icegov2012 proceedings

government made of citizens’ contributions. These questions refer
to the analysis of later stages of policy making, and do not reflect
the analysis provided here. From a different starting point, this
section focuses on earlier stages of deliberative processes,
specifically evaluating how policy makers decided before the
public was invited to contribute online what policy questions were
open or closed for deliberation, and what technologies would be
used to mediate such debate.
In the case of the MCR project, understanding what policy issues
were open or closed was straightforward – the MCR website
reserved one page to list all topics open for discussion (i.e., civil
responsibility of Internet users, right of expression, privacy and
net neutrality) and another to list all topics closed for debate (i.e.,
copyright, data protection and child pornography). The list of
issues mentioned in the webpage was included in the interview’s
questionnaire, and interviewees confirmed that in general terms
these topics were the ones actually open and closed for
deliberation.
Nonetheless, beyond defining what issues are open or closed for
discussion in policy debates (i.e., beyond defining on what people
deliberate over), designing rules for policy debates requires also
identifying and selecting tools to aid people and institutions to
share their opinions with each other (i.e.., deciding on how people
deliberate). In “offline” policy forums, such as the ones regularly
run by the Congress with the aid of public meetings rooms, policy
makers have to decide how large meeting venues have to be, what
time and date meetings will take place and how present speakers
can effectively share their opinions. In policy forums held online,
similar decisions need to be made, addressing other issues such
as: how people will have access to the forum’s website, what
coding language will the webpage be written in, how comments
will be visualized online, and how people will post their opinions.
3.1 Designing Rules for Technology Use
Due to the pioneer nature of online projects like the MCR
initiative, we notice that designing rules to decide what people can
debate over is a much simpler task than deciding on how
technology is used for deliberation. As interviewees argue, they
made decisions on what issues to deliberate over based on several
background research tools they had at hand: they identified policy
topics already under discussion in other spheres of government,
planned to select topics that would increase chances of receiving
support inside Congress, and favored topics that were likely to
increase their project’s audience. Based on such analyses (which,
by the way, are very similar to those available in “offline” policy
consultations), policy makers had plenty of sources of input to
strategically decide on what mix of policy issues was likely to
increase the overall success of the project.
The same does not apply when we analyze policy makers’
decisions about how technology should be used for deliberation.
As interviewees repeatedly point, the MCR project was a very
experimental and challenging initiative. Interviewees report none -
or at the most very few - previous projects to serve as models,
relying mostly on their own private experience or ad hoc
inspiration. Above all, interviewees say to have mainly decided on
what technology to use based on a trial-and-error basis, reason
why the most important source of input information mentioned in
this regard is feedback provided by users reflecting decisions they
had already taken.
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Interviewees say for example to have chosen to use Wordpress
based on the open-source nature of this technology; moreover,
they also say they took this decision based on their personal
expertise in running blogs of their own, as well as based on their
awareness of the initiative Culturadigital.br run by the Ministry of
Culture (that was later used to host the project website). The
decision to create a comment section based on a “paragraph-byparagraph”
lay-out, for example, was also generally inspired on
some previous knowledge they had of the “The public index”
project [11], which required, nonetheless, several improvements
before it met their needs. Even decisions on what technology
decisions to continue or discontinue were made based on ad hoc
information: the overall lay-out of the comment section for
example received positive feedback, which resulted in an
improved lay-out implemented for the second phase of
consultation; the use of a “thumbs up/down” voting system
however was removed shortly after implementation due to bad
feedback received.
3.2 Emerged Conceptual Framework
Based on the interviews’ analyses, designing online consultation
with the aid of web 2.0 is a very innovative task. However, we can
find at least three common themes around the uses of Internet for
policy making that have been largely documented before [7],
namely: (a) the will to use of the Internet as a platform for
political discourse, (b) the collective intelligence emergent from
political Web use, and (c) perpetual experimentalism in the public
domain. The former two themes describe quite well interviewees’
expectation during the early stages of the MCR project. For
example: selecting the CulturaDigital.br portal to host the
project’s webpage is justified based on the will to foster new
Internet forums of political debate; inviting citizens to deliberate
online is justified based on the will to follow CTS’s goal of
designing new collaborative ways of knowledge production.
It is however the last theme (i.e., the perpetual experimentalism)
that we most highlight in describing the MCR initiative. To some
extent, online consultations resemble designing a complete new
environment for policy making. For example: policy makers were
required to understand the essence of tools such as Twitter and
email and decide if they were good or not for online
consultation’s use. Based on their previous experience with
offline policy forums, interviewees were willing to avoid the oneto-few
communication flow in favor of a many-to-many flow.
Hence their decision (reached after a try-and-error period) of
using Twitter (but blocking the use of email) to interact with the
general public. In other words, the MCR project is clearly a case
study where experimenting new forms of communications is a
mandatory task that political practitioners have to deal with during
theirs daily routine.
After the end of their project, interviewees perceive to have left
two challenges unanswered. The first refers to the bridging the
online world barrier. Publicizing the MCR’s initiative beyond
those who already had an interest in the topic is described as a
very difficult (but still mandatory) task. Interviewees say to have
attended as many offline conferences and events as possible, and
to also have targeted media venues to increase their reach and
visibility. Even so, considering the geographic and social
characteristics of the country, the overall understanding is that the
online barrier has been only merely scratched. The second
challenge refers to controlling political outcomes of the