Probation Board of Northern Ireland Consultation
Background
E-consultation is often criticized on the grounds that different groups of people do not have equal access to electronic communications technologies. They may not be able to afford Internet access at home, or have the skills or confidence to use Internet facilities in libraries, community centres or cybercafés. As a general criticism, it is a weak one.
The most common consultation technique used in Ireland is to write a long document (40, 50 or even 200 pages) in an inaccessible language. This discriminates against those with little time, and those who do not have very high reading skills.
Few e-consultation techniques will be so exclusive. From the beginning, we have proposed e-consultation techniques as complementary to traditional approaches, rather than replacements. Each technique can reduce participation: but the groups excluded are different. However, no matter what you do to make electronic access simpler, there are still people who will find it difficult to participate.
In this case example we discuss what can be done to improve accessibility and usability for some of these groups.
Case Overview
One of the people who came to our Armagh workshop in April 2005 worked for the Probation Board of Northern Ireland (PBNI). We met with Mary Coffey and Louise Orr on 5 Aug. 2005 to discuss their coming consultations. The PBNI was planning to run a consultation on changes to the locations of probation offices, and reporting centres, across Northern Ireland. Consultants had recommended nine alternatives ways of reducing the number of offices they had to maintain. The PBNI would like to gather data on the impact of the changes on: · Partners groups under NI section 75, · Political parties, councillors, community groups, and · Individual offenders They had had a number of problems with previous consultations: · There was a low response to calls for public meeting in newspapers.
- No response from some partner groups.
· Little interest in filling out surveys. · There were no representative groups for offenders42. · It was difficult to engage with individual offenders due to low literacy, numeracy and other learning difficulties. This last point is a substantial challenge to any consultation process. Many offenders had left school early, and spent many periods in prison. This had left them functionally illiterate. Perhaps they could read a few words on a road or shop sign, and text short messages from mobile 'phones, but not compose paragraphs. Can such people access some electronic communications technologies? Are there ways of using e-consultation technologies with them? The project team suggested a number of technologies that could be used in their consultations with organisations. As for the ex-offenders, we suggested running some experiments or usability tests to find out which technologies they can use. Now these e-consultation components would, if accepted, only be a small part of an overall consultation. The consultation managers at PBNI spent some time over the autumn on designing and planning the consultation, with the help of the Consultation Institute (represented by Stratagem in Ireland). The Consultation Institute pointed out the disadvantages of consulting on only one out of nine options.43 The consultation dates needed approval from the PBNI corporate managers, their board, and the Northern Ireland Office, so there was a long delay before the consultation process and schedule was approved. In the end, the PBNI ran a conventional consultation, without any e-consultation component, between 10 March and 2 June 2006.44 In that consultation they ask for views on the positive and negative of their preferred option only: but the final questions ask for alternative suggestions. Rather than introducing a new technology for consulting with offenders during this major consultation, they agreed to work with us to do a usability test of an e-consultation technology with ex-offenders.
