Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Online Civic Engagement

Local governments are increasingly relying on dedicated digital engagement platforms. As of March 2023, these participatory websites were in use by over 30 percent of Canadian municipalities with more than 5,000 residents. Dedicated digital engagement platforms are turnkey websites purpose-built for civic engagement, hosting all of a municipality's engagement projects. Staff can launch one for participatory input with no coding expertise. These participatory websites offer surveys, idea boards, moderated forums, and other online feedback tools.

In "Handwaving Participatory Planning: The 'Ongoing Experiment' With Dedicated Digital Engagement Platforms" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 92, No. 1), Morgan Boyco goes behind the scenes to explore government officials' use of and perspectives on participatory engagement websites.

Boyco shows that adopting a website is not the same as doing participatory planning. Absent intentional design and ongoing care, mere adoption can devolve into a kind of performative handwaving of participatory process. As a manager of engagement in an eastern Canadian city noted, "I think that these platforms could be used very cynically, to look like you're engaging, because you've got a website, but not actually doing anything."

Four Ways to Examine a Participatory Website

In 2023 and 2024, Boyco conducted 44 interviews across 33 Canadian municipalities with planners, public participation and communications professionals, and others responsible for procuring, implementing, and managing digital engagement platforms. Three of those interviews were with representatives from leading platform vendors. The study uses these interviews to examine multiple local governments' use of participatory websites through a four-part framework:

1. Adoption: Discovering, evaluating, and deciding to implement website.
2. Administration: Staffing roles, maintenance challenges, implementation decisions on oversight and risk tolerance.
3. Affordances: Built-in design features and technical capabilities of websites.
4. Assessment: Judgment of website's participation reach, dialogue quality, impacts on trust, comparisons with offline methods.

1. Adoption: Sites of Status

Of the Canadian municipalities with participatory websites, the vast majority pay for-profit developers for the service. Over 80 percent of those rely on a single company, EngagementHQ (now owned by US-based Granicus). Boyco found that adoption was often driven by peer influence rather than a holistic strategic evaluation. Contracting with EngagementHQ became an unquestioned minimum, a status symbol to "keep up with the Joneses."

Another driver of adoption was the desire to switch away from social media for public engagement. A community engagement manager made it clear, "Social media is not a place where we're actually engaging, full stop. We don't take your feedback on Facebook; we don't take your feedback on Twitter." Interviewees reported feeling more comfortable facilitating discussions on software purpose-built for civic participation than on social media platforms.

2. Administration: Fear of the Open Floor

Participatory websites are shaped by how they are managed. Capacity constraints, knowledge gaps, and insufficient resources for digital engagement often shaped how municipalities managed these platforms. Features such as online discussion forums require daily management, and many municipalities tended to only use basic surveys and polls.

Beyond resource limitations, risk aversion led many to avoid open public dialogue on these sites. A manager of community planning in a rural Ontario county using EngagementHQ shared, "I'd be afraid of opening up the tool, allowing a lot of back and forth amongst community members, because completely unfiltered things can often get uncivil. And that's not helpful for anybody."

Reluctance and difficulty taking advantage of a website's full capabilities can lead to an "assimilation gap," a concept explored in "The Illusory Diffusion of Innovation: An Examination of Assimilation Gaps." This occurs when actual performance falls short of the technology's full potential as envisioned by vendors. Governments considering new technologies should learn from their peers' experiences rather than assume they will achieve the outcomes promised during the sales process.

3. Affordances: Suppressing Conflicts

A website's affordances are its built-in design features and technical capabilities: what the software makes easy, what it makes difficult, and what it makes possible at all. These shape public input and can narrow the depth of participation. An official's choice to toggle on automatic moderation on a public forum can only happen because of a for-profit company's choices to design the top-down tool and make it optional.

These affordances directly affect how the public accesses information, provides input, and interacts with planners and each other. Interviewees appreciated how the websites increased their ability to enforce parameters for feedback. They could control engagement online better than in traditional in-person settings. An Ontario engagement manager noted that various departments in the municipality preferred a "closed system" to ensure that a really active participant group doesn't then sway the outcome of a project.

This top-down design allows officials to bracket dialogue and control conversations more easily than at a traditional public meeting. This dynamic is enabled by platform affordances: the option to select non-deliberative tools, templates that privilege one-way information provision, and the impact of automated dialogue moderation tools.

Participatory websites run the risk of stage-managing feedback, which can create a false appearance of openness, transparency, and participatory opportunity. A senior communications official in an eastern Canadian city summarized this concern: "So, it looks good. It looks like we're engaged. [But] we're not. I think there's more of a danger, because it is called an engagement platform. Everything is 'have your say.'"

The impact of these websites on democratic participation is not predetermined. They are shaped by private companies' platform design and public officials' choices to activate.

4. Assessment: Balancing Unclear Outcomes

Officials from 18 of the 33 studied municipalities noted that participatory websites led to real or perceived expansion and diversification of participants. Other commonly cited benefits included improved access to project information, increased transparency, ease of use for participants, the removal of certain barriers to participation, and enhanced data collection and reporting capabilities.

Interviewees' assessment of participatory websites painted a complicated picture. Shortcomings and negative implications included limited platform functionality, inadequate technical support, persistent digital divides, and insufficient internal capacity to fully implement the program. Several people were concerned that digital engagement can be shallow and not representative of residents.

Evaluating Value-laden Tools

Although the study was entirely in Canada, Boyco's research surfaces challenges for planners elsewhere who are deploying online participatory tools. Officials charged with managing requests for proposals or evaluating vendors should consider peer-pressure adoption dynamics, risk aversion to features, and design options that stifle messy deliberation.

Technology in participatory planning is increasingly critiqued. Scholars have raised alarms about how new participatory technology can reinforce existing obstacles, create privacy and security risks, and carry hidden algorithmic bias. The shallowness of digital interactions can limit their capacity to build trust. Boyco responded to these theoretical concerns with real-world analysis and lessons. The study highlighted how online participatory tools are neither neutral nor value-free.

Key Recommendations 

• Notice peer pressure around adopting digital tools.
• Critically assess whether a platform aligns with engagement needs.
• Learn from peers' limited use of technology before assuming performance at vendors' claimed potential.
• Carefully consider the hidden values behind moderation and feedback tools.
• Evaluate if the engagement tool is providing cover for predetermined solutions.
• Develop metrics that measure democratic impact, not just page views and survey completions.

Top image: Photo by iStock/Getty Images Plus/ Jacob Wackerhausen