EVALUATING ONLINE DELIBERATIVE ENGAGEMENTS
Tanya Ruscheinski · Summit (Simon Fraser University) · 2015
As planners and politicians struggle to engage the public around local development issues in an era of increased political apathy and decreased available time of the everyday citizen to commit to traditional face-to-face methods, online engagement has emerged as a potential strategy to reduce barriers to engagement and be relevant to the methods people use to communicate on an everyday basis.This shift raises questions, however, as to the effectiveness of online methods, particularly in relation to deliberative democratic theory that situates deliberation as the ideal form of public engagement.In attempting to address these questions using real-world examples, five online discussion forums containing 207 comments were analyzed using qualitative discourse analysis, and two interviews were conducted with forum administrators to assess how well online engagement adheres to the requirements of deliberation.The findings show that in its current state, online discussion forums are not deliberative, but they contain the potential to be deliberative if facilitated under the committed leadership of practitioners.Ultimately, online engagement is best situated as only one component of a larger engagement process, which as a whole can achieve deliberation by using multiple mechanisms and engaging all stakeholders through a variety of methods.