Jean-Daniel Cusin Chief Solutions Architect e-Deliberation Inc.

1. Introducing e-Deliberation™Solving the Problem of Achieving a Meeting of the Minds Through Collaborative DeliberationFor Government Organizations Jean-Daniel Cusin Chief Solutions Architect e-Deliberation Inc.

2. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government Typicale-Deliberation Use-Cases For Government • Concurrent Policy Engineering • Post-Mortem Reviews • Engaging Community Support & Synergy • Getting It Right • Deploying It Right • Strategic Governance

3. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government The Challenge • Concurrent Policy Engineering • Coordinate the design and advancement of the many different facets (areas of expertise) of a policy being designed such that every facet is in sync with the other ones. • Ensure that all facets have been reviewed for potential problem identification and resolution in the light of what other facets are planning. How Usually Addressed & Impacts • Many rounds of formal and ad hoc meetings, reviews, town halls, rework, sign-offs, revisions, etc. • Impacts • Time required finalize policy remains unacceptably long because the process is very administrative and it is complex to involve all the stakeholders simultaneously; • One or two louder voices end up taking the lead anyway, and dictating the path of the solution set; • Problems/challenges at the junction of different specializations or stakeholder groups take a long time to get resolved.

4. Concurrent Policy Engineering The e-Deliberation Advantage • Using the e-Deliberation process, each facet of the policy area is defined as one of several Topics that need to be developed in parallel; • Stakeholder participants collaborate in topics where they are experts as well as in others, to foster synergy; • The Topic Teams advance their deliverables in parallel waves. At the end of each wave, each participant has the opportunity to consent to each of the Teams policy proposals or raise a formal objection, which becomes an input to the Team’s next wave of deliberation; • The goal is for all Teams to achieve consent from everyone in a maximum of three waves, at which point the policy can be signed off. Benefits • The e-Deliberation concept of iterative consent-based waves of deliberation enables a Concurrent Policy Engineering approach. It teases difficulties out early in the process and gets these resolved before engaging downstream rework; • Participants either commit to design directions or raise objections which get dealt with; there is no grey area; • By enabling team membership in teams in addition to areas of core expertise, participants develop an understanding of these other domains’ constraints and opportunities; • The overall cycle time is reduced significantly by easing the scheduling constraints and making face to face meetings optional; • The complexity of dealing with a multi-stakeholder team is reduced considerably.

5. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government The Challenge • Post-Mortem Reviews • Understand project shortcomings and ensure they do not recur; • Foster continuous improvement from project issues, errors and shortcomings. How Usually Addressed & Impacts • Meeting/conference call where the issues are debriefed and analyzed in terms of cause and effect; • Guilty parties are identified for retraining or reclassification; • Most attendees stay silent to keep out of trouble. • Very little real change happens.

6. Post-Mortem Reviews The e-Deliberation Advantage • Recognizing that most issues are of a systemic nature and that their causes cannot be traced with a reductionist approach, an e-Deliberation-based post mortem considers the whole project as well as its organizational context as the backdrop for the post-mortem deliberation. • The outcome of such an event delivers structural, policy and procedural change recommendations that are endorsed and supported by all the participants. Benefits • The learning that results is systemic and achieves a critical mass of support sufficient to make it stick; • This process enables core aspects of learning organizations: • Positive feedback loops • Complex adaptive behavior • Self-regulation • Fail-proofing and antifragility; • Less frequent errors & cost, better contingency, mitigation and remediation.

7. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government The Challenge • Engaging Community Support • Obtain Community & Stakeholder feedback about a planned policy or regulation so the misgivings can be understood and addressed positively. • Creating Community Synergy • Engage Community participation in mitigating potential negative impacts of a policies while meeting community aspirations or wishes, so the project achieves community support and acceptance. How Usually Addressed & Impacts • Media ads and other communications to market the concept in positive terms; • Lobbying; • “Townhall” meetings, stakeholder meetings, private meetings & presentations; • Etc. • Impacts • Population remains unengaged; • Negative and critical voices make the most noise; • Good projects get cancelled or sidetracked for political reasons; • Costly compromises.

8. Engaging Community Support & Synergy The e-Deliberation Advantage • Ask the community to express its concerns early in the process using the Feedback e‑Deliberation variant; • Build a case based on these concerns so they are conclusively addressed in the planning and communications strategy; • Involve self-selected and targeted community leaders into ane-Deliberation event to determine a strategy focused on a theme such as “What will it take to allow this project to be positive/successful for the community”; • The idea is to create synergy between the project and other community concerns, aspirations, goals and projects where the sum is better than the parts. Benefits • By opening up direct communication lines, negative community reactions can be preempted/replaced by an attitude of trust and collaboration; • Holding an online event is productive and inexpensive. • The project gets to be endorsed as a community development initiative; • The needs of the various stakeholder groups get heard, integrated and met in collaboration; • By dealing directly with the community, third party intervention and distraction is minimized; • Lower cost of friction; • Profitable synergy with other partners in play.

9. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government The Challenge • Getting It Right • New policies, orders or regulations must be relevant and must best address the situation(s) that are being targeted; • Policies must meet stakeholder interests, needs and commitments while upholding the mandate of the government. How Usually Addressed & Impacts • Consultants and subordinate committees are tasked to draft; • Public hearings register stakeholder complaints; • Lobbyists try to influence; • Drafts are revised to mitigate complaints. • Impacts • Process is lengthy, costly and not robust; • Population remains unengaged; • Negative and critical voices make the most noise; • Good projects get cancelled or sidetracked for political reasons; • Costly compromises.

10. Getting It Right The e-Deliberation Advantage • Involve the community/stakeholders to collaborate together and with government • Draft the policy or regulations, surfacing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks and dealing with them up front using a consent-based decision making/recommending approach. Benefits • Creation of a critical mass in the community to support the team’s emergent policy/regulations; • Conflicting/ inappropriate or impractical dispositions are rooted out early; • By opening up direct communication lines, negative community reactions can be preempted/replaced by an attitude of trust and collaboration; • Huge time saving; • Transparency.

11. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government The Challenge • Deploying It Right • Once a policy or regulation has been approved or legislated, it still needs to be deployed with a minimum of disruption and costs to people, businesses and the environment. How Usually Addressed & Impacts • Bureaucrats/ administrators redact the policy or regulatory deployment dispositions and ensure that administrative support exists to monitor conformity; • Public outcries arise from the stakeholders who are negatively affected. • Impacts • Process is lengthy, costly and not robust; • Population remains unengaged; • Negative and critical voices make the most noise; • Costly after the fact adjustments and compromises.

12. Deploying It Right The e-Deliberation Advantage • Ask the community affected by the policy decision to help plan out it’s deployment and mitigate undesirable effects. • Involve self-selected and targeted community leaders into ane-Deliberation event to determine a strategy focused on a theme such as “What will it take to allow this project to be positive/successful for the community”. Benefits • Creation of a critical mass in the community to support the planned deployment; • Conflicting/ inappropriate or impractical dispositions can be adjusted early before they cause harm; • By opening up direct communication lines, negative community reactions can be preempted/replaced by an attitude of trust and collaboration; • Huge time saving; • Transparency.

13. e-Deliberation™ Use Cases for Government The Challenge • Strategic Governance • Governance direction and goals need to be aligned from the level where people/ taxpayers/ voters live level to the state and national levels to ensure continued relevance and the removal of unnecessary friction in a world where information and mobility has never been as great as it is today. • Ensuring strategic alignment is a complex problem given the number of stakeholders and associated interests. How Usually Addressed & Impacts • Most of the strategy making is reactive and contained to single levels of governance; • Centralized top-down decision-making is the default approach. • Impact • Top-down strategies don’t trickle down effectively and have disappointing results; • Increasing disconnect and isolation between levels of governance; • Loss of global synergy for promoting and attracting investments and tax revenue (sub-optimal competitive positioning).

14. Strategic Governance The e-Deliberation Advantage • The e-Deliberation process can mix both face to face and online meetings, or can be used entirely online to support multi-tiered collaborative conversations. • The process considers all perspectives in parallel, and is design to allow their integration; • The meeting of the minds is achieved using a consent-based decision making approach and multiple feedback loops; • The process of developing strategy explores the multiple facets of the situation in parallel. Benefits • By conducting strategic governance meetings online, the stakeholders can get together more often, stay connected, and better aligned; • Policy decisions and strategy can be created collaboratively, balancing top-down and bottom-up needs, concerns and information flows; • Local differences can be visibly managed and integrated into the strategy making, as opposed to ignoring them during the crucial discussions. • Strategy outcomes are multifaceted and comprehensive, as opposed to being simplistic, naïve or underestimating the nature of the situation being managed.

15. e-Deliberation: When You Need It Checklist to validate that a situation warrants using e-Deliberation™ to address it* * If any two of the above are true, e-Deliberation is the most effective medium of collaborative deliberation.

16. Benefits of e-Deliberation™

17. The e-Deliberation™ Collaboration platform The e-Deliberation™ protocol uses divergent/convergent thinking modes, multiple feedback mechanisms and a multifaceted strategy development process. It ensures a high variety of ideas and concerns flow through to a sustainable and consent-based resolution. It can be used for both online and co-located participants and it yields a multifaceted, integrated strategy. Has a process variant for every type of collaboration needed. Click here for more details.

18. Nurturing Participant Collaboration Participants • Schedule their daily participation to dovetail with their rest of life priorities • Get emails when each phase starts and when it is wrapping up • Work with a defined number of other participants over a predefined period of time, with clear goals, deliverables and process • Get “reputation points” for their contributions (posts, comments, polls, star-rates) and for receiving star-rates from others • Give their opinions and feedback at multiple points in the process • Can see others’ Reputation Points and when they last showed up • Gain influence based on the power of their ideas • Attendance is tracked by a Project Manager. S/He can also bar disruptive users from the event if necessary • Work individually, in sub-teams and in whole group according to the phase • Take on some responsibility for teamwork when in sub-teams

19. About e-Deliberation™ Servers based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in a world class world class infrastructure offers state-of-the-art redundant systems that assure power availability, temperature and humidity control and security. Operations head quarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada All data traffic encrypted 256 bit High Grade (Camellia-256) ᵷᵹᵱᶚᵬᴥ Site certified by Geotrust