SNAPSHOT
Process: Panel (short form deliberative panel)
MosaicLab’s role: Design and facilitation
Client: Bayside City Council
Outputs: Panel report presented to Council
Timeframe: February 2020 - May 2020 (three day panel deliberation - broken into one full day in-person, five afternoons online and one full recall day online)
Participants: 29 for day one; 20 for five afternoons; 12 for the final recall day
OVERVIEW
The 30-person panel was charged with the remit:
The world is changing, and life in Bayside will be very different in 30 years’ time. What’s our vision for Bayside in 2050 and what do we need to prioritise in order to get there?
The recommendations of the deliberation were to form the basis of a new community vision for Bayside City Council (Bayside 2050 Community Vision). With the new Victorian Local Government Act 2020, all local government authorities now have to prepare a community vision (as well as three other key documents) using deliberative practices.
It was to be a short form panel, meeting over three full Saturdays starting in late February and March. Other than the shortened timeframe, the panel was designed to meet the usual principles and practices of deliberation including:
the panel being recruited using a random stratified method to match the demographics of the local population,
the group writing their own report, and
all recommendations meeting an 80% super majority to be included in the final report.
CHALLENGES
Day one was held in person on 29 February 2020, the day after the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency. Two weeks later it was clear that to continue, we needed to move the panel online.
Decision to proceed and the new format
The panel were asked whether they were willing to go online and if so, to nominate their preferred time, suggesting that the two remaining days (16 hours) be replaced with five, three hour sessions (15 hours).
Of the panel members who had participated on day one, 23 were willing to proceed (only 20 ended up participating). A decision was made to convene the panel online for five Saturday afternoons in May.
Why some chose not to participate online
Five people advised that they were unable to participate when we moved online and three didn’t turn up. When asked their reasons and whether we could have provided any support to better enable their participation, five of the eight responded.
Of these, all but one related to not being able to commit the time. Too many online meetings and being unable to express one’s views online were the other two reasons:
I can’t commit to 5 Saturdays - could do 2 full days
I work fulltime and can’t do another day of online meetings
I find it difficult to express an opinion online
The frequency of attending over so many weeks made it virtually impossible to balance work and family.
Unavailable for some online dates – clashes with rescheduling work to a weekend (due to COVID-19)
Technology and assistance online
We used technology that many participants would be familiar with - Zoom (for breakout rooms), Google Doc (our standard way of writing) and SurveyMonkey (for between sessions rating of ideas). We did a simple hand up voting in the final walk through, enabling the facililtator to see and work with people who voted against a proposal, as to whether there were small changes that would bring a recommendation to above the 80% threshold. One person used a phone to connect, another an iPad, with the rest on computers. To assist panel members we provided:
Pre-workshop support to help people understand the technology and feel more comfortable using it.
An in-session facilitator for issues that arose during the workshops.
TASKS UNDERTAKEN ONLINE
Over the online sessions the group completed the following tasks:
hearing from one more guest speaker (a futurist),
writing a vision statement with rationale,
identifying draft priorities needed to meet the vision,
refining priorities, and
a final assessment of the vision and all priorities to check they met the 80% super majority.
Judging success of moving online
The panel members’ experiences
We asked for feedback on the ideal format for the panel after the completion of the sessions. Of the 16 respondents:
10 (63%) considered a mixture of face to face and online to be ideal,
five people preferred all face to face (31%) and
one person said all online (6%).
Reasons given for preferring all ‘in person’ meetings:
Easier to get a group ‘feel’ in person.
Online you don’t always have the opportunity to give your comments.
Personal connection to others is lacking online.
I prefer the energy of face-to-face meetings.
It was great to meet initially and get to know them.
Parts of the process were more difficult (logistically and in terms of balance) by having many small groups online.
Zoom has limitations in terms of technology used.
Missed the energy and personal interaction from being in a space with others.
Too easy for one person to dominate online.
Reasons given for wholly online deliberations:
Better environmentally, cheaper and possibly faster.
Expediency.
Reasons participants gave for preferring a mixed format:
In person, upfront is good to set the scene and provide panelists with the opportunity to meet. After that, the online sessions provided a really tightly focused forum which was very helpful in driving the group towards the outcome.
Participants had varying degrees of technological expertise/competence and equipment.
Mixed format adds variety. Some people prefer different formats.
A mixture of in person and online may make sessions more accessible to some people and allow greater diversity of the community panel. Plus, we may as well make use of all the technology we have access to.
Some parts such as filling in surveys, responding to generated reports etc can be done online.
The facilitation team’s experiences
Transparency and observers
It is hard to enable and manage observers in an online space - we allowed council observers but not public observers in this case.
When working in plenary we asked council observers to say hello to the group and then turn their videos off. This made it easier for the facilitator to see the group and who was voting, and to ignore those with no video.
Observers were placed in their own breakout room during small group work, meaning the council couldn’t influence members and could converse together (not possible in face-to-face settings).
Observers online have much more visibility of the draft work (through observing the Google Doc) than in face-to-face sessions. It is possible to block observers’ view of the Google Doc, but this would prevent sharing the link in the chat line.
Building relationships
It takes more time and requires considered effort to build relationships online.
There is a lot less informal ‘getting to know each other’ time when operating online – to overcome this, facilitators encouraged informal chatting at the beginning of each session while waiting for the whole group to be online.
It is difficult to assess the impact this reduced informal connection had on the group’s dynamic and work.
The other uncertainties and questions still to be answered about going online are the impact on the quality of the deliberation and the level of satisfaction group members gain from the process. MosaicLab is committed to continued exploration of these processes and how they can be successfully undertaken in an online environment.
Time
Tasks took longer and some were not completed, needing to be done between sessions (including combining several visions statements into one and theming data). The assessment of the initial set of recommendations (ideas rating) was also done between sessions using SurveyMonkey.
As a result, in subsequent deliberation designs we have scheduled activities to be done between sessions. A benefit is participants have more thinking time when working offline - a drawback is there is no guarantee the work will be completed.
If scheduling work between sessions, participants should be made aware when signing up about the level of ‘compulsory’ offline work required.
Technology
Most people were familiar with the technology we used and it did not provide a major challenge.
Most participants used computers and managed the Zoom platform and Google Doc. They did their own writing into the Google Doc as they identified options, and wrote and refined recommendations.
There were challenges for the people working on a phone and iPad, as they could not write nor view the Google Doc. We overcame this by assigning them a group with someone else managing the Google Doc, but they still lacked visibility.
It is preferable all participants have a laptop computer at their home or are in an office. In subsequent processes we arranged laptops to be ‘borrowed’ and delivered to their homes.
Visibility of small group work
Working on Zoom meant facilitators lost overall visibility of the room, making it hard to see if a group was struggling - although they could indicate for help. We tried ‘dropping’ into rooms, but monitoring was obvious and potentially disruptive.
We received feedback some people dominated the small groups more easily than if we had been there. This may have been overcome by using small group facilitators, but we did not feel we could introduce them partway through.
Other facilitators’ experiences moving online
Other facilitators have also written about their experiences moving from in-person to online:
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