A busy week with team meeting in London, and getting the Call for Papers for our Participatory AI Research Symposium as an unofficial fringe of the Paris AI Action Summit live. In weeknotes this week, some reflections on being an effective oversight group member, and blogged version of a BlueSky thread looking back on my early experiences of participation in government, sparked by speaking at a UNICEF UK Digital Week event on AI on Wednesday.
How can I be an effective oversight group member?
This week I took part in the first oversight group meeting for a new ScienceWise supported public dialogue project on public attitudes towards police use of AI, commissioned by the National Policing Capabilities Unit (NPCU) within the Home Office, and co-managed by the Home Office’s Policy & Innovation Lab (CoLab). It’s really interesting to see a user-research and design team engaged in commissioning public dialogue - and a really interesting opportunity for learning about how user-research and public dialogue can interact: a theme that came up in our evaluation of the Legal Education Foundation’s Justice Data Matters dialogues.
This is the third recent experience I’ve had as either an observer of a public dialogue process, or on an oversight group - in addition to our hands-on work at Connected by Data in recent years commissioning, facilitating and evaluating public engagement work, and thinking about governance of participatory processes. As a result, and building on recent conversations with a colleague who has sat with me on another recent oversight/advisory group, I’ve been reflecting on how I can best approach oversight group roles.
First sessions matter. A first oversight group session often involves lots of scene setting and introduction: but it will often be timed just as the scope and shape of a project is being tied down (if it hasn’t been already). If there are big framing questions to be asked about the project, or process points that need working out - they need raising right at the start.
In the oversight group session I took part in this week, a chunk of time was given to consultation on the group Terms of Reference. This was a useful opportunity to address questions like whether oversight group members would be invited to observe dialogue sessions, how long would be available for comment and feedback and documents, and whether members can request access to additional materials. Establishing the right balance of group as advisory, and critical friend, feels like it can make the difference between a group that is able to meaningfully contribute to a process, and one that is just a formality.
Identify who is absent. Oversight group membership is generally voluntary (i.e. unfunded), and recruited through the networks of the commissioning organisation. To make the most of the critical friend role of an oversight group, its important to have a diversity of participants. After the first I dropped a line to a fellow oversight group members (learning: debrief from calls with a colleague or another group member in order to think about follow-up), and we decided to suggest a few other potential groups who could be considered either for oversight group membership, or to input as experts into the dialogue process. Such suggestions may not always be taken up, but making them feels important - and acts as a reminder to me of the perspectives I should be looking for in draft dialogue materials or expert selection.
Create space for questions. Most oversight groups I’ve been part of now take place on Teams/Zoom, often with 15+ participants, and fairly heavy representation from commissioning organisations and delivery partners, and with members who don’t all already know each other. As in many scrutiny or oversight contexts, there’s usually lots to present, and then relatively limited time for questions. In the past, I’ve held back on raising questions (as I generally have quite a few - but don’t want to crowd discussion and/or it never feels comfortable to be the first person with a hand-up) - but I’ve recently been thinking on the kinds of early questions to put that can encourage and create space for others to also bring questions and comments forward. I’ve also been trying to use the chat channel to make sure I properly log questions that I think should be addressed, as this provides another way to surface areas of shared interest in the oversight group, even if not everything gets discussed on the call.
Follow up. On every oversight group I’ve been part of, convenors have ended calls with an invite to follow-up with them with any comments or questions not addressed during the session. I’m realising I need to book in a half-hour at least after sessions to work on any follow-up: as sending notes afterwards to convenors appears as useful as speaking in the sessions.
There’s nothing ground-breaking in these reflections - but useful to write them down as a reminder-to-self if nothing else.
Write-up as research and practice
One of the useful side-effects of writing up a project for weeknotes is that looking for contextual links to include (e.g. trying, in this case, unsuccessfully to find a good URL to point you to if you want to understand what the National Policing Capabilities Unit (NCPU) is) can be a good trigger for additional research, both to (a) find out how transparent or legible the bits of the government system I’m engaging with are in practice - and to understand them better; and (b) to discover additional helpful context, such as news of this prior NCPU commissioned TechUK research into Threats and Opportunities of AI for Policing (unpublished?), and the existing Covenant for Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Policing .
Another good reminder (to self) that write-ups really matter.
Looking back to look forward
Back in the early 2000s, as a teenager, I was a member of the Youth Advisory Forum to the cross-departmental Children and Young People’s Unit - and yesterday had cause to look back on some notes from it.
Musing on the concept of ‘Participation as a service’ in relation to DSIT Digital Centre of Government plans, I came across this 2003 interview in Children and Young People Nowwith Althea Efunshile, CYPU director, and I was struck by a couple of things:
(1) Participation as a force of inter-departmental alignment. Getting depts to align around citizen-centric reform is difficult. For CYPU, facilitating direct contact between young people, depts & Ministers was strategic move to keep focus on young people’s lives, rather than individual services.
(2) The focus on direct dialogue with Ministers. Perhaps there is something exceptional about C&YP’s participation. Under-18s are not (currently) voters - and so lack the political channel the enfranchised in theory have. Yet, voting is an increasingly weak signal to direct policy with.
Is there then a case to re-emphasise the role of the civil service in creating inclusive spaces for dialogue between political leaders and publics: helping shape both the direction and detail of policy at the political level - and not just user-centred implementation detail.
(3) Layers of engagement. The 25-or-so of us under-18s on the standing advisory forum were just one part of CYPU’s public engagement. We were sometimes consulted on design or analysis of other engagement activities, but participatory culture in the unit involved many overlapping activities.
(4) Partnership with civil society. I was nominated to the CYPU advisory panel by The Children’s Society, and TCS continued to support my engagement there. Other members had links to, and were supported by, other civil society projects and groups.
When recruitment to many participation processes is today either outsourced to firms specialised in market research and/or public dialogue, it’s useful to think about the cases where, with the right relationships, civil society should still be a key broker and enabler of diverse public engagement.
In sum: The CYPU’s participatory practice was not perfect. Nor are the elements above entirely absent from current thinking on public participation and dialogue with govt. However, I’m left with reflections on how much was lost in years of austerity and how certain forms of professionalised participation and the deliberative wave have perhaps taken us in different directions. There is, I suspect, always some value in looking back in order to look forward.