The Northumbria team collaborated with policy officers from NTCA through a series of one-to-one discussions and workshops. The discussions sought to locate opportunities for citizen input into the work of policymakers, surfacing examples of where citizen input might generate better informed decisions, legitimise decisions, or otherwise benefit society. The conversations helped us to generate a framework for participation. They also highlighted the significance of relationship building and surfaced interesting tensions around how we think about deliberation. Deliberative engagement is often advocated as a means to building trust between citizens and policymakers. Yet, deliberation is also an activity that relies on pre-existing trust and tests relationships; getting people in the room, contributing, listening to others, assumes trust between citizens and policy makers that can be difficult to establish. Furthermore, deliberation involves navigating disagreement and careful consideration of difficult, social sensitive issues, which can be testing, awkward, inefficient, and frustrating, even when it is working well.

If the one-to-one sessions addressed the question of why we do participation, the workshops explored how we do participation. Citizen Assemblies are one of the most celebrated examples of citizen engagement, and NTCA became the first combined authority to implement this approach following many cases at other levels of governance (King and Wilson 2021). NTCA were interested in exploring further approaches to build on this engagement and were particularly keen to explore the opportunities of digital engagement.

There has been a surge in interest in digital engagement following the pandemic and high-profile cases in Iceland, Finland, France and Taiwan (Bass 2022). For policymakers, there are barriers in navigating this field and identifying how approaches might be best applied to support their work. The field is diverse, awareness can be limited, and the purpose intended by developers may differ from the application most valuable for policymakers. The technologies typically emerge with limited input from the intended users or validation in policy making contexts, establishing the case for more collaborative work between practitioners, academics and policymakers in this area. 

Our workshops explored two different approaches to digital engagement. The first utilised Pol.is, a deliberative-crowdsourcing platform that has been used effectively in the vTaiwan process (Megill 2016). The second case utilised an approach based on structured argumentation. Through the project workshops we were able to develop a preliminary model of the elements of deliberation in support of making sense of this field.

The CAPE network was helpful in enabling us to share learning and the outputs of these workshops, and connect with other academics and policymakers engaged in this challenge. Our project was selected to be a demonstrator project for the Newham Council Participation Academy Business Case by CAPE fellows at Newham Council and was also used as a case for Policy Labs discussions. Two of the outputs of the project; the framework of participatory goods and the model of the elements of deliberation have helped to inform explorations and civic tech and online deliberation platforms and help in the planning of deliberative participatory exercises of other local authorities and public organisations. The NTCA identified areas where these tools might support their engagement work, for example on education, and we are continuing to consult with them in their engagement projects.