TechDemo

Welcome to our technology demonstration

At different times in a consultation, you may use a range of communication activities to carry out your consultation tasks. In this demonstration we will show you the ways Information and Communication Technologies support communications in consultation.

Introduction

• The e-consultation research project
• What we have found out about consultation in Ireland (N & S)
  • benefits and difficulties
• Consultation techniques used
  • mainly traditional (e.g. consultation documents, public meetings, committees)
  • e-consultation mostly mechanises traditional processes, supporting:
    • 1. One-way information transfer.
• Objectives of demonstration
  • Getting a taste of different e-consultation technologies
  • How can we use these technologies to help improve your consultations?

Supporting discussion

A common complaint about consultation documents is that there is no discussion. For that reason, consultations often include some spaces for conversation or dialogue. E.g. public meetings, focus groups, consultative committees or citizen's juries.

There are many electronic communication technologies that support discussions between people who are not necessarily all in the same room, or even present at the same time. There are two main types:

• realtime 'chat'
  • systems that allow people to converse with others at the same time, reacting immediately to each other, wherever they happen to be.
  • E.g. chat rooms, text messaging, audio and video conferencing.
• ongoing discussions
  • these allow people to take part in a longer discussion over several days or weeks, joining in whenever they have time.
  • E.g. discussion forums, e-mail mailing lists and virtual worlds.

For details, read:

• 2. Supporting Dialogues.

Structured communications

Conversations help people understand each other. But at times during a consultation process, we want to go beyond talk, and start to map out solutions, find out opinions and produce reports. Such tasks call for more structured communication activities. We have divided them into 3 types:

• 3. Exploring problems and planning solutions
  • Imagine a group tasked with exploring all the aspects of the problem, and coming up with several alternative solutions. How do you manage the meetings to use the time productively? Computer tools can help:
    • organise an agenda-driven meeting
    • allow lots of people to brainstorm ideas at the same time, without having to wait their turn to speak
    • allow pseudo-anonymity, so people are less afraid of coming up with creative, but risky ideas
    • help map out the issues discussed and the options identified.
• 4. Measuring needs and preferences.
  • Some consultations set out to find what particular groups of people need.
  • Others try to find out what preferences people have between different options.
  • In either case, apart from discussion systems, we often use surveys and votes to quantify the needs or preferences.
  • computers can help send out surveys, collect the results, and analyse them. They can also be used to run a quick vote in a meeting, or by subtle analysis of preferences, find underlying consensus between oponents.
• 5. Writing Documents.
  • Not only do consulting bodies need someone to write a report on the consultation, but also consulted groups often need to put together a document responding to a consultation.
  • With computer software running on a server, several people can work on the same document at the same time, writing different parts of it, then editing each other's work.

Improving consultation

Once you have had a chance to sample the different communication technologies, it is time to come back to the main question:

• How can we use e-consultation technologies to improve consultation?

You are the experts on this, not the technologists. You have personal experience of consultations.

Think about a particular consultation task you will be carrying out over the next six months. Think about the consultation topic, and the people who will be (or should be) consulted.

• How can you get more of them more involved in the consultation, using some of these technologies?
• And how can the technologies help make consultation easier for you and them?