The Obama campaign has attracted lots of attention for how it used technology to get people engaged. The web reduced barriers to participation since you could fit your campaign activity into small blocks of time from anywhere. Responding to a variety of "5 minute options," Obama supporters gave more money and pulled off more election-relevant events than "the pros" had ever before thought possible. Future campaigns will clearly learn from this. Technology has become a strategic tool for the "civic engagement" called campaigns.

But what about post-election governance? Many are interested in the new tools. But they are clearly wary about Web 2.0 as an augmenter and mediator of government's interactions with the public - it's all too new, too easily to explode out of control, and too vague. What is "civic engagement" anyway?

Abstractly, technology-enabled "civic engagement" simply continues the "e-gov" trend of using the net to reach the public. The big e-gov win so far has been services you can reach "online, not in line." An internet world offers "anytime, anywhere" access to a huge variety of private and public services.

What "engagement" will do is increasingly shift online interactions from one-way transactions (government delivering services like tax forms to the public) into two-way relationships, where the public will play a more engaged role in defining problems, setting priorities, and "co-producing" services. As with campaigns, substantial "work" on public problems could take place as volunteer effort without money changing hands. We've seen the net make it convenient and rewarding enough to create a huge body of open source software from a largely volunteer workforce. And we've long had volunteers for community projects like cleaning up vacant lots, helping with the elderly, looking out for crime in the neighborhood, and meeting with elected representatives so both constituents and representatives can learn from each other.

The question, then, is what will happen if technology reduces barriers and increases participation in these and other "civic engagement" events?

Today's example, complete with scientifically collected evaluation data, can be found in the report:  Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21^st Century.

This was a very interesting, if simple, experiment, with very interesting results.

The experiment allowed a variety of U.S. Representatives and one Senator to meet online with their constituents. Each of 21 meetings featured one of the Members of Congress. The meetings in total engaged roughly 600 constituents. The offers to attend were sent to a representative sample of constituents. Those accepting were tracked with before and after surveys as a test group (those who attended the sessions) and a control group (similar demographics, but not admitted to the sessions). The issue discussed was immigration reform, and the Members of Congress held diverse views on how immigration should be handled. The sessions were neutrally moderated and accepted all questions including hostile questions (only redundant, off-topic, unintelligible, or questions that were profane or abjectly disrespectful were filtered out).

Some of the key results:

• The online sessions attracted many who don't normally participate in politics and increased their participation in a subsequent election. Compared to normal electorates, the online group was younger, with more minorities and women, with fewer churchgoers, with fewer holding strong party affiliations, and with more having low incomes.  Compared to the control group, the members of the online group were more likely to eventually vote, to follow the election, and to attempt to persuade others how to vote.
• The online sessions were:
• extremely popular with constituents (95% would like to do it again) and
• effective at increasing the participant's approval of the Member's position (from 20% in the before surveys to 58% afterwards) and of the Member (from a before session 29% net positive - i.e., approve minus disapprove - to 47% net positive after).

The online sessions were convenient for the Members of Congress (all they needed was a phone, with no travel to specific sites) and also for the constituents (all they needed was a computer with a connection to the internet).

This study, conducted by David Lazer of the Kennedy School and others, generated further comments you can find here.

This example clearly doesn't answer all the questions we've got about civic engagement. But it does represent the kind of concrete testing and data gathering we need if we're going to make sense of civic engagement now and for the future.

What do you see taking place in the "civic engagement" space? And how would you prioritize that work?

• High potential return with low risk? Something to harvest?
• High potential return but with high risk? Something to closely manage?
• Low potential return with low risk? Something to delegate to others?
• Low potential return with high risk? Something to be sure you avoid?

You can follow the blog back here for comments.

All the best,

Jerry