Title:ابزارهای جدید برای مشارکت عمومی: احتمالات و مشکلات

۰۱-۰۴-۲۰۱۱ ارائه دهندگان: جنیفر ایوانز-کاولی و راب گودسپید این وب‌کست فقط برای مشاهده در دسترس است، برای اعتبارات AICP CM قابل استفاده نیست. این جلسه به بررسی انواع ابزارهای جدید برای مشارکت عمومی می پردازد و نحوه استفاده برنامه ریزان از این ابزارها را در عمل بررسی می کند. در حالی که بسیاری از این ابزارها امکانات جالبی را ارائه می دهند، مشکلاتی نیز وجود دارد. با طراحی دقیق فرآیندهای مشارکتی، برنامه ریزان می توانند به طور موثر این ابزارها را در فرآیندهای برنامه ریزی خود ادغام کنند.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: I hello I’d like to welcome everybody to today’s webcast new tools for public participation possibilities and pitfalls I have a few short announcements before we get started with today’s webcast the slides for today’s webcast are available at the Utah hyphen APA org website in the webcast archive you can go ahead and

Download those slides for today’s session for help during the webcast you can type a question in the question box on your GoToWebinar menu or call the 1-800 number for tech support at go to webinar we will be collecting the questions that you have regarding the content of today’s session and we’ll be

Reviewing those in the question-and-answer period of today’s session we do have a new webcast address for the webcast series it has changed to Utah hyphen APA org backslash webcast we just drop the HTM on it so if you have trouble finding any of our upcoming events just know that we have a slight

Webcast address change we have a wide range of participating chapters divisions and universities that are part of today’s session are part of our webcast series today’s sponsor is the technology division of APA we have a series of upcoming webcasts that are located over the next quarter I’ve

Listed a number of those here including today’s session for new tools for public participation our april eighth session is approved for Ethics cm credit if you’re looking for that we have events on campus planning using GIS improving client consultant relations and new ideas for bike friendly communities and

So for those of you that are interested i just got a question that popped in you can just go to utah hyphen APA org and click the past webcast button and that will take you to where today’s slides are for today’s session we do have a brand new webcast that’s been added to

The series that will be sponsored by the technology division it’s the introduction to the H and T it’s the housing and transportation affordability index and allocations and planning many of you may have heard about this it’s from the center for neighborhood technology and so you may be interested in joining that

Session it will be on june twenty-fourth to log your CM credits for today’s event you’ll go to planning org backslash cm you’ll select today’s date Friday April first and select the item new tools for public we do have a video recording that will be made available of today’s

Webinar at Utah hyphen APA org slash past webcast and that will be posted by the end of the day today we are hosting a twitter feed for today’s session you can access that by going to twitter and typing in the hashtag APA social media and that will pull up our tweets

Throughout today’s session our speakers will be tweeting links and key ideas throughout today’s session so you can feel free to join us on Twitter as well today’s session is on the use of public participation in planning and we have two speakers with us today I’ll be one of your sneakers I’m Jennifer Evans

Cowley and I’m the chair of the technology division of APA and the head of sitting Regional Planning at Ohio State University I also coordinate this webcast series that you’re participating in and my passion centers around how technology can be used to engage the public in planning for more sustainable

Cities I have a BS and a master’s in urban planning from Texas am a master’s in public administration from the University of North Texas and a PhD in urban and regional science from Texas A&M my partner in today’s session is Rob Goodspeed who’s a PhD student at MIT s

Department of urban studies and planning his dissertation research is evaluating the role of planning support systems for participation in local land use planning he recently completed an open government strategy for the city of Boston and before returning to school he was an analyst with the metro area Planning

Council he holds his bachelor’s degree from Michigan and his master’s in community planning from the University of Maryland now today’s session is an advanced session on the use of social media in public participation focusing on the possibilities and pitfalls you’ve all heard about different organizations using social media and most of the work

Out there has been good case study showing you what planners have done today we’re digging deeper looking from a researchers perspective at how one city has experimented with social media I’ll be focusing on in social media experiment in Austin’s transportation planning with a focus on how we as planners can analyze participation data

And Robb will be looking at Austin’s use of social media in its comprehensive planning effort examining how open representative and relevant the public input is that is received through social media in both cases we recognize that online participation is just one piece of larger participation strategies and

We fully recognize and support the idea that social media is just one tool that should be used as part of suite of tools used in the planning process now because this is an advanced session we expect everyone participating has a basic understanding of how social media works and the basic terminology this slide

Just presents a few of the terms that we’re going to be discussing throughout today’s session but to get started we want to go ahead and have a quick poll first of all we want to know all right which of the following of social media tools are you personally using so we’re

Using facebook twitter linkedin you can answer as many of them as you would like and we’ll give everybody a second to respond to that you have about 10 more seconds to get your vote in okay I’m going to go ahead and close the poll now all right and so what we see is

That sixty-eight percent of you are using Facebook about twenty percent are using Twitter fifty-eight percent or on linkedin and forty-five percent are on YouTube I did a social media session with folks just like yourself last year and this these numbers are dramatically up from the year before so we want to

Ask you another question and I just have to pull up the next poll but we’re going to be asking you about whether or not you’re using social media tools professionally when you’re working on planning projects okay so how many of you are using facebook twitter linkedin or youtube in your professional planning

Projects will give everybody a little bit of time to type get your votes in alright so I’m going to go ahead and close the poll I always see is that about thirty percent of you are using Facebook in your projects fifteen percent are using Twitter fourteen percent linkedin and eight percent are

Using YouTube so that’s great we’ve got some people that are out there experimenting in a professional context hopefully Rob and I can share some great information with you today about what we’re doing and what we’ve observed in participatory processes in Austin okay so that’s the end of our polls for now

At this point I’m going to move on and get started with the content of today’s session so my portion of today’s presentation centers on the use of micro blogs in promoting public engagement and so when I say microblogs I’m referring to all those status postings either on Facebook or Twitter or other outlets

That users posed to share information so for example I could tweet right now that I’m giving a presentation on the use of micro blogs and social media now when I use the term micro participation simply put it’s just participation that is at our convenience we’re all time

Constrained and sometimes all we have is a minute or two to give so how we as planners best utilize that one or two minutes that people can give us now my recent research has been centered around Austin strategic Mobility plan and their efforts to try to engage using social

Media now Austin is a place that’s known for innovation and experimentation and technology and so it seems like a great case study for us to look at both Rob and myself in the business community they had a survey in Austin that asked about the barriers to economic development and the number one barrier

That those respondents came up with was traffic the traffic was the number one barrier to economic development I recently saw a study that rated Austin as one of the most trafficked place there is in the United States so this is a really critical issue that the City of

Austin was looking at so they put together this austin strategic mobility plan and the intention was for it to be multimodal to guide investment and this represented a fairly fundamental shift in the thinking around transportation to focus on all modes rather than single or one or two modes

And the city had been experimenting with social media and other planning processes and wanted to try it using this planning process as well so back in 2009 the Texas citizens fund invited me to serve as an external evaluator on a federal transit administration proposal their goal was to try to use social

Media to engage the public in planning and at first I thought okay everyone’s trying this so what are you doing that’s new we’ve all seen the build it and they can calm approach we’ve also seen the build the social media and presence and push information out approach and there’s nothing wrong with these

Approaches that they’ve generally had limited success so I was pleasantly surprised that their approach did indeed represent an innovative approach to engagement their innovation was simple in concept build a system that would constantly scan twitter facebook and blogs looking for anyone posting about transportation issues in austin and once

They found a conversation they would attempt to engage that microblogger in a conversation and dialogue around key topics in the austin strategic mobility plan and so from this the idea of snap was born the social networking and planning project so here’s how it works first of all people can share their

Thoughts on Twitter they might type something like I don’t feel safe riding my bike to work or they can post on Facebook my commute down mopac takes me more than 40 minutes and what happens is snap is sweeping the internet every 15 minutes searching for new micro blogs

And posts and then it pulls those on to their live website at snap ATX org and the rest of the world can see the micro blogs on transportation Austin in near real-time on their website so then snap captures all these micro blogs related to Austin and transportation based on

Keywords into a master database and then snap reviewed these thousands of blogs and analyze them to in aggregated themes and trends on a monthly basis using some experimental in analytic methods then each month the analysis was sent over to the City of Austin help support the development of the

Strategic mobility plan and the preparation for a bond election now people were able to friend follow or comment using the social media applications and they were welcome to do this but the intent was really to find people who are already talking about these issues and then to just try to

Engage them in a conversation so building an ongoing rapport was important but more important was finding those people to start with and they ran this project between April and October of 2010 so it was about a six month period that they were doing this engagement process and the goal of all

This was to engage the public in helping to solve Austin’s pressing transportation challenges using social media platforms so here’s an example from the snap website and the way it’s set up is they have this database of all the commentary that’s coming in every 15 minutes and we can sort it by social

Media outlet and by mode so if we want to look at buses and rail we could look at that only for Twitter or Facebook or whatever assortment we wanted and so what we can see is in this list we have one tweet that says everyone in Austin

Start writing the metro rail the more that ride the more they will expand it so this would be an example of something we’d be interested in and that we would want to facilitate and try to engage in a conversation around now you have to go in expecting that if you’re intruding on

People’s personal conversations that they may or may not realize are being shared with the rest of the world that you’re going to come across some interesting things so in this case I’ll admit most of the appeal of cycling is wearing nothing but multicolored underwear in public like some sort of

Superhero so you have to consider as a planner what’s the starting point if you walked into that and how do you what kind of question might you ask do you start with something like do you buy coed to work for for recreation I’m not sure how you would start that dialogue

But the planner needs to be thinking about that if this is what’s going to be posted how do we respond and then engage them in a conversation about strategic planning and snap responds to all these thousands of micro blogs in this little sheet what we see is that between 12 55

P.m. and 114 a.m. a snap facilitator had a conversation with cat’s head 42 and I’m going to talk more about this specific conversation a little bit later but the whole point is that in this 15 20 minute period the facilitator was able to engage in a conversation about challenges in writing

The bus and so we’ll talk more about the content related to that now snap also made pushes to stimulate conversations for example in five words or less how would you describe Austin the answer overcrowded and congestion now some planners might be worried about the responses that you might get but if you

Want people to participate you have to expect that the good is going to come with the bad for example in the next push they had said what’s your vision of a perfect Austin and they talked about the comprehensive planning process which rob is going to talk more about in a

Moment and just ask people what do you think about the vision statement now unfortunately Michael cost per said their vision statement is way too long and convoluted to be a vision statement and that the entire process is an unprofessional kindergarten level exercise now that may not be the kind of

Input that you want to receive but you have to expect that there are going to be people who may not support everything that you’re talking about one of the other things that they try to do was to have micro surveys these were quick two-minute surveys that were limited to

Just two or three questions trying to get people to help in prioritizing critical issues this is one that took place in May of last year they asked two quick questions for a potential 2010 bond where should the investments be made they gave them a hundred dollars and what people said is the largest

Portion of money should be invested in regionally significant projects improving congestion points so we had six hundred people that respond to this micro survey just giving quick feedback to the city on where they saw their priorities the second question was about priorities in terms of overall what are

They thinking and people put more emphasis on fixing some of the backlog of gaps for roads sidewalks bicycling and accomplishing a few larger iconic projects now the demographics in the survey we’re asked we just ask them whether or not they were male and female

And their age and what we see is that we have slightly more males than females and that we have a older population that has responded to this survey additionally snap would be pushing out things they might push out as a tweet exploring to alternatives better bus versus urban rail which do you think

Suits Austin’s needs better and what would happen is they would then link that to this blog post that goes into more detail about what a better bus technology is and they’ve translated the technical details that are located in the central austin transit study and they provide a link to that more

Detailed study it digestible ways so we’re trying to push out information to get people better educated about the strategic mobility choices that are facing the region they also provided transportation links to people who wanted to spend more than what micro participation may allow they could look at the full transportation bond project

Proposal look at the full strategic mobility plan and other documents that are out there but the bigger question that I want to present is how do we actually analyze all of this micro participation data that’s great that we can get all these people to participate

But then what do we do with these micro blogs and the micro conversations that are happening so there were more than 49,000 microblogs that were collected now you think about that 49,000 text statements how are you going to begin to understand that and create meaning from that that can influence decision making

And what snap did is they organized the micro blogs so of the 49,000 11,500 of them were relevant so what would happen is that people would be saying I’m on the bus with my friend Austin that is not a relevant tweet it’s something that would be captured in the scraping

Because it contains a transportation word and the word Austin but it’s not referring to Austin as a place so those had to be excluded they found 11,500 that were relevant of those 8300 were from microbloggers so just members of the public that are writing about issues of transportation in Austin a thousand

Of them were from media sources 2,100 came from snap itself a thousand of those facilitating conversations and another 1,100 that we’re pushing information out to encourage people to engage in conversation so what happened is they coded the 8300 microblogs that came from the public themselves by type theme

Topic and sentiment and i’ll talk more about that in a moment and then i conducted a more detailed sentiment analysis engaged in a dialogue content analysis and then looked at rates of participation and i’ll be talking about those analysis techniques in a moment so how do we think about what is a

Microblog how do we think about how we would create a typology so staff decided that they should have three different types a sharing and engaging in a now is an Eliza ng so sharing one listen up UT students City of Austin is cracking down on ebus writers that become unruly

That’s an example of somebody that’s trying to share information with others an engaging example is a seven dollar fare for a 24 hour bus pass how much is it in Austin exactly so what they’re trying to do is engage with others who are out there in these social media

Forums and encourage them to respond and then an analyzing example is transit Austin red line versus Twin Cities Hiawatha I like both only similarity a single route then what we did is organize them around theme and topic the themes were related to the Austin strategic mobility plan such as economic

Development regional integration safety so they have these major themes and then what we would look at is what were people actually saying in that comment so we take this example where do most of Austin’s bicycle motorist collisions occur check that this map the two topics would be bicycle and automobile and the

Theme would be safety because that’s the focus of this message so provided a way to organize these different micro blogs that we can understand what are the issues that people are talking about then snap conducted a simple sentiment analysis they just reviewed each micro blog to determine which ones were

Positive or negative so if somebody posted traffic sucks that would be an example of negative it was a beautiful day for my bike commute would be an example of a positive sentiment then what I did is I went in and I conducted a more detailed sentiment analysis and I used it the

Linguistic inquiry and word count analysis software it’s a text analysis software it’s about eighty dollars so it’s an affordable price and what it does is it allows you to look in more detail at the sentiment that’s being expressed it assesses emotional cognitive and structural components of text using a psychometrically validated

Internal dictionary the lwc calculates the degree to which a text sample contains words belonging to empirically define psychological and structural categories and then it calculates the relative frequency with which words related to the psychological dimension occur and this software has been used in a study of Twitter during German

Elections and when I had read that article I thought this was ideal for analyzing public participation in this context and so wanted to experiment with that so if we look at the results this is just the simple sentiment analysis this is what snapped it so what they

Would do is is here we just took mode so if we looked at all of those 8300 tweets and microblogs that came in and then looked at whether or not they express positive or negative sentiment what we see is that bicycling is associated with positive sentiment while automobiles and

Buses are fifty-fifty or slightly negative so that tells one picture okay people like biking and walking and maybe there’s somewhat negative about automobiles and buses but if we take it to the next level using that L IWC software we see different things that emerged and unfortunately i’m not sure

Why series 4 shows up but that is the automobiles and so what if we look at this in more depth what we see is that when people are talking about bicycling they’re talking about it in the context of leisure so that means that when they’re talking about bicycling they’re

Associating with a leisure activity they’re not necessarily associating it with commuting okay so that’s important to know where as when we look at automobiles and buses they’re talking about that in real time and space so it means that people are tweeting about their difficulties with automobiles and buses while they’re having

This experience so they may be stuck in traffic and tweeting about that now that may not be safe but that’s what’s happening is that people are talking about it in real time and space so then it tells us maybe we should reconfigure this analysis to then separate the text

Comments that are being said about commuting and then look at mode choice in commuting behavior and see if we see a different sentiment analysis that might appear so that’s just one example of how you might use sentiment analysis to understand this aggregation of text that’s being put forward then we could

Look at it in another way so we separated out the comments that came in around the mobility planned and around the bond election and what we see is that the micro blogs about the Mobility plan our achievement oriented so they express a sense of achievement that we’ve accomplished this thing while the

Bond election is talking about real time present time present space and generally expresses positive more positive emotion than negative emotion so if we wanted to look at this and just study what was happening in advance of a bond election using the these micro blogs coming in

They gave us some sense of what may happen in an actual election that there’s generally positive feelings about this bond election so this is one more way that we can think about it and this certainly requires more case studies to look and see how this works in different contexts so then I looked

At the actual content itself and one of the things that we’re interested in is whether or not people are simply sharing or whether they’re trying to engage in some way and so the at simple means that you’re trying to direct your comment to somebody specifically retweet in the

Form of RT means that you’re trying to share information that somebody’s given you to a larger audience and then including URLs generally intends that you’re trying to engage someone and looking at a piece of information that you’re sharing what we found is the fifty-seven percent of the microblog so

Those 8300 microblogs included an @ sign meaning that they were engaging in some sort of conversation with a specific person and sixty percent of them included some sort of URL now we also wanted to look at the analysis of stimulation attempts so on Facebook the snap had 282 pushes so for example

Earlier when we talked about the vision statement that was an example of a push trying to encourage participation and of those 282 Facebook pushes fifty-four percent of them received a response and on average they received two point three responses but most important is the content analysis of completed dialogue

Because that’s really what we wanted to have happen was completed dialogues where somebody would post something snap would respond and that there was an ongoing dialogue there so snap made 374 attempts that I was able to document of those forty two percent received your response now the question mark is any of

This good or not good where’s the bar and the question the answer is we don’t know where the bar is that’s why these studies are important is to say what should we expect but if then I was in a copy shop and you were talking about the

Traffic on the way to get to the coffee shop and I come up behind you and I tap you on the shoulder and I say hey would you like to engage in a conversation about the Austin strategic Mobility plan since you’re already talking about transportation I don’t know maybe we get

Forty percent that would respond maybe not so then we look at actual conversations and I’ve got three examples here that I’ll share with you in this example snap is trying to push out an engaging message that will hopefully solicit some comment back so in this one they say okay Austin

Nashville has you beat again an amazing downtown transit station and they share a picture and some information about this Austin transit station so someone sees this and they respond and they say wow really impressive station like that waiting room the only downtown transit station I’ve been to is in Eugene Oregon

And then they share a picture of the station that they’ve been to in Eugene so snap respond back we admit it looks good and sounds good have you ever been there to experience in person if so how was it and the person responds back yeah then they change the topic a little bit

And say Congress Avenue acts as a transit mall of sorts though is this brt the metro rapid or something different so now they’re asking a question about the Mobility plan and as it relates to rail so snap responds back Austin is looking at a combination of

BRT in a streetcar for the 2012 urban rail project but no mention of a great station like Tennessee so the microblogger responds back with two questions one they say and the latest on urban rail is the streetcar going to be at grade mix traffic like Portland or

Some other kind of separation then they go on to say Tacomas light Rapid Transit is an example of what I mean by slight grade separation so snap responds back check out all the details on the Austin urban rail project here at the awesome tree G mobility calm website so what

I’ll say about this is that it is very difficult to try to communicate in 140 characters or less but the snap facilitators tried to be as effective as impossible as framing their questions and their responses so that they’re short understandable and connect with people and then microbloggers who are

Out there tweeting all the time they’re familiar with how to do this and they’re effective in communicating their messages in using abbreviations and other things that help to get to a point that you can have a interaction like this now this is the example from earlier that I pointed to with cat’s

Head 42 so in this case this is a microblogger who has initiated a conversation by saying seriously the bus system in Austin needs major work snap then sees this through their scraping of the internet they find this and they respond back and they say what about Austin’s bus system isn’t working for

You now how can it be made better the microblogger responds my bus was 15 minutes early so I had to wait at the stop for an hour for the next one to come they drive by stops all the time so snap response it sounds like more frequent buses might help ease the pain

If you miss a bus that’s running early yes anything else they respond back that would help too if the buses ran later into the night or early in the morning that would help to snap response excellent voicing your opinion about problems and solutions is the best way

To make change happen we hear you so what we see is a complete conversation there in a short period of time with the tweets going back and forth and that snap is able to solicit this information on what the particular bus problem was in this case i also want to talk

About the importance of understanding the local culture to be able to understand the cultural references that people are making so in this example we have a microblogger that is having a conversation with a specific person and they say when I was there I saw a guy

With the ZZ Top beard pulling a stand-up bass on a trailer behind his bike Austin equals weird biking so snap responds and says do the weird Austin bikers make you want to ride a bike yourself are you just happy to observe and the microblogger responds it depends on

Whether I have to ride the bike in a g-string toting a stand-up bass and snap says nope you can ride the bike in any manner you choose no G stirring or instrument hauling required in this case this Austin has a very famous biker who only rides around in his g-string so

He’s kind of this public spectacle and people talk about him and he’s just part of the weirdness of Austin that people celebrate so it was important for the facilitator to understand these cultural references so they could effectively engage in a conversation the last thing

That I wanted to look at was you know we hear the message from our lick to the leaders from our planners and others it’s always the same folks participating so were we actually engaging a broader group of people where is anybody dominating the conversation so if we’re

Hearing that track traffic is the number one issue is that really just the issue of one or two people or is it the issue of the broader hole and so through this participation process we were able to identify the specific user names associated with 4439 people that prove

That participated by putting in these micro blogs and what we find is that the vast majority of the messages are coming from users who are only posting one time or they’re posting to 25 of these micro blogs we only have two people that are very heavy users so what this means is

That we have a large portion of the messages coming from a large portion of the people meaning that we’re experiencing a fairly good equality of participation in the process and the fact that snap was able to engage you know have participation from forty four hundred people in a period of six months

Is pretty impressive so in the end did it all work and what do we take away from this so far yes exceeded all past project measures based on what’s out there in the literature they were able to get 200 Facebook fans in a period of just six months which is

Far greater than what we’ve seen in a lot of publicly oriented Facebook projects they had 366 Twitter followers which is far more than the vast portion of twitter users they were able to generate 45 retweets per week so this means that the messages that they were pushing out were then being shared and

Reaching out to a much larger audience and ninety-eight percent of the microbloggers contributed a two percent of all the relevant microblogs so this says you know there was a quality in participation at the same time I’m also going to say no it was a failure because it failed to influence decision-making

In the end as part of the strategic mobility planning process and in the bond election and in talking to the city about why there were there were problems in getting the data to them in ways that they could then use they said you know the city perceived a need to oversee

Composing messages and wanted to require message approval but they understood that this is counterproductive to the effective use of social media there’s no way if you’re engaging in the middle of the night that you’re going to be able to get approval from the city on those individual messages and the city was

Particularly concerned about the pushes because the whole point is to find something engaging to get people talking about in the city was worried whether or not there was bias and what the facilitators were pushing out the city recognized the usefulness of facilitation but they would have

Preferred that their staff be able to do it themselves rather than relying on the Texas citizens fund to provide that staffing and but they recognized at the same time they didn’t have staff available and the resources to allocate for facilitation so that was a concern the city didn’t have any policies for

The use of social media in microblogging informal or formal information sources said they were all just kind of working their way through it so there was a lot of tension and concern around what was happening and the city remained concerned about who participates so while we could tell them hey you had

More than 4,400 people that participated they wanted to know who those specific people are and they were concerned that the avatars of these people might might be reflecting their real views or these views may not represent the public as a whole and so he had some real concerns about that in

Addition there was the issue of time lag so it took a lot of time for snap to analyze all of these micro blogs and then to provide these monthly reports there was concern on the part of the city they really liked the sentiment analysis that they wanted to understand

The stories behind the micro blogs and that would have required a lot more time and energy to generate that and if the time snap didn’t have the analytical tools that could potentially help them in telling those stories more effectively and generally the public officials didn’t fully understand or

Trust social media and what it could provide as part of the process so there was a resistance actually using the public input that was received because they didn’t fully understand it so they’re definitely needed to be much more training and discussion in advance of the launch of the project to make

Sure everybody was on the same page about how this data can be used so looking forward we have rapidly evolving technology or social media tools or getting better and better our planners need to get on board to understand how we can best use this time type of tool in supporting our participatory

Processes and the social media methods need to complement our traditional methods and public officials need to understand what social media can and can’t deliver now while in this process I tried some different experimental methods that might help to analyze this data there’s definitely more work that

Needs to be done and so that’s an area that needs further work as well to work on additional rise that’s an oolitic elul and there’s increasing adoption of Technology and minorities in particular adopting social media in greater portions than the population as a whole and at the same time our leaders are

Increasingly becoming technology savvy so the digital divide is certainly an issue but when in concert with other targeted outreach activities social media can contribute to a comprehensive outreach and engagement effort so I think this really points to what rock is going to be talking about next is the representativeness of the input that’s

Being received and how much can we trust that how can we understand and interpret that to create meaningful input in our planning process so at this point I just would say that it’s obvious from going through this process that planners need more training on how to micro blog for

Engagement and they need to not only understand how to use social media but how to analyze it and use it to persuade public officials of its legitimacy so at this point I’m going to be turning it over to rob and he is going to be talking to you about the process in

Austin Rob let me change presenters are others thanks okay great thank you so I’ve titled my brief remarks today here the dilemma of online participation and I will explain in a minute exactly what I have in mind by that so just a brief overview first is an orientation to the

Process that I was studying which was also in Austin second is my results for three research questions and then finally some conclusions and recommendations for practice so to begin I really looked and oriented my study using two types of theory and the first was I asked what is the purpose of

Participation planning I think the most widely known article about this is sherry Arnstein’s lateral participation and she really says two things one is that participation can be manipulative so she should be careful and the other is she’s writing in the 60s the more power you can delegate the better and I

Think this has been very influential in the field but I really needed to be updated for a more modern view and so I found a framework that worked for me by arc on phone and he identified three failures of representative democracy that participation can help ameliorate the first is legitimacy often planning

Is concerning topics which were not sure our elected representatives know much about the second is effectiveness and so presumably you can get ideas and create policy that’s really tuned to the local context and then finally there is an assumption of the participation maybe help achieve justice in particular if

You’re engaging communities that don’t have good working relationships with government entities or officials and I’ll just say this is a very kind of specific framework that I took but there are other ways of looking at it I think Jennifer’s suggest some of them some researchers are very interested in the

Individual participant outcomes of learning and empowerment and there are other ways of looking at it about the empowerment of communities the other approach I took looking at participation was finding theories that could explain why people are motivated to participate to begin with the most clear relationship in the literature is that

It’s linked to socioeconomic status such as income and education but I don’t think that’s really very useful for planners and so identified two studies they try to go a bit deeper and identify some of the causal factors that can help us understand this is so I’ll discuss

These little bit more later but you can see right away for example the first theory is the civic volunteerism model says that some of the factors involved are how much information the citizen has about what’s going on whether or not they recruited by a friend or a community leader and other factors and

Similarly the night andy sixx study goes into detail about we know education is important what are some of the skills or attitudes that it may actually impart and I think in my conclusion I’ll circle back we can use this to craft participation methods that are more inclusive and motivate larger numbers

And more representative people to participate this is the general framework of the study and really I was sensitive to kind of two things that citizens are involved in the creation of the plan a comprehensive plan the topics themselves are up for grabs second they actually can theoretically should be able to

Provide input into the specific proposals or vision that’s described in the plan and then finally there is a relationship the City Council approves the document and so there’s a formal relationship through voting as well as City Council members polling and informally discussing the citizens so in all three of these identified on the

Left a series what I call participation approaches these are things the city was doing to enable these links to heaven and so for the purposes of the study these were the final approaches and so you can see I’m looking at online in the context of all of the activities that

Are taking place in particular I look at a Facebook page it’s not on the slide but also their use of Twitter a online survey using SurveyMonkey a website that has comments and then you can see there’s a variety of other exercises as well as formal community meetings that

Were happening at this time and just to briefly explain this research was done over a period of about 1 year and but it was the early phase of the comprehensive planning process so actually right now they’ve proceeded on to I think they’re near 3 or they may be of approaching for

When the City Council will be considering the final proposal I think they’re refining the vision and so some of my conclusions as you’ll see our color by the fact that in this phase of the process they were really looking to generate vision and to get many ideas on

The table and so some of what I’ll say may be amended if you’re looking at participation at various points in a complex planning process similar to ones you may be familiar with the neuro practice or here as we see in Austin so finally what is this dilemma and I

Think the dilemma is this that we know that large numbers of people are using digital tools and we have an intuitive sense that it’s a great way to get in touch with people but we’re have a lurking suspicion that it might actually empower the wrong people and really I

Think it’s a fear of uncertainty that Jennifer was talking about we’re not sure how representative they are various ways of the citizens and unlike a public meeting it’s a mediated form of communication so the whole person isn’t there for you to really get a sense of where they’re from and what’s used they

Have you can see just the raw numbers and participants that even in the short period of time the number of people they reached through online mediums was much higher than the number of public meetings and these meetings were highly publicized in very professionally run meetings but I think this kind of

General pattern you could see might be similar to what could be possible in your city or town and then just briefly the research here I did a participant survey of some of the most active participants I went to Austin and observe some of the meetings as well as

Analyzing the content and so the planners there did a great job of capturing a lot of the input that was received in the various meetings minutes and other things and so you could get a sense of the content that was being received and of course some interviews

Of the planners as well as participants to get a sense of kind of on the ground how is unfolding and so I’ll briefly introduce I had three questions the first and you can see these relate to the the theories i chose really if one of the purposes participation was to get

Views and the local knowledge and ideas of citizens how open were these different mechanisms and so for example as jennifer was showing you can use twitter for listening and engage in a conversation you can also use it just to promote yourself and spread information the second was how representative and i

Found in two ways i’m into em interested i think the first is the most evident in terms of age ray ethnicity the demographic factors the second is a little more nuanced it says looking at the views of the people there they may look slightly different than

The city at large but really what we should maybe should be more interested in is are their views systematically different than the city at large and then finally kind of a meta issue is was the input they’re receiving through these channels relevant to what’s actually going to be in the plan and so

We saw in the Twitter examples the dialogue where they can sort of explain the issues or the specific provide links to kind of the specific specifics of what’s proposed but in this content context the topics and scope of a plan I don’t think is necessarily self evident

To all citizens and so I’ll quickly go through some of the results so first in terms of online participation really the only one that was used to receive implement was the online survey and although the city was engaging in these other methods they would frequently tell people you know we’re not actually

Recording this you need to come to a public meeting in person and so you can see the brief excerpt from Facebook below and I identified several reasons this was as Jennifer pointed out but at the at this time which is slightly before her study they were developing in

Social media policy also the social media outreach was being conducted by sub health consultants and who are marketing consultants so the planners were kind of removed by another layer from the people actually doing this and I don’t think it’s a critique but it’s something to think about to be very

Clear with how you want to engage in using these tools and what the assumptions in practices of the professionals actually using it will be and then finally there’s just some sheer technical barriers the imagine Austin website was the first blog the city hosted on their own website and the

First to have comments and so they had to go through a process of modifying their content management system creating this policy trading various staff and which they went through but it meant that there was a delay and some usability problems in early on and really I think the this is an

Interesting conclusion the city deliberately chose to say that these online forms were experimental and would be distinct from what they term the formal opportunities participation which are the public meetings and steering committees workshops and so I think this is a very understandable and good starting point and I think the idea of

The conversation today is to figure out what we know what we might want to know before we can treat these experimental online tools as quote unquote formal approaches to receiving additional forms of participation and next I turn to this issue of representativeness and so my

Survey had a size of 65 65 I didn’t do statistical testing because it wasn’t a random survey again it was a survey of the very highly active online participants but my take home and I have a complete table in the full full paper my conclusion from this is you know

First that the demographic representativeness of public meetings the conventional public meetings is what I think our intuition says it’s not we’re not quite reaching people that look like the city and I have the American Community Survey here as a benchmark the other conclusion is surprisingly the online participants

Were fairly similar and might even be slightly better in terms of these demographic indicators in particular there’s actually more elderly and more more youth may be online or it could be kind of kind of similar statistically but it gives you a sense that our kind

Of suspicion is is on but a long survey a long list of literature I found has basically proven that it must do something radically different kind of conventional meeting in the school is not really going to reach exactly statistical picture of the city I don’t think this is a big surprise the next

Factor i looked at is a little bit more nuanced is the issue of view representation and so the city is part of the process conducted a statistically significant survey which they had a polling firm send out a mail survey and they had a simple size and

They had a sampling plan I would ensure that they they got it to all neighborhoods and all types of people in the city and I took one of the questions about what people’s priorities were for the plan and I asked it only to my 73 extremely active online participators

And I find there’s kind of two take homes for this chart the first is that the highest priority is actually very similar between the two groups and the black bar represents the margin of error for the city survey and so transportation is clearly number one and

In fact many of these my group which is not representative demographically and highly self selecting is within the margin of error and have similar views as a very carefully done citywide survey however and it’s an important however there’s two caveats I found where the groups differ widely and they’re well

Outside of the Martian air the first was the city as a large rated developing health and human service facilities homeless shelter is much higher than the participators and the second is developing public safety facility police and fire also rated higher and so I think this follows some of earlier

Research done by Tim beat Lee in the 1980s in Austin that found the view representation differs but in kind of slight ways it’s not a wholesale radically different profile that may be on certain issues such as the role of government kind of the relative emphasis of these kind of core services over

Other things like open space may differ suddenly but I think this is a really interesting initial take that hopefully we can follow up and look in more detail kind of and me and be able to attune these different mechanisms even better and then finally most briefly is the

Question of relevance I observe the operates a plan as it is in most places is legally mandated to contain 10 different elements the City Council through iterative dialogue with the steering committee added four more however these elements topics we’re often not communicated to participants in either the survey or the take home

Exercise or even in the public meetings and instead they ask for kind of a SWOT analysis strengths weaknesses and ideas for the future the online channels like Facebook and Twitter covered a wide range of topics land use transportation and others and I think this is important trade off to consider a be very

Strategic about on the one hand we I think want to be extremely open it and do with these comprehensive plans to encourage creativity and to encourage citizens to guide the topics through their responses on the other the plan does have some elements which it will clewd and unless people know about it

They may or may not know to give their viewer ideas about it so for example it’s definitely going to have transportation and land use what’s overall pattern of growth and ensuring that’s communicated at the point where the first hearing about it may be important so that they know to kind of

Cover that in in what they’re giving you and so I from that’s true some conclusions that i’m looking forward to discussing with a group and really the first is that in some sense this dilemma is real there are these slight and several differences however I think more

Importantly we really have to be very specific about what our goals are so for example if you’re looking for the views or local ideas in a neighborhood I think really what you should have in mind is smarter participation and not necessarily maximizing the numbers so in

That case you may want to have fewer more goal-directed approaches where it’s clear to the citizen into the consultants or government officials operating that exactly what the purpose is looking for new ideas are we rank sites for new parks or is this very open-ended brainstorming and secondly I think there’s always a

Desire to promote planning and to promote these processes in general and a broadcast approach can work but as you saw earlier in the example of the dialogue on Facebook it wasn’t clear to me citizens are making these new ones distinctions between yes the online survey is actually real but if I post a

Comment on facebook it’s not being listened to and that’s putting a lot of burden on them to sort of know and and choose how they’re going to engage and also require people to come to public meetings can have a real high real cost in terms of time childcare in

Transportation and we should maybe think twice about requiring that as the only formal mechanism and think about in what ways can we open up some of these online channels in ways that we’re comfortable to us as well as the citizens at large the second had to do with looking at

These different approaches as really a wide constellation that people were in my survey the most active people are going to engage in multiple ways and we need to treat this very deliberately upfront and so what the chart shows is the percent of these active participants who I surveyed who said that they had

Done each activity and so almost twenty percent had done almost all of them and the next slide will show in more detail and so I think we sometimes add more and more chain Knowles not really not thinking kind of critically about this is truly going to reach new communities

Or is this truly giving the additional value in terms of what i can tell me and how it can improve the plan or is it causing more work and more opportunities but for the same people to kind of engage in different ways this visualization represents the number of

People who overlap between each of the approaches in my study and so i think it kind of suggests some hypothesis to me I’d like to follow up I mean intuitively it seems correct that the website is a gateway in one of two ways either a place to of initial contact they sort of

Google something or seek it out for some reason in communications theory there’s a notion of mobilizing information which is things like directions for how to participate in surveys the dates and times of meetings dates and times of steering meetings or other meetings you can attend and so clearly that kind of

Information the planners are very good at putting on the website the second way of interpreting this is that the initial point of contact maybe one of these others but in as in the case with Jennifer they’re being referred or leaking back to the website to get more

Context and to find out what other opportunities are so they’re kind of bouncing around between them and I think we don’t think as deliberately about what the overall system who are creating is and 10 to view each of them as an individual self-contained entity so this just might suggest that the world is

Complex and people have kind of many different preferences and many different channels that they may be working with and finally some recommendations and so I have recommendations for each of the three research questions the first concerns openness and so really it’s to be open to the idea of using these

Channels and to be very deliberate on both ends about where what’s being asked for and what’s being recorded and so I think there’s some fuzziness you know what are your hopes dreams and ideas and those could be refined further and saying you know in these case we’re

Looking for ideas on this topic we’re looking for a general spatial strategy for the city and that potentially this could mean that actually doing fewer channels but picking only a few may give you the human resources to actually listen and engage in a more detailed way secondly is representation and so this

Comes back to the theories that identified really the case actually contain two really inspiring stories and the city conducted two Irish meetings one at the asian-american community center and one at the mexican-american community center which were highly successful a photo of the former is below and i think this

Confirmed some of the sociologists who are telling us that yes participation is loosely correlated with things like income and education but if we look at a more nuanced way the principles of community organizing or successful because they do things like recruit people they work through existing social networks or community or cultural

Networks and if you locate them in the right places in other ways you can minimize the resources required another major conclusion of my paper has to do with the issue of language and it’s self-evident pup bares repeating to be very attentive to the languages spoken in the target communities and ensure

That your online and offline channels if you want to reach those language communities are are doing it in the right way this in certainly requires expense and complications I’m sure many of you are familiar with but it’s you’re really a very critical piece that we can’t omit in our enthusiasm to look at

New tools and finally kind of very briefly here this issue of relevance and I keep it brief because i think it’s debatable maybe it’s a acceptable trade-off to be extremely ambiguous in the early phase and then zero in as the process moves along however you are kind

Of taken the position that be too broad can be demotivating in some sense and we need to be actively providing some context it’s a very complicated busy world out there not everyone is that familiar with planning and when we’re going to be most successful we’ll be talking to those people and it’s very

Useful to kind of communicate clearly and succinctly about exactly the content of the plans and policies that were poured relating and then as a final slide here I think kind of what the future holds is tools and practices you may be familiar with and we mate we’ve

Seen some a little bit in the case today where the online engagement is really narrowly and clearly linked to an intended purpose so one example the future Melbourne project was really oriented getting creative good ideas for new policies for the city of Melbourne Australia and so it was about creating a

Wiki in a document they did look at issues representation but it was much more about trying to generate from the ground up what are some of the policies or ideas about designing the city that could be done and some of these others you may have some exposure to they are

Similarly linked to kind of discrete purposes for participation I think the final one to just mention is that at the federal level many federal agencies have been experimenting with idea ranking systems like user boys they have a drawback like Twitter they’re very narrow bandwidth you kind of enter a

Short statement but the advantage is if what you’re trying to do is generate ideas and rank them on a very focused question or topic area it’s provided online framework where you can enable people to contribute ideas and fo interact but come up with an outcome that’s easily understandable and has

Been sort of sifted and filtered into a way that can be plugged into the process and these slides are posted online so if you’d like to follow up on these citations you can also contact me and I think we’re going to open it up for questions here and use the remainder of

The time to begin to discuss some of the issues okay great well we’ve got a whole slew of questions that have come in from our participants so Rob I have a good one that you can probably answer right away so rude Ruben wants to know are there any good precedents out there for

Municipalities looking to develop social media policies cities that have done a good job in terms of creating a staff usage apology policy that provides staff with sufficient access to these tools to engage stakeholders without creating too many limits or restrictions I you know I’ve heard about many of use I actually

Think this is something that I’d like to take a few minutes and kind of pull together the ones I’m aware of and then maybe I can Jennifer we could circulate it to typical because it is an area that’s been kind of in rapid development I’ve cited the

One in Austin which i think is public and I could share but I’ll do a summary view about others I mean it’s a also kind of a caution is on finding policies from other cities is a great starting point but ultimately the best policy might be tuned to the skills and

Temperament of your own office in your own city ok great and Rob can you post that last slide for everybody to look at that has the contact information on it and I just see that someone has just given us the social media policy for Austin and I’m going to post that to the

Entire audience via the chat so that’s available for everybody ok so we a next question will I ok has there been any concern about skewed sampling coming from Twitter users and this is in the case of snap but I think youth you could answer this as well Rob about the skew

Of participants coming from the social media sites in your comprehensive planning process I’ll just respond from the perspective the city was just very apprehensive generally from the transportation end of things in not understanding who was specifically participating because you couldn’t give them complete demographics on who these

Participants were we do know that Austin social media usage is higher than the national rates but that we understand that Twitter users are not representative of the population as a whole and that’s why a comprehensive participatory process is so important is to recognize that the online social media participate patient you’re getting

Is just one piece of that puzzle so it was definitely a concern and I think we need to work to develop better ways to communicate about what social media can deliver in terms of some of those demographics as a whole Rob do you want to comment on that yeah really kind of

۲۲ issues many of you may be familiar with the work done by the Pew Internet american life project is a ongoing survey project to really understand how not just the internet but also these new channels are being used and so they have excellent longitudinal data about various things than they do special

Surveys you have to be when using that data to figure out who’s on web platform be very cognizant of the precise question asked and there’s a huge gradation between somebody who has an accountant signed up once and somebody who uses it every day and so that’s this

Kind of a resource I think really this also points to the issue of the digital divide which we don’t talk about so much anymore I think it’s because the world is getting more complicated I like to think about it in terms of three kind of key factors the first is the literally

The hardware you know how what percentage of people are using smartphones or have high bandwidth connections if the channels you’re using requires that the second is the issue of usability many the how much participation are going to get is a factor of how well-designed your survey

As well designed your website is and in terms of things like Twitter is whether you’re engaging with the norms of use that the community are using but then finally and this is the kind of killer factor for planners is motivation is usually important I think what we’ve learned is communities which on the

Other two you know they don’t really have necessarily the most excellent hardware or the system that they’re using our kind of clunky and coyly design but if you’re highly motivated you are willing to shoulder the burden of figuring it out and going through that and so because of these three

Factors it’s very hard to predict and we should also treat statistics with a grain of salt because for any given process the way they did usability how in this case the awesome website is very good but plenty of city websites load very slowly or don’t work well in

Different browsers and that will affect the numbers you get a man and so that’s I think a thought about that okay and Rob dad I just saw a statistic that came out based on 4th quarter 2010 sales of smartphones that twenty percent of Americans now have a smartphone and

That’s a rapidly rising number but about one in five III heard an estimate by the end of this year it’s going to be over fifty percent but so anyway it’s there certainly spreading very widely okay great uh there was just a quick question for you rob about what a meeting in a

Box is that was it’s a really creative approach some of the faculty of the University of Texas dreamt it up the ideas it’s a structured dialogue and basically if someone an individual is really motivated to engage with their family their neighborhood or community group they can pick up a set of

Materials that has a script and guides you through some exercises and it’s oriented towards generating lists and information with the strengths weaknesses on ideas for the future for the city this was part of the visioning phase and then the idea is you record how your meeting went and then you can

Turn it back into the city and they aggregate all these different meetings into boxes so it’s very low-tech but I think it has cog was kind of an a high-tech attitude where it’s much more seeking ways of engaging people not just in the meeting that we’re going to pick

The time but the one that works for your community so I didn’t in a paper I discuss a little more I didn’t analyze that kind of exclusively but certainly an example of a more innovative offline approach that we could consider great we’ve got a couple of related comments

But I think relate to both of our studies so one how do you notify respondents that their data is being collected analyzed and likely saved for public records and then the flip side of that and I think this probably relates a little more to my study is did people

Feel like their privacy was being invaded so Rob will let you start with that and then I’ll follow up I think I did look at this specifically you know I said in a presentation my assumption is many citizens are assuming when they talk to a government that the government listening and to presumably

To listen you have to record and due to all that certainly on the online survey they very explicitly had a policy saying you know yes we’re recording their SSN explain the privacy issues but you know kind of to that extent certainly the paradigm at the federal level has been

That if you want to have right in and comment on a regulation it’s it becomes a public record and it’s it’s pretty widely known I think that’s a really important question that as we drill down to lower levels or community-based processes to be really explicit and clear with participants about that and

About the weather different things are subject to hide or freedom information laws or also public meeting laws okay great and I would add the snap website explained you know pretty clearly in simple language that this information was being collected and given to the city out of the thousands of people who

Participated only one person raised a concern and they posted some kind of hate messages via Twitter telling people that Austin is you know invading their privacy but it really they weren’t because they didn’t have their privacy settings set up so that it was blocking the city from being able to view it and

I think the important point here is the difference between open and closed social networks so an open social network is Twitter unless you specifically set up your privacy settings to block people from being able to see it then anyone can search on any topic and its really intended to be that

Way that the expectation on twitter is that you may not know the people that are following you but they’re following you because they’re interested in what you’re saying and then vice versa you know close social networks such as Facebook you’re only allowing people who you’re friends with to be able to see

What you’re doing and so the XP the problem is most people on Twitter don’t understand that distinction and so it does come as a surprise when somebody happens to tweet them that they don’t know but of the thousands of people that participated only one raised any concern

About this issue of invasion of privacy okay so the next question one bit of the big legal questions that we are wondering is how we make sure that comments on a social media forum on a current land use file is not part of the public record for the file so this is a

Question from Christina Rob do you want to try to answer that one you know the UM I that reminds me I’ve been in conversations other people about this and I’m actually I’m actually not going to give an answer other than to say I think that’s it’s a great question and

Something that we clearly have to work out you know in my case the channels i was looking at were very clearly in control of the city or the city’s consultants and so in which case comments they receive would have to be it wasn’t falling on it wasn’t a NEPA or

Barbell impact kind of process which have different requirements but in any case it would be clear it’s part of the record the public records related to the process but I’m really not sure if there’s a way of engaging online and making them exempt and I’ll just add

That this is a topic that we’re going to be talking about at the APA conference in two weeks there’s a session that’s going to be on social media that Rob and I will be participating in and one of the speakers is going to be there specifically talking about this issue of

Documentation and the legal requirements related to documentation can you rob pull back up that circular diagram the wheel graphic that showed the different connections we have questions around how it was created and then also how to understand it so maybe if you can go back over that quickly that would help

George and I stand in a couple of others as well okay right I and in there good questions this graphic actually only includes people who participated in more than one of these activities and in this case I’ve selected six and so what the links are showing is the number of people who

Participated in both of those activities so for example if we start up on the website on the top right you can see there’s a bar going all the way over to the open house and so the numbers add up to more than are in the set because if

You participated in both the website and the open house as well as the website and the meeting in a box you would be represented as part of it being a greenish bar as well as the bluish bar but why the reason I included it and I

Thought it was useful is simply to show that essentially everything is no one channel is getting kind of very unique participants in terms of these very active 65 online participants that are included in the survey and so the ones that are you know pretty much everybody

Is doing is the website and the public meetings and the others have smaller overlaps but it’s a very complicated picture and you know any individual thing you know that there’s a high chance that people are also participating in one or more of the others I think yeah in the paper I think

It’s I have kind of a table that shows a little more clearly what I’m trying to share with this it wonderful so with the question about the large percentage of blue-collar Hispanic immigrants that cannot speak or read English but may not also be able to read

Spanish how can social need me media be used to engage these groups and have you considered the validity of data collected in areas with high Hispanic populations so i can say that i know that los angeles has created multilingual facebook pages so that they have them set up in both Spanish and in

English so that way they can encourage the participation of their spanish-speaking population that would of course require that they do read Spanish so that’s just one example where you have a high immigrant community where they’ve gone into multilingual efforts to try to engage their population via social media Rob I don’t

Know if you want to add anything on that only that there’s actually a colleague here in my department is doing research on a voice-only platform developed by people in los angeles to engage with migrant laborers and day laborers and so that’s not social media per se but there

Are there still are ways to being creative with technology to work with these communities but certainly the macroscopic trends in terms of widening gaps in income disparities as well as worsening literacy and educational outcomes are well documented and you have multi-decade trends the United States and so certainly in create and

Increasingly difficult and socially polarized context to do planning so you know i’m i’m well aware of it and you know you know really think that the only technical solutions will be things like voice systems and and that sort of thing but recognize it’s not a bear fur that’s

Very easy the other comment there is I think we should understand the information moves and very unexpected fluid ways and so systems and protocols that empower community leaders for example or empower kind of key figures and educate them can often and have trickle down into their communities or conversely recruitment strategies in

My case in the Mexican American cultural center that target those communities through their existing social networks whether it’s faith organizations can often be an effective strategy and none of that is very techie it’s much more about organizing but there are reasons those methods are so effective and the reasons why planners often start

Thinking that way and because that really is the way to reach certain communities okay how do you establish sampling validity for use of social media is compared to more traditional random sampling and survey methods is there an inherent bias built into reliance on social media for opinion

Sampling so since you actually did a survey do you maybe want to respond to that Rob I did a survey but then the more that I I kind of got went down the rabbit hole the less certain I was you know how representative anything was and

I’ll give an example the city hire a consultant to do what they called a statistically or scientifically valid survey but I looked at the reported rates of renter’s versus owners and there’s a wide discrepancy between the results of that allegedly scientific survey which was a male survey with phone follow-up and the American

Community Survey estimates and so I immediately had concerns you know our students or renters throwing these things out and even in a very rigid survey design they’re always a margin of error and it may may or may not it may actually be wider than sometimes the one that’s reported given the person doing

The survey there was an earlier survey that I cited timbi Lee and some other scholars did of the previous Austin comprehensive plan and they went to great lengths to make it representative but I so I guess my point of view is increasingly phone surveys are because

Young people and all people of all ages don’t have landlines or don’t answer phones survey pollsters are realizing that any given channel is increasingly challenging so you know if you’re looking for zacks representativeness in terms of views or demographics it’s going to be a challenge and you may want to spend the

Money to go in any one of these directions and so that’s why I emphasize that is only kind of one dimension of the valid outputs and participation all of these things are being vetted by City Council which is presumably accountable in some form of representative democracy

So we have to figure out how we’re going to balance these different needs Jennifer was there another part of the question or Die answer no I think you got it and I was just going to add on to that in our example we went back and we

Contacted all of those people that had been engaged with and sent them a survey link via their Twitter messaging or Facebook or whatever it might be and encourage them to fill it out so that we could get some demographic information to understand who was participating in the process of course not everyone

Responds so we can’t know for sure and we knew going in doing that survey that we weren’t going to be getting a sample validity and so we recognize that going in but we at least wanted to have some sort of survey that would tell us more about who was participating in this

Social media process and I agree with Rob completely it is increasingly difficult to conduct a statistically valid survey using any of these mediums because of the lack of participation rate among different audiences using different mediums so that’s certainly an issue that we still have to grapple with

So thanks Edwin for that question okay and I guess this would go for both of us rob is there anything that we know about where the users are from so for example in particular neighborhood or other demographics what do we know in terms of who the gap is and who are not reaching

You know really the various channels that the kind of data the city of collected that was analyzing asked for the neighborhood you’re in they used relatively coarse zones of the city and so I didn’t actually analyze it in a fine level of detail because I think the whole city was only divided

Into five or six and so this the city themselves have published some kind of you know who are we reaching and Aragon our community forums fact sheets that show this geographic representation but each area itself was pretty heterogeneous in it it trended from my recollection slightly towards the more affluent middle-class neighborhoods but

That is you know it is expected kids correlated with the demographics of the individuals which we have data about I think this is kind of an intriguing way because increasingly especially with mobile phones were able to receive data that’s being geotagged tweets can have geographic data associated with them as

Well as photos and blog posts can I place names and things like that and so that does enable given the the form to know a little bit about kind of which the neighborhood variation I think the the large unanswered question here is what about people who don’t live in the

City or who split their time and this isn’t something i’ve seen narrowed in on i did see a case study of participatory budgeting and brazil they had a very strict registration where you actually to be registered voter in in the city and then you could log in and vote

Through an online system for infrastructure improvements and i think but from my memory over ten percent of the people who voted who so they have to be registered voters in the city we’re voting said that they were voting from other places and so i think that there’s this broader trend of the traditional

You know i live in this neighborhood my whole life is really radically shifted and we actually transnational migrants calling you know living 50 splitting their time between different different cities fifty percent Manhattan fifty percent of the Dominican Republic to give an example so that’s that’s a huge conceptual challenge for planners who

Are much more comfortable with the community group of homeowners than they are with migrants or students or young young people that are much more more transient and Rupp brings up a really important point this was something we tried to emphasize to the city that a lot of the transportation problems are not

Necessarily caused by the residents of the City of Austin specifically they may be commuters that are coming in from another area or their along a major transportation corridor that people may be commuting from San Antonio to Dallas or other places and so getting input from people who are tourists who may be

Commuters who may be other things may be equally important in terms of understanding how to develop transportation solutions so the place base of those people may not be as important as one might have liked but in the original design the idea was to do heat maps where we could see where the

Tweets were coming from where these micro blogs were coming from so we could identify how close they are to the rail line or public transit or other things but unfortunately because of the bureaucratic structure and getting things approved we weren’t able to do the micro surveys as frequently as one

Would have liked and ultimately we had to abandon the idea of being able to connect people to locations through very small surveys just asking them what’s your zip code or you know where do you live in some other way so we were unfortunately unable to do that but that

Was part of the intention was to try to measure that in some way so that you can better understand how sentiment is associated based on where people are at so if they’re close to the rail line are they more supportive or less supportive of real transit or other kinds of issues

Okay um we have another question about that circular graph Rob you didn’t answer how you made it what program it was made in oh I forgot the name it was a particular visualization program I can look that up it’s been approximately a year since I did it so I blanking on

What it was called okay but it’s not in PowerPoint or anything else it’s special program no no okay great so crystals to know if communities transit systems use location-based social media such as Foursquare as a tool in understanding their user base I’ll respond that chris i haven’t seen any local governments

That are using it that way I was putting together a presentation a little earlier today for an applications based conference I’m doing next week and I was looking specifically for examples of that there are some that are using location-based data for reporting code enforcement and so for example the City

Of Boston is a tying their 311 system into an app that you can download take a picture of a code enforcement problem send it in there’s examples like that but I haven’t seen anything that is more engagement based the transit systems it tends to be location-based for telling

You when the bus is coming rather than the engagement that we’re talking about here Rob I don’t know if you want to add anything to that yet just that in the in the Boston case it’s a city-owned tap that then you can actually report it to their constituent relationship system

You can then tweet your report and so there’s kind of outward integration the the only engagement around transportation I’ve seen this place based is some of the third party apps that are we using a real-time data have kind of various ways of providing a discussion channel or back discussion

I’m kind of in either any app or through a Twitter hashtag it might be specific to a rail line I’m all for I think there’s like a some of them it’s like the bus system in general you can kind of tweet & and other riders can go there

And see what’s being said and then just a note of a foursquare is if this group only about twenty percent are using Twitter my suspicion is it’s a much smaller group that are using poor stairs Foursquare it’s really those kind of tools are my sense is still kind of very

Elite tools and and so there’s potential for creativity but you also have to be sure that there’s enough kind of a critical mass to do the experiment you want to try ok great point so based on the research that you’ve done Rob what methods would be most useful or applicable to determine

Representativeness of an online population or participants that’s from Edwin mm-hmm I think that’s a great question i think the starting point is to have a critical discussion we’ve talked about at least three dimensions view representation demographic representation and then also geographic which the question raised a couple ago

And so in any given process you want to have a critical discussion of all those different dimensions you know what which ones are you going to prioritize and then tune the process that way also these we’ve all are many of us may have seen these maps in this bit what

Specific networks communities use does vary the u.s. is more or less homogeneous but there are language specific and especially as you go around the world there’s a host of each country many of them have social networking sites that are more popular there than they are somewhere else so that’s the

Other factor to think think about I think and so you know if you’re doing a downtown plan it might actually be linked in that you really want to spend your time and energy if everyone’s a white-collar worker and they’re all in LinkedIn I think Faye’s you know

Facebook and then kind of each of them have slightly different demographic profiles and any kind of think about that and then you know but in relation to the larger issue of representation it’s you know linking exactly what are we concerned with that they have unrepresentative opinions or we just

Want to tell our elected officials that in terms of certain key demographic factors we’re reaching everyone and then tune your strategy and something I saw happening in Austin that I thought was great advice as they literally at their steering committee meetings would pass around the latest report of who they

Were reaching through their meetings and outreach efforts and discussion in an open forum you know with who’s missing and what steps can we take to bring them to the table or to ensure that they’re included and I think that’s that’s really the best way to go about that crate we

Have two people who have asked questions about how do we think about social media in a rural context both Megan and Patricia are saying you know what do we do in locations in rural areas with limited broadband and cell coverage or in areas where you just have a generally

Low population III just a brief comment I think the very clear finding was the website is kind of the starting point for a lot of this and so Jennifer I know you’ve done extensive research kind of longitudinal studies of how planning it has used their websites but that

Immediately you should evaluate in terms of technical usability the according to plain language or the quality and clarity of the language and information and then begin to think about are there limited ways we can engage people there allow them to sign up for notices dissipate in surveys I think that you

Know and to the extent that you’re going to reach people where you’re not sure about tools it seems pretty clear that that’s that’s the biggest for a tech-savvy place like Austin and I would suspect it would be the the primary way you’re going to get people and the other

Thing is you really try to learn on the ground kind of what tools people are using and if if they’re not usually is you may have to put you know be just very pragmatic about what’s going to work great our time is up we didn’t get to all the questions today but everyone

Asked some really great insightful questions and we had some really good dialogue I’d encourage you to take a look at our papers in more detail there’s more detail located on our websites and we look forward please join us at the APA conference if you’re there we’ll have a very good discussion that

Session is focused on being more discussion oriented as an opportunity to go into more depth with a lot of the questions that you all are answering or asking a recording of today’s session will be available after the fact that the Utah APA website you can get a

Recording of that there when you leave you will be asked to fill out a survey letting us know what you thought about today’s session we appreciate your feedback it certainly helps us as we move programming future sessions so thank you rob for joining us today and thanks to our audience for your insightful

Comments all right thank you okay so Rob you can go ahead and log off I’ll just gather a few of the questions and then I’ll communicate with you by email okay sounds great all right thanks

ID: NhVy6gOvBvw
Time: 1344192711
Date: 2012-08-05 23:21:51
Duration: 01:33:10

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