Post-launch e-consultation Design

This page explores the design issues in a little more depth.

Engaging the Stakeholders

The activities at the launch only engaged the 60 to 70 people who attended.

However, these were important stakeholders, often senior people in organizations involved in funding or managing educational exchanges. They were not the only group that NSEC wanted to involve in their consultations. So, in several meetings following the launch, the research team discussed and demonstrated technologies that might be used to facilitate consultations with different groups of participants.

Need for Publicity and Promotion

One crucial element of the process, which was emphasised constantly throughout the early stages given the problems experienced with the Waterways Ireland trial, was the need for publicity and promotion.

It is essential in any consultation, regardless whether conventional or electronic, that there is a clear strategy to ensure that potential consultees are aware of the proposed consultation. NSEC needed to engage more than the senior staff who had attended the launch.

Consulting those who are affected most: Organisations in Educational Exchanges

One important group to consult were the organizations that currently managed and/or funded existing educational exchanges.

They are important for two reasons:

• Any new policy would impact on them.
• If NSEC were to eventually administer funding for cross-border exchanges, it is these key stakeholders NSEC would have to work with.

So, NSEC planned to run long meetings with them to discuss the issues in some depth.

The Technology

The research team suggested using group support systems, such as WebIQ or Zing in half of these meetings. In principle such idea mapping tools should speed up brainstorming and ranking activities, as participants could type at the same time.

The consultations should achieve the same benefits from the group support system tools used in private companies. The research team arranged for the Centre for Competitiveness to demonstrate Zing to NSEC staff in a meeting in Belfast. However, although they agreed in principle to do this, NSEC were not able to organise any group support system meetings before the research team's project ended. A reason is NSEC's staff were fully stretched organising and running non-electronic meetings.

Consulting those who are affected most: Young People

A second key group to consult are young people, including (but not limited to) those who had participated in cross-border exchanges. Michele Smyth showed NSEC staff the work she had been doing for her Ph.D. research with groups of young people at the NI Youth Forum (NIYF).

NSEC staff explored with the NIYF the possibility of subcontracting part of the consultation with young people to NIYF . The ideas discussed centred on an initial face-to-face workshop in which a small group of young people could discuss the issues and determine the questions they would want to ask about cross-border exchanges, followed by an on-line discussion forum in which many more young people could participate.

After some discussion NSEC decided not to fund this work (at least in the short term), apparently because of resource limitations in NSEC .

The Technology

What NSEC did manage to start, just before research team's project finished, was to design on-line questionnaires targeted at particular groups of participants, including young people and teachers. The research team helped them design the questionnaires, and loaded into the system some of the lists of e-mail addresses they had finally obtained.

Finally, the research team's technical assistant (Yan Chen) also customised the SugarCRM Customer Relationship Management software for NSEC, so that they could keep track of their (potentially) huge number of contacts with pupils, staff, youth workers and others in 9000 organisations. Because Yan Chen used free (open source) software, he could customise it so that it was no longer a tool for selling into companies, but one to record contacts with many individuals in each organisation: something that many commercial CRM packages lack.