better e-consultations?

[ from discussion on the do-consult list]

This debate is timely. More and more bodies are 'consulting' online, formally and informally.

There are three aspects to the ‘better’ consultation issue, at least in my view.

The first aspect is the clear definition of the aims of consultation. Often, these rules are unwritten though embedded in the code, statute, practice of the entity organising the consultation. Be it a local government, a legislative assembly, a select committee, a party (thinking here of labour’s big conversation), a newspaper, the local parish, etc, etc. These are in addition to the formal ‘terms of engagement’. Critical discourse analysis is needed to determine what the intended and unintended aims are of the consultations.

Second, there are external _criteria_ drawn from various theories of deliberation on how and under which conditions reasonable debate occurs. I realize that 'reasonable' is controversial here, but could find no better term. Alas, this has been reviewed, hasn't it, in countless articles on deliberation online, the public sphere online, free speech online, anonymity and the internet, early CMC studies, etc. I have quite an extensive biblio, and this is not really my area :) Iyengar, of recent; Fishkin, for years now; David Newman's stuff; Steve Schneider’s thesis. And you can borrow from dozen of related disciplines: CSW, education studies, small group research, mediation, etc, all those fields dealing with, ehm, interpersonal communications?

All in all, can we settle for the following criteria to guide the ‘ideal’ consultation (or ‘better consultation’ for the incrementalists on the list):

Openness – free access for all
Equality – all contribution are equally important
Relevance – discussion should include all and only those participants affected by its outcomes
Agenda setting – topics can be endogenously generated
Responsibility – all contributors should be visible
Anonymity – contribution can be anonymous under specified conditions
Diversity – opinions should diverge, controversy be welcome
Incrementalism – contributions should build on each other
Peacefulness – personal attacks are intolerable
Effectiveness – contributions should be fed to the policy making circuit by formal mechanisms
Transparency – discussion should be visible from ‘outside’
Efficacy – the consultation should effect change, or not, which reflects the balance of preferences expressed

Borrowing wildly here. Would anything else make for a 'better' consultation, generally speaking?

Third, what are the methods one can use for analysing such non-naturally occurring conversations. In my research I used:

0. discourse analysis of texts, oral and written, guiding the consultation
1. ex-ante questionnaires of participants;
2. content analysis of contributions, according to ad-hoc coding schemes;
2.1 factor and cluster, MDS, latent class
3. structure analysis of conversation;
3.1 log file analysis, using a variety of tools
4. conversation analysis of utterances and speech acts analysis; paper and colour pencils here;
5. grounded theme analysis, Atlas-ti
6. social network analysis, using a variety of tools
7. ex-post debriefings with participants, and experimental control with ex-ante results
8. semi-structured interviews with consultation organisers, moderators, policy-makers.

At times I thought one was more suitable, given the format of the consultation, and time-budget constraints. At times I thought that a ‘better’ study would incorporate them all, treating the alleged multi-semic social text – the consultation I mean – as formally and structurally multi-semic, for once.