Community Engagement Design Experiment
Project description
Contact centres receive numerous day to day phone calls from concerned citizens and it may be that some of these callers might, with some encouragement, take action to improve their local area. IPEG have worked with Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council on a design experiment to test an innovative way of stimulating active citizen participation in improving a local neighbourhood. Citizens phoning the local authority contact centre were asked if they were interesting in finding out more about getting involved in improving the area. Those who showed an interest were contacted by a neighbourhood officer and encouraged in a variety of activities. The research aims to change the interaction between service providers and citizen during everyday contact; find effective ways of engagement and creating more and different opportunities for participation. The design experiment methodology allows us to trial how to achieve this over a number of successive iterations.
Preliminary findings
In the first iteration, a slight change in the routines of the contact centre as a point of contact has successfully attracted thirty people who want to improve their area. These are not the “usual suspects”, but a cross section of local people including Asian women, young workers and people who had no history of civic activity. But, after exciting initial interest, most of the recruits did not maintain their involvement. We speculate this might be because the opportunities offered do not meet the expectations of citizens.
Next steps
A second iteration will repeat the experiment in another neighbourhood, with the opportunities being tailored to meet the needs of citizens. There will be less focus on getting people to join groups and more on listening to people’s opinions.
Outputs
- Link to PSA April 2009 Paper
- Report to Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council August 2008
- Link to Public Administration Committee Conference Paper , York, October 2008
Sarah Cotterill and Liz Richardson
The University of Manchester
October 2008
