“Our Budget, Our Economy” has reached its peak with a series of live events, so called Town Meetings, all over the USA on June 26^th.  Here, approximately 3,500 participants have discussed about the federal budget and worked out a message, saying which reforms they find to be most important. As the organizers announced, the project should help the participants to “weigh-in on the difficult choices necessary to put our federal budget on a sustainable path.”

We at Zebralog are currently working on the third edition of the BürgerForum, an online-discussion forum dedicated to produce the so called citizen agenda. In 2011, about 10,000 German citizens are going to join the discussion about the growing diversity in Germany’s society.

Aims: Forming opinions, raising awareness
Both projects combine online discussion with live events and both projects want to produce concrete results, a message that can be delivered into the public and into the political sphere.

AmericaSpeaks announced, that it “will present the priorities that emerge from the National Town Meeting to Congress and President Obama, as well as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and the Bi-Partisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force.” The BürgerForum´s organizers and its participants will present the results to politicians as well, but set a stronger focus to deliver the citizen’s message into the public, to reach other citizens.

Our Budget Our Economy

Neither of these projects can promise to what extent the results will really influence politics. Instead, they aim at educating the participants as well as the broader public and want to raise awareness for political and social challenges. So, they work as tools for opinion forming, political education, and political vitalisation. This are already a quite ambitious tasks, considering the huge numbers of participants these projects include.

Besides all similarities, the organizers from AmericaSpeaks and the BürgerForum’s initiators have chosen very different ways to reach their goals: Whereas “Our Budget, Our Economy” has been focused on a nationwide live event, the BürgerForum places the main part of the discussion online.

America Speaks: Meeting face to face
On June 26^th, AmericaSpeaks organized 19 Town Meetings and several smaller Community Discussions that took simultaneously place all over the country. The discussions were linked to each other via video conferencing and combined with virtual discussions in Second Live and on the “Our Budget Our Economy” website. Several bloggers covered the Real Life discussions from different locations.

Before and after the Town Meetings, online discussion has taken place at the well known social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. The live events have been accompanied by online-discussion as well: The project website presented a “Cover it live”-box, were internet uses could insert there comments. The discussion was moderated by a member of the project team, furthermore experts answered user questions. Questions and remarks could also be submitted via Twitter and Facebook. Online participants also had the opportunity to take part in short opinion polls.

BürgerForum: discussing and reaching results online
The approach taken by the BürgerForum´s organizers differs clearly: The former two BürgerForen (2008 and 2009) have started with live events, giving incentives for the following online discussion and giving the participants the opportunity to meet in person, such making the discussion process more personal. In 2011, this structure will be followed again – with one difference: due to the huge number of participants, the online as well as the offline discussions will be organized locally, in about 25 different regions all over Germany.

BürgerForum Europe 2009

The online discussion will be carried out during several weeks, allowing an asynchronous debate. For this debate, the BürgerForum is using a platform which has been specially designed for the task to deliver concrete results. Each local forum will be accompanied by four online-moderators, most of them being former participants who volunteered to work for the new project. With the workflows provided by the website, through a strict timetable and through the helpful attendance of our online-moderators up to hundreds of people work together on a political agenda, comparable to a party programme.

Inclusiveness
The two projects also have chosen different registration processes – which lead us to the question of inclusiveness. Including a huge number of participants is not enough if you want to present the “nation’s opinions”. You also have to ensure that the participants come from socially diverse backgrounds – and that all these citizens have the same chances to actively participate.

Theoretically everyone could register for a Town Meeting or a Community Discussion with “Our Budget, Our Economy”, answering an online survey giving some information about the personal and economic background. Due to the fact that space was limited, AmericaSpeaks monitored the registration process and tried to ensure that the participants reflect the USA’s diversity. People could also become online ambassadors, educate others, and help other people to voice their priorities and to join organizations that share their points of view.

The BürgerForum organizers instead take another way to recruit a socially diverse range of users, independent from their computer knowledge: A randomly selected sample of citizens is phoned and invited to join the discussion. Participants than get a Log-In and can register themselves. Without quantitative evidence, we assume that both ways of recruiting are able to reach a similar diversity.

Conclusion
AmericaSpeaks has concentrated the most important part of a participation project, the developing of the citizen’s message, on one single day. Thousands of people working in unison deliver a big symbol of unity and joined interest. But on the other hand this workflow fails to use one of the biggest advantages of online discussion: the nature of asynchronous discussion. Participants can log in whenever they want and take all the time they need to read the arguments and to write own comments. Thus, people from very different backgrounds with differences in thematic knowledge and their speed and ability to argue, can participate on a more equal level in an asynchronous setting.

Using known social networks for online discussion and for registration – like “Our Budget, Our Economy” has done – has the advantage that a lot of people are already familiar with the tools and know how to use them. The discussion’s fragmentation on different websites could lead to a wider spreading of arguments – but it also has the disadvantage that it is harder to keep track of all arguments, loosing the possibility to set up a focused online discussion. Another danger: People who are not frequent internet users and not familiar with social networks are more or less excluded.

The BürgerForum’s setting of using a special online platform always carries the slight disadvantage that some people first have to learn how to use it. But this task that can be managed: videos and online moderators help people finding the right way to place their arguments. The design has been chosen to focus the discussion one virtual place, where all arguments are gathered. Furthermore, setting the focus on debating online rather than offline makes discussion independent from place and time.

Contact:

Hans Hagedorn, Zebralog Hagedorn,  +49 30 497 698 -60

Anna Wohlfarth, Bertelsmann Stiftung,  wohlfarth @ bertelsmann-stiftung.de, +49 5241 81-81425

2011 we will open a new round with a new online dialogue. This time the BürgerForum found a prominent initiator: German Federal President Horst Köhler starts this project to foster citizen participation. The Bertelsmann Stiftung and Heinz Nixdorf Stiftung will act as project partners.

Participants will focus their discussion on the growing social diversity and the multicultural society. As in 2008 and 2009, the political programmes will be discussed and worked out on a specially designed online-platform, using the format BürgerAgenda (citizens´ agenda), designed by Zebralog and proved in the two former online discussions. But instead of a few hundred people, the BürgerForum 2011 will unite 10.000 German citizens. To open the dialogue for this considerably larger group of participants, the discussion process as well as the website has to undergo a few changes: First, the participants will debate in 25 local forums, whereby each region will work on their own citizens’ agenda. Afterwards, the local forums will be combined to one nationwide forum, where the participants will approve a common citizens´ agenda.

Several live events will accompany the online discussion: In January 2011, the participants of each region will meet and chose the topics for their debate. In May 2011, the approved citizens’ agenda will be presented to Federal President Köhler.

Employing professional translators is definitely too expensive. Using peer-to-peer translation might be a good idea, if you have a rather slow developing, open-ended dialogue, e.g. the comments of a weblog.  But a translation always slows down the track of comments, so communication across language barriers would still be constricted.

So, how can organizers and designers make it easier for people to leave their own language group and to get into contact with people speaking different languages – thus, what can you do to enable a real, inclusive discussion across language barriers?

We’d like to introduce an idea – and are very interested about your comments and insights:

We though about a mechanism matching users who have different native languages, but who can speak the same foreign language.

In detail: This matching mechanism would work in online dialogues were users do not only discuss in an open forum but also communicate one-to-one using a messenger-system integrated into the platform. When signing up for the online discussion the users would have to state their mother tongue as well as the languages they can also speak and understand.

The system would than match the users. Every user would be attached to a defined number of peers, lets say to 10 other users. The condition: these users may NOT have the same native language, but are accordant in at last one of the languages they are familiar with as well.

So, a German user who can speak English, French and Spanish would be matched with English, French and Spanish user speaking German, with Italian users speaking French, with Greek users speaking English, and so on – but not with other German users. So, this user would get into intensive one-to-one dialogue (reducing the embarrassment some might feel when writing in a foreign language into an open forum) with different people from different language groups.

Facebook members use group feature to discuss about the European Union

Facebook does not provide concrete figures about how many groups deal with political topics. But there are a lot of them, creating a buzz about current political events as well as about long-term processes. Given the mass of users located in the European Union, it’s hardly surprising that a number of groups are also concerned with specific European topics. If searching for the term “European Union”, you get far more than 500 results, including groups like FOR A “EUROPEAN UNION” NETWORK, At least 400 million EU citizens don ‘t want Turkey in European Union !!!!, Females In Front – EU or anti-European groups like I Declare Myself Not a Citizen of the European Union.

Looking at this lively group culture, the questions pops up: Can social media like Facebook help to create a European Identity?

Research on this topic is very rare. But Finish PhD Candidate Itir Akdogan attempted to find an answer to this question. In 2008, she examined the political outreach of Facebook through analyzing groups and causes concerning political topics and views, concentrating on Facebook groups dealing with the European Union.

During her research, the question mentioned above, “Does social media help to (re)build a European identity?” have been asked to group-members. Akdogan got 71 answers: 32 Facebook-users answer with yes, their use of Facebook does help to rebuild their European Identity, whereas 29 oppose this point of view. 38 users also believe that Facebook can play a role in (re)building a European identity for its members in general; 16 users do not share this opinion.

Common experience fosters the feeling of a European identity

Now it’s interesting to take a closer look to the reasons given for answering with yes or no:

People thinking that Facebook helps to create a European identity stress the common experience and action they can share through using online media as well as the visibility provided by the Social Network. Using Facebook groups, people can display that they are European, they can do something together, can share information and opinions, and even more, they can make their action visible to a broad public. Through this common experience they feel their European identity fostering and growing.

On the other hand, some users think that identity building rather takes place in real life than on online platforms, through your “real” experience. Facebook groups could only display that identity, but could not change it. This answer is especially interesting, because it suggests that experience on Social Networks / Facebook is seen as “unreal” by some users, and shows a sceptical attitude towards technical means. Akdogans research does not provide personal data about the answering Facebook members, but it would be interesting to know if there are correlations between the mentioned reasons and e.g. users’ age.

Furthermore some users do not think that Social Networks can change people’s minds: people opposing the European Union for example would never take a look at a pro-European Facebook group.

The reasons to join a Facebook group concerning the European Union seem to support this last point. Akdongan identified the most common reasons given by users:

• “They have a certain opinion about the group’s content: e.g. they think Facebook should open an EU network and they want to support that opinion by joining that group
• They want to display on their profile that they belong to that group: they want people who go on their profile to see that they are European and/or belonging/supporting a European cause
• They have practical benefits: such as networking with likeminded people, getting information about the subject, especially those who study and work on related subjects, related institutions
• They are invited to join the group: by their friends who have already joined that group
• They identify themselves European: so they simply feel like being part of the group”

So these Facebook groups seem first of all to be used to get together with likeminded people who confirm their point of view rather than challenge it – the Facebook group feature does not seem to invite people to discuss with users of different opinion. This observation leads to another question: How should a platform look like and which tools should it include to encourage the exchange of divergent opinions on a European level?

Simone Gerdesmeier, zebralog.com