Seven Core Principles for Effective Public Engagement

November 16, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business Networking 

The Principles of Public Engagement

Social networks have burgeoned within the public sphere with the rise
in popularity of participatory democracy. Complementing representative
democratic systems, participatory democracy or public engagement seeks
to place decision making into the hands of ordinary citizens. Rousseau,
for example, believed that civic participation in decision making would
increase the feelings among individuals that they truly belong to the community
in which they live.

There is no specific methodology that can be used to facilitate every
occurrence of public engagement, since each context contains its own
unique mix of people, issues, and institutions. Nevertheless, bolstered by
the active involvement of such public interest organizations as the National
Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, the Co-Intelligence Institute, the
Center for Wise Democracy, and AmericaSpeaks, a set of principles28 have
been derived for engaging citizens in effective collaborative action. These
seven core principles serve as guidelines for building mutual understanding
and working toward caring and productive decision making within
most social networks, even among those not necessarily working in the
public sphere.

These principles are defined as follows:
1. Planning and preparation: Plan, design, and convene the engagement
specifically to serve the purpose of the effort and the needs of the participants
2. Inclusion and diversity: Incorporate diverse voices, ideas, and information to lay the groundwork for quality outcomes and democratic
legitimacy
3. Collaboration and shared purpose: Support organizers, participants,
and implementers to sustain efforts on behalf of the common good
4. Listening and learning: Help participants listen, explore, and learn
without predetermining outcomes
5. Transparency and trust: Promote openness, especially by providing
a public record of the people, resources, forums, and outcomes involved
6. Impact and action: Ensure that the engagement has real potential to
make a difference
7. Sustained participation and democratic culture: Build a culture of participation among associated programs and institutions that support
quality public engagement

The Seven Core Principles for Effective Public Engagement

The seven principles are overlapping and mutually reinforcing. This activity
assists network participants in developing criteria for evaluating the quality of
their network decision making in terms of participation and involvement. What
is suggested is that the more the reliance on these principles, the more likely
will be a sense of leaderful engagement; the less reliance on them, the less likely
will be the feeling of leaderful engagement. Thus, there are explicit steps to be
taken in encouraging their wider use as well as steps to be taken to point out
the traps to be avoided.

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the seven principles to building authentic
engagement within the social networks in which you are serving in a weaver
capacity. Public engagement is meant here to entail the convening of diverse yet
representative groups of people who engage with one another on a variety of
viewpoints in conversations that are well facilitated and that provide important
guidance to decisions to be made by one another, by policymakers, or by fellow
citizens.

Step 2: Assemble as many of your network participants as you deem feasible
and most useful. If your network isn’t too large, perhaps you can assemble the
full network membership as it currently stands. The intent of this step is to
determine when and how these principles have been restricted. Once these
behaviors have been identified, as a team you can list them as practices that you
would ask that members do less of. Your assignment together is to review
the relevance of the listed practices, add your own items, and communicate
them throughout the network.

Step 3: Continuing with your assembled membership, determine when and
how the principles of public engagement have been promoted. As a team, list
what you would like members to do more of (or at least continue to do). Your assignment together is to review the
relevance of these listed practices, add your own items, and communicate them
throughout the network.

Step 4: Having produced lists of what the network would like to see members
do less and more of, the full community should now engage in a full dialogue
on learning. Especially if a subgroup from the network was assembled to work
on the lists, it is critical that there be outreach to other nodes or stakeholders
to ensure that the guidelines become a product of the full network and are
subsequently endorsed as a communitywide endeavor.

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