the results of our research through an online e-consultation guide and training workshops to help groups develop their awareness of and basic skills in e-consultation.
4 phases
1. Social context, needs assessment and technology matching.
We will map the current use across Ireland, north and south, of consultation levels and forms. This will require a multiscalar approach involving local government, regional bodies and NGO's both local and transnational. The objective is to establish a reliable base line to provide context for the current project. Social mapping techniques will be used as well as more traditional questionnaire methods.
To get an overview of the needs for e-consultation, and the technologies that could be matched to these needs, we need to find out four things:
· The current use of consultation techniques across Ireland
· Needs of social groups consulted
· Needs of organisations involved in consultation
· E-consultation technologies
2. Technology assessment and process design
We will carry out a limited number of experiments with small groups of participants, to evaluate tools and processes developed elsewhere for their suitability to the elicited needs for e-consultation on the Ireland, and their ability to support peace and reconciliation. By the end of this phase we will know which techniques are particularly suited to our context (public sector consultations and community reconciliation in Ireland), and how they may be further modified to meet our needs.
We will carry out small-scale controlled experiments on a range of e-consultation technologies and processes. Volunteers, representing a range of opinions (e.g. from community groups with opposing interests), will be set a consultation task to carry out, and then divided into groups who will use different technologies or no technology at all.
3. A guide to e-consultation
We will synthesise the findings of phases 1 and 2 into an online guide to e-consultation, and other support and advice materials, so that organisations can start to benefit from the research, and disseminate the through workshops.
By this phase we can jointly produce a guide to e-consultation processes and technologies that are (a) based on research, rather than speculation, (b) appropriate to the requirements for consultation in both parts of Ireland and (c) can cope with the degree of conflict found in public sector decision-making and inter-communal deliberation.
4. E-consultation trials and wider feedback
Once the ideas and techniques are better known in Northern Ireland and the border counties, following the workshops under 4, the project will assist in and evaluate a few demonstrations of e-consultation in collaboration with consulting bodies. These will validate the models of best practice and technology developed in the small-scale experiments carried out in phase 3.
A follow-up series of focus groups will seek to derive the political implications of our project. Preliminary results of the study will be fed back to focus groups drawn from communities and relevant policy makers. The concept of e-democracy in the context of citizenship building will be tested, refined and developed in this phase.
Peace & Reconciliation
One of the main focus of this project is on ways to develop reconciliation, mutual understanding and respect between and within communities and traditions. Software can be used to support human mediation, negotiation and decision-making processes. IT can be used to collect issues and needs from many people (e.g. via on-line chats). Other software can be used to map out arguments and possible solutions.
a. Exchanging messages. Allowing communications over physical and psychological distances.
b. Understanding others. Reading of the needs of others, so that even if you don’t agree with them, you begin to understand what is important to them.
c. Creating shared models. In business decision-making, people use software to map out issues and solutions until they come to a shared understanding of the problem. In community consultation, it is unlikely there will be a single shared model, but the software can help map out the areas in which there is agreement, and voting software can discover which options have consensus support.
Potential positive impact of the project -
· An overview and identification of consultation practices on the island as a whole is a necessary component of its social development and will allow for the development of common initiatives on a cross border basis.
· The development of appropriate technologies and processes for citizen participation will foster social stability and a healthy civil society and will provide a context where the benefits of the peace process can be maximised for all.
· Marginalisation of citizens, a feature of traditional techniques of consultation, will be countered in the testing of these e-consultation technologies, thus ensuring more progressive social policy initiatives.
· This research group will engage with and submit the findings to relevant state, local and voluntary agencies/institutions thus improving the quality of planning decisions for local and regional development.
· The locus for the workshops, training and evaluations are situated in Northern Ireland and the border counties. We are specifically addressing citizen involvement in these areas, to the benefit of local and regional development.
· In particular, e-consultation promises to improve the quality of planning decisions, leading to better solutions to local conflicts between alternative approaches to local and regional development.
External Links
HEA Cross Border Programme for Research
Northern Ireland E-Government Unit
Irish Government Knowledge Society and eGovernment Policy