10 tips for using electronic consultation processes
1. Be absolutely clear about what you want to learn from the consultation.
2. Decide whether you can get what you want from asking people
specific questions and giving them boxes to tick (a ‘closed process’),
or whether you need to ask open questions and give people space to
formulate their own replies (an ‘open process’).
3. If you want to use an open process, invite named individuals
and provide them with a secure means of participating - anonymously
if necessary.
4. Explain the purpose of the process and exactly what
scope it has to influence its sponsors.
5. Participants generally contribute best to open processes
when they are responding to or commenting on specific information.
6. If either a closed or open process is to involve any form
of vote by the participants, then to be meaningful the participants
must be statistically representative.
7. One of the advantages of electronic consultation is that
it frees people from the constraints of time and space. Rather
than require participants all to be on-line at the same time,
provide ‘windows’ of
time, usually two or three weeks, and ask people to make
their submissions at any time during that window.
8. Aim to collate and feed back the results of open processes
to participants within one week of the end of the process
or of each stage of it.
9. Reserve the right to remove abusive or offensive
comments.
10. At the end of the process make available a record
of every comment from every participant to ensure the
process is transparent.
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