Welcome to the tenth edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world.
This will likely be our last newsletter of 2015. Thanks to everyone who has submitted items throughout the year and thank you for reading. In this edition we’ve got a few of local events and bits of news, some interesting research, some useful tech from this side of the globe, and more.
As always we’d love to see you at the OpenAustralia Foundation Sydney Pub Meet next Tuesday in Sydney.
If you know someone who’d like this newsletter, pass it on: http://eepurl.com/bcE0DX.
News and Notes
We’re having an end of year party in Sydney
It’s been a busy year for the OpenAustralia Foundation. To celebrate our achievements, and all of you who have helped us on the way, we’re going to have a little party on Sunday, the 6th of December. It’ll be pretty low key and casual (what else?). We’re going to head to lovely Bicentennial Park on the Glebe foreshore and hang out from 11:00 and enjoy some sunshine, a drink, and something to eat.
We’d love for you to join us. Please come along any time after 11:00. BYO food and drinks. RSVP on the Meetup page.
There’s a hackathon to help refugees in Sydney
The Techfugees Australia Hackathon is happening next weekend in Sydney on the 28th and 29th of November. It’s billed as the Sydney tech community’s response to the current refugee crisis involving a network of concerned individuals and inspired by recent similar events in Europe.
It’s great to see that the event has partnered with organisations that will describe the challenges they face to participants. This makes it far more likely that the solutions developed will be for real problems and will hopefully see real world use.
If you want to use your civic tech skills for good, register soon as there’s only a few places left.
Australian Government finally commits to finalising OGP membership
It’s been a long and often rocky journey but the Australian Government has finally committed to finalising its membership of the Open Government Partnership. Now the real hard work can begin, starting with the development of a national action plan for open government.
Congratulations to the people working behind the scenes to make this happen. And thanks to Peter Timmins for tirelessly keeping us up to date with the latest developments over at his blog, Open and Shut.
It’s all go on They Vote For You
From time to time we get an email from the offices of Members or Senators that ask us to change their voting record on They Vote For You in some way because they think it’s inaccurate. But when we ask them to tell us what the error is, we don’t hear back from them again. Recently we got an email that was refreshingly helpful and we’ve even made some changes thanks to it.
We’ve also got a call out for people that want to help make our parliament more open by contributing to They Vote For You – get in touch if you’re interested.
Civic tech: Would use again
mySociety have released some early findings from their research into the impact of civic technology. It’s definitely work a look. We’ve been participating in this research and can’t wait to see more of it so it can help inform the work we do.
Hackpad to SayIt importer
We recently heard about this tool that could be a really great way of creating and publishing transcripts. For example, you could use it to transcribe your local council’s meeting on a Hackpad and then have it published in a really nice way using SayIt.
Give it a go and let us know how you get on!
Audrey Tang, Brilliant Programmer, “Hacks” Politics in Taiwan
Audrey is the person that wrote the above tool we just mentioned. This translated interview with her is a really interesting story of one person’s journey to creating civic tech.
Who comments in PlanningAlerts and how could it work better?
In our last two quarterly planning posts (see Q3 2015 and Q4 2015), we’ve talked about helping people write to their elected local councillors about planning applications through PlanningAlerts. As Matthew wrote in June, “The aim is to strengthen the connection between citizens and local councillors around one of the most important things that local government does which is planning”. We’re also trying to improve the whole commenting flow in PlanningAlerts.
I’ve been working on this new system for a while now, prototyping and iterating on the new comment options and folding improvements back into the general comment form so everybody benefits.
About a month ago I ran a survey with people who had made a comment on PlanningAlerts in the last few months. The survey went out to just over 500 people and we had 36 responders–about the same percentage turn-out as our PlanningAlerts survey at the beginning of the year (6% from 20,000). As you can see, the vast majority of PlanningAlerts users don’t currently comment.
We’ve never asked users about the commenting process before, so I was initially trying to find out some quite general things:
The responses include some clear patterns and have raised a bunch of questions to follow up with short structured interviews. I’m also going to have these people use the new form prototype. This is to weed out usability problems before we launch this new feature to some areas of PlanningAlerts.
Here are some of the observations from the survey responses:
Older people are more likely to comment in PlanningAlerts
We’re now run two surveys of PlanningAlerts users asking them roughly how old they are. The first survey was sent to all users, this recent one was just to people who had recently commented on a planning application through the site.
Compared to the first survey to all users, responders to the recent commenters survey were relatively older. There were less people in their 30s and 40s and more in their 60s and 70s. Older people may be more likely to respond to these surveys generally, but we can still see from the different results that commenters are relatively older.
Knowing this can help us better empathise with the people using PlanningAlerts and make it more usable. For example, there is currently a lot of very small, grey text on the site that is likely not noticeable or comfortable to read for people with diminished eye sight—almost everybody’s eye sight gets at least a little worse with age. Knowing that this could be an issue for lots of PlanningAlerts users makes improving the readability of text a higher priority.
There’s a good understanding that comments go to planning authorities, but not that they go to neighbours signed up to PlanningAlerts
To “Who do you think receives your comments made on PlanningAlerts?” 86% (32) of responders checked “Local council staff”. Only 35% (13) checked “Neighbours who are signed up to PlanningAlerts”. Only one person thought their comments also went to elected councillors.
There seems to be a good understanding amongst these commenters that their comments are sent to the planning authority for the application. But not that they go to other people in the area signed up to PlanningAlerts. They were also very clear that their comments did not go to elected councillors.
In the interviews I want to follow up on this are find out if people are positive or negative about their comments going to other locals. I personally think it’s an important part of PlanningAlerts that people in an area can learn about local development, local history and how to impact the planning process from their neighbours. It seems like an efficient way to share knowledge, a way to strengthen connections between people and to demonstrate how easy it is to comment. If people are negative about this then what are their concerns?
“I have no idea if the comments will be listened to or what impact they will have if any”
There’s a clear pattern in the responses that people don’t think their comments are being listened to by planning authorities. They also don’t know how they could find out if they are. One person noted this as a reason to why they don’t make more comments.
Giving people simple access to their elected local representatives, and a way to have a public exchange with them, will hopefully provide a lever to increase their impact.
“I would only comment on applications that really affect me”
There was a strong pattern of people saying they only comment on applications that will effect them or that are interesting to them:
How do people decide if an application is relevant to them? Is there a common criteria?
Why don’t you comment on more applications? “It takes too much time”
A number of people mentioned that commenting was a time consuming process, and that this prevented them from commenting on more applications:
What are people’s basic processes for commenting in PlanningAlerts? What are the most time consuming components of this? Can we save people time?
“I have only commented on applications where I have a knowledge of the property or street amenities.”
A few people mentioned that they feel you should have a certain amount of knowledge of an application or area to comment on it, and that they only comment on applications they are knowledgeable about.
How does someone become knowledgeable about application? What is the most important and useful information about applications?
Comment in private
A small number of people mentioned that they would like to be able to comment without it being made public.
Suggestions & improvements
There were a few suggestions for changes to PlanningAlerts:
Summing up PlanningAlerts
We also had a few comments that are just nice summaries of what is good about PlanningAlerts. It’s great to see that there are people who understand and can articulate what PlanningAlerts does well:
Next steps
If we want to make using PlanningAlerts a intuitive and enjoyable experience we need to understand the humans at the centre of it’s design. This is a small step to improve our understanding of the type of people who comment in PlanningAlerts, some of their concerns, and some of the barriers to commenting.
We’ve already drawn on the responses to this survey in updating wording and information surrounding the commenting process to make it better fit people’s mental model and address their concerns.
I’m now lining up interviews with a handful of the people who responded to try and answer some of the questions raised above and get to know them more. They’ll also show us how they use PlanningAlerts and test out the new comment form. This will highlight current usability problems and hopefully suggest ways to make commenting easier for everyone.
Design research is still very new to the OpenAustralia Foundation. Like all our work, we’re always open to advice and contributions to help us improve our projects. If you’re experienced in user research and want to make a contribution to our open source projects to transform democracy, please drop us a line or come down to our monthly pub meet. We’d love to hear your ideas.