What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO's approach to open innovation? by Karoline Andersen

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO’s approach to open innovation?

KAROLINE KIRCHHÜBEL ANDERSEN 2014

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Introduction Human-centered design is increasingly being applied to public policy-making. The process of design thinking lends itself very well to designing new policies that are rooted in the needs of the citizen. However, open policy-making is in its infancy in the UK and suffers from some weaknesses. This report concludes that IDEOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s open innovation platform OpenIDEO provides a useful model of citizen engagement that could become an essential tool for open policy making. In doing so, three areas will be considered: the current state of open policy-making and its weaknesses; the model employed by OpenIDEO; and how that model could be used to address existing weaknesses in UK open policy-making.

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Karoline Kirchh端bel Andersen Industrial & Theoretical Contexts London College of Communication January 2014

Content 3 Introduction 6 Policy-making and design thinking 7 Open policy-making 9 Madness of the masses? 10 The Red Tape Challenge 12 Opportunities for continuous engagement 13 5 Weaknesses of the current approach 14 OpenIDEO 16 The IDEO innovation process 18 Features on OpenIDEO 19 What motivates people to participate? 20 Growing a community 21 Rewarding participation 23 What might open-policy makers learn from OpenIDEO? 26 Conclusion 28 References and Bibliography

Methodology This report is the outcome of the analysis of both secondary and primary research into open innovation platforms and open policy making in the UK. It is based on formal reports published by government and research bodies, publications, interviews with experts in open innovation and policy advisors at the Cabinet Office, as well as through the personal experience of working at OpenIDEO for 8 months. Through the process of creating this report, members of an open policy-making discussion group on LinkedIn were also engaged in conversation.

Terms For the purpose of clarity, in this report, ‘open policy making’ refers to the act of engaging citizens in parts of the process of developing policy and not open-data or government digital services. The term ‘policy-makers’ is used to refer to both ministers, civil servants and anyone else who plays a key role in the development of policy. Unless otherwise noted, all institutions and government departments cited are UK based.

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

What is policy-making? ‘Policy-making; can be difficult to define, but a common understanding is that it is the formal expression of activities undertaken by government to achieve outcomes, often through legislation (Page & Jenkins 2005). Policy making usually takes place in the interaction between ministers, civil servants and stakeholders. (Hallsworth 2011)

At its best policy making in the Civil Service can be highly innovative and effective, but the quality of policy advice is not always consistent or designed with implementation in mind. There must be a clear focus on designing policies that can be implemented in practice, drawing on a wider range of views and expertise. CABINET OFFICE, 2012 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM PLAN, CPT 2, PAGE 14

Policy and Design Thinking It’s interesting to note how many of the terms and principles of design thinking are being adopted in the public sector. Words like ‘iterate’ – ‘prototype’ are now used to describe desirable elements of policy-making processes. Policies are also often referred to as being ‘designed’ rather than ‘made’, suggesting that the distinction between the two disciplines is becoming more blurred. (Civil Service: Policy, Kills & Knowledge framework 2013) The process of identifying a problem and gathering real-life insights is similar to that of human-centered design, or design thinking. The public sector is increasingly working with public service design agencies to draw from their experience in designing around the needs of the users. (Olliff-Cooper 2013)

Open policy-making In 2012, the UK Government published a Civil Service reform, in which it aimed to increase public engagement in the process of policy-making by introducing ‘open policy-making’. This expressed a commitment to engaging the public and experts from beyond Whitehall, not just in consultations, but in the policy-making process itself. It read:

“Open policy making will become the default. Whitehall does not have a monopoly on policy-making expertise. We will establish a clear model of open policy making” CABINET OFFICE (2012) THE CIVIL SERVICE REFORM PLAN, PG 14

The reform plan named a number of reasons why the approach to policy making would benefit from being opened up. These included: • • • • •

The range of input of which policy is drawn up on is too narrow Policy is not challenged sufficiently externally before it’s announced The policy-making process and the evidence and data behind it is not transparent enough Policy inadequately reflects the reality which citizens experience It’s often drafted without enough input from those who have to implement it PASC 2013, PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IN POLICY-MAKING, PG 8

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Why open policy-making? One hope is that, in time, the Government will be able to prove that citizens are able to participate in policy-making on a continuing basis. The intended benefit of a shift away from outmoded processes would be the creation a new and more meaningful relationship with citizens. (PASC 2013) The Civil Service’s official Open Policy website my.civilservice. gov.uk describes open policy-making as aiming to ‘drive up the quality of civil service advice’ by encouraging greater collaboration to ‘challenge and innovate beyond conventional thinking’ (2013). It also states that open policy-making; “does not change the core tasks of the policy process; the policy question still needs to be properly defined and analysed; options developed, tested, implemented and evaluated. Ministers continue to require clear, robust and concise advice they can use to make decisions.” (THE CIVIL SERVICE, WHAT IS OPEN POLICY MAKING WEBSITE BY THE GOVERNMENT DIGITAL SERVICES. AVAILABLE AT HTTP://MY.CIVILSERVICE.GOV.UK/POLICY/WHAT/ LAST ACCESSED: JANUARY 18TH 2014)

In line with the application of Design Thinking to make traditional policy-making more human-centered, the open policy-maker further improves the quality of their work by: •

Inviting broader inputs and expertise; and creating the room and conditions for others to help solve problems

•

Developing options by trialing, testing and iterating; always keeping implementation in mind

(THE CIVIL SERVICE, WHAT IS OPEN POLICY MAKING WEBSITE BY THE GOVERNMENT DIGITAL SERVICES. AVAILABLE AT HTTP://MY.CIVILSERVICE.GOV.UK/POLICY/ WHAT/ LAST ACCESSED: JANUARY 18TH 2014)

A lot of interesting work is being done in the space of open policymaking. Most people in the Cabinet Office feel positively about open policy-making and recognise that it is the right direction to head, but there is possibly less awareness of it across the rest of the civil service. (Anonymous Policy Advisor 2014)

Madness of the Masses or Wisdom of the Crowds? However, not everyone is of the view that open policy-making is unequivocally beneficial. In their discussion paper The ‘Californication’ of Government? Crowdsourcing and the Red Tape Challenge, Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich from London School of Economics (2012) have drawn a table of contrasting views about crowdsourcing in consultation exercises. Those in its favour may say that it provides high tech, low cost intelligence that improves intelligence, whereas the sceptics may argue that it encourages uninformed mob rule and ill-informed responses. During the 2008 presidential transition, the Obama administration’s transition team launched Change.gov, a predecessor of WhiteHouse. org, which allowed visitors to share their stories and visions for the country and vote for those of others. A relatively small but vocal group of people managed to push marijuana legalisation to the top of the list, by leveraging their networks to vote the suggestion up. (Hochheiser & Shneiderman, 2010) Later, the White House launched their We The People petition website in 2011 which allowed citizens to petition the Obama administration’s policy experts directly, who had committed to reply to petitions had they reached a certain number of signatures. Similarly, the petition to “legalize and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol” received nearly twenty thousand signatures in just two days, making it the most popular petition on the platform. (Gwynne 2011)

If the argument is, that the Change.gov and We The People are examples of crowdsourcing resulting in an anti-democratic process due to a group with particular interests taking advantage of the open policy-making tool, what can be done to avoid that? Perhaps the idea of ‘open’ needs to be reframed. The above instances are examples of what happens if the question you ask people is too open. By giving people a playing field, and boundaries – they can focus their efforts on something attainable and their input becomes more valuable. (HULME 2014)

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

The Red Tape Challenge The Red Tape Challenge is an example of giving people a framework when asking for their input. Launched by the Cabinet Office in 2011, its aim was to listen to those affected by particular regulations and reduce the overall burden off them, by either scrapping or improving them. (PASC 2013) The engagement took place online, and people were invited to comment on legislation in a specific area or industry for a couple of weeks at a time. The ultra open version in this case would have been to ask the public “Which regulations should we scrap?”, but by asking the same question, only thematically, the comments were more focused and therefore useful.

5,121 regulations within 30 themes received more than 30,000 comments, and to date Ministers have announced their decision on 3.375 regulations, 54% of which will be improved or scrapped (CABINET OFFICE 2013) The Red Tape Challenge shows that it’s possible to base decisions on the feedback from the masses wider population. It is however, unclear which comments led to direct changes in legislation (Lodge & Wegrich 2012)). Part of the reason for this is that very few of the 30,000 comments on the site have received responses, despite the availability of a reply function on the site. (Adewumni 2012)

To some extent, this has been acknowledged: Where citizens are engaged in policy-making, the Government must manage their expectations about public engagement. Open policy-making should empower citizens and make them feel their time and contribution has been worthwhile. This means being clear about the purpose of engagement and the limits of the what the process is intended to achieve, as well as providing feedback on the findings of engagement activity and the reasons for decisions taken as a result.

PASC 2013, PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IN POLICY-MAKING, PAGE 19 PT 39

The examples of open policy making analysed so far, and other recent experiments such as the London Borough of Redbridge budget challenge “YouChoose” and BIS’ Focus On Enforcement microsite, have all succeeded in asking focused questions, but neither has built a network of people who are likely to engage and participate long-term. (CIVIL SERVICE 2013) The lack of direct response and community management is likely to deter people from returning to the platforms frequently.

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Opportunities for continuous engagement The linkedin group run by the open policy making team at the Cabinet Office, shows that it’s possible to create a network of people who continuously engage with a topic. It is perhaps a less conventional example of open policy-making: an open discussion group for professionals who develop policy inside and outside government to ‘connect and share lessons for opening up the policy-making process’ (Cabinet Office 2013) The group has 454 members and acts as a hub for sharing knowledge and increasing transparency in the work that is being done in open policy-making within the Cabinet Office and beyond. (Cabinet Office 2013) This approach leverages existing behaviours by targeting a group of people – professionals – and engaging them in their current location, in this case LinkedIn. It also harnesses people’s wisdom in the divergent activity of gathering stories of open-policy from around the world, and the group moderators synthesise the input and share relevant stories elsewhere and on their official website.

If the divergent stages of policy-making benefit from being opened up to get larger input, it raises the question of whether it would be possible to engage a group of people throughout the process of policy-making rather than at a single point. This question was posed in the Open Policy Making UK LinkedIn group, but responses suggest that there have been no clear examples of it so far. When asked a similar question, one policy advisor said that whilst they are very good at engaging people when looking at particular issues, such as evaluation policy or in the beginning when trying to understand the problem, they have less experience in involving citizens throughout the process. After a project has concluded, it is common practice to attach an evaluation to it and report back to those who have been involved. However, taking people on a journey through policy-making has not yet happened. (Anonymous Policy Advisor, 2014)

Weaknesses of the current approach Some of the weaknesses identified in this report are:

1. The risk of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;madness of the massesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by the questions being too open 2. Little experiments of involving citizens at different stages of policy-making rather than at a single point 3. Few examples of long-lasting engagement and therefore established networks of citizens 4. Examples of failures to report back and citizens feeling that their input has had an impact 5. Lack of awareness amongst the wider civil service

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

What is the open equivalent to human-centered design? If applying design thinking to policy making is increasingly favoured what would the open version look like? It makes sense to look at OpenIDEO – IDEO’s online platform, which opens up their Design Thinking process to thousands of people.

OpenIDEO OpenIDEO is an online social innovation platform. It builds off IDEO’s innovation experience and allows a community of more than 50, 000 members to go through their design process and solve challenges for social good. Every couple of months for 3 years, OpenIDEO’s community of 50.000 members from over 160 countries are given a social challenge to tackle. The topics of these challenges range from addressing health, ageing and urban sanitation, to solving the problem of e-waste and preventing atrocities ” (OpenIDEO 2014) The platform was build in 2010 as the three co-founders; Nathan Waterhouse, Tom Hulme and Haiyan Zhang were interested in sharing the success of the innovation process at IDEO, and seeing what social impact it could have if “instead of 500 employees, IDEO was 50.000 strong? What kind of impact would we have on the world if we scaled the spirit, process and tools of design-driven innovation by a factor of 100?” FAYARD ET AL. 2012 OPENIDEO HBS CASE STUDY PG1

They started looking at different methods of crowdsourcing. Hulme was particularly interested in the idea of disruption, and identified that open innovation software could potentially disrupt traditional design consultancies, including IDEO.(Waterhouse 2014)

A lot of the software relies on people ‘voting up’ or ‘voting down’ (..) The popularity measures remain the same with just a ‘vote up’ or ‘like’ functionality, so why encourage a culture of negativity?

Zhang, Hulme and Waterhouse began testing different innovation softwares, but felt they all lacked the nuances of their own process at IDEO. There was no phased approach and the language failed to reflect culture of optimism at IDEO. For instance, a lot of the software relies on people ‘voting up’ or ‘voting down’, but the three of them found it hard to see the point in ‘vote down’. The popularity measures remain the same with just a ‘vote up’ or ‘like’ functionality, so why encourage a culture of negativity? (Waterhouse 2014) “Most of them don’t really use a time-based approach, they’re often very much like glorified wikis or systems where you throw ideas in and they get sorted by popularity. Many are made by software companies who don’t come from a culture and rich experience of running design challenges and knowing that you can’t just jump to ideas. You have to understand the problem first and that’s when you get the most innovative ideas. That’s when you get really interesting adjacent benefits that you didn’t think of at first, which is like market identification or new opportunity areas, and therefore new projects might spin off that first project” NATHAN WATERHOUSE 2014 INTERVIEW

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

The IDEO innovation process During an interview at the IDEO offices in London, Nathan Waterhouse identified the different phases of a typical IDEO project, and then explained at which stages in the innovation process it made sense to involve a crowd. The first thing we do with an IDEO project is to challenge the brief. A client will come along and say ‘we want to create new chairs on our super fast train, that’s what we want you to design’. But classically, we’ll go out and spend some time on trains with people and realise that the entire journey is broken. (…) So we try to get the client to realise that their problem is part of a bigger experience, and that they need to potentially re-position themselves and re-design the whole eco-system. NATHAN WATERHOUSE 2014 INTERVIEW

A typical IDEO project begins with multi-disciplinary teams trying to understand the problem in depth. This is a divergent phase of looking out, gathering insights and conducting field research. Following this is a convergent phase of synthesis. Bringing together everything they’ve discovered and finding patterns and opportunity areas. This provides the framework for the divergent, creative phase of coming up with ideas. Brainstorming, visualising and building on each others ideas. Ideas tend to get combined and re-combined, prototyped and then we do something called formative testing. Usually with consumers or whoever the end-user is, which is testing out early ideas, but in a creative and collaborative way, so you treat the user as a kind of co-designer with you. Rather than ‘do you like this or not?’ its ‘how would you use this?’ or maybe even get them to draw what things should look like NATHAN WATERHOUSE 2014 INTERVIEW

Following the formative testing of ideas, Waterhouse explained that the multi-disciplinary team usually go back to the drawing board, to iterate, prototype and improve their ideas. Finally, they conduct some more formal testing and refine the idea based on what’s not only desirable from a user perspective, but also technically feasible and commercially viable – aiming to get the idea out in the real world. He mentions that the process is often described as an iterative loop. Roughly, you could divide the process into four or five blocks: Insights, Synthesis, Ideas, Prototyping, Evaluation and finally Launch. Not to mention framing the right question in the first place, which perhaps deserves its own block. (Waterhouse 2014)

Insights

Synthesis

FIG 1: THE IDEO INNOVATION PROCESS

Ideas

Prototyping

Evaluation

Launch

At which points did it make sense to involve a larger audience? When building OpenIDEO, the three designers at IDEO figured that they could involve a large number of people in the more divergent phases of the innovation process:insights gathering (research), ideation (ideas) and evaluation (testing, gathering feedback). Synthesis involves strategic decision-making and is more suited to being done offline and in smaller groups. Similarly, coming up with the right question in the first place is another ‘fuzzy’ process and probably best done with a small number of people. The process of prototyping and testing ideas became the ‘refinement phase’ on OpenIDEO, where community members are invited to try out their ideas in real life to see if they have legs. (Waterhouse 2014) On OpenIDEO, any stage which involves narrowing down ideas, or shortlisting a selection is done offline with a small group of stakeholders and experts. However, the community also evaluate the ideas against set criteria in parallel with experts, and everything that comes out of the convergent phases is shared back with the community. (Fayard et al. 2012) “Launching” is what’s now the ongoing “Impact Phase” on OpenIDEO, where social impact is continuously shared and celebrated. (Waterhouse 2014)

Research

Ideas

Refinement

FIG 2: THE OPENIDEO ONLINE INNOVATION PROCESS

Evaluation

Winners

Impact

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Features on OpenIDEO OpenIDEO as it looks now, allows participants to go through the following process: • • • • • •

Research: understanding the question and building up context around it. Sharing existing ideas and solutions Ideas: coming up with new ideas to solve the question Applause: sometimes added, allowing users to applaud ideas they like Refinement: Shortlisted ideas are prototyped and refined further Winning: a selection of winning ideas are announced. There is no prize and anyone can take any idea from OpenIDEO forward. Impact: Impact stories from throughout the challenge and beyond are shared and celebrated (OPENIDEO 2014)

Other features include • • • • • • • • •

Build upon – the ability for users to develop and iterate the ideas of others Collaboration map – a visual map which links the research and ideas that inspired new ideas or impact stories Missions – specific tasks which helps break down the research for community members, or points to opportunity areas in the ideas phase Design Quotient – a point system which measures participation and collaboration in each phase Applaud – similar to a ‘like’ functionality Comment – the possibility to comment and reply to comments Blog – where updates, impact stories and synthesis results are shared. Community Champions – community members taking on leadership in form of blogging and encouraging the participation of others Offline, self-organised meetups.

“The process works best when people share and build on ideas instead of hoarding ideas so that they can collect prize money” ARJAN TUPAN (FAYARD ET AL. 2012)

What motivates people to participate? People participate on OpenIDEO for a variety of reasons and motivations, but with a common purpose: to create impact. (Waterhouse 2014) The platform allows users to participate in different ways; some might just browse the site for knowledge and inspiration and maybe applaud ideas they like. Commenting is another form of participation. Some users might want to engage further by sharing research or insights in the first phase, or participate in the creative part of coming up with ideas. It’s also possible to help develop the ideas of others and join collaborative teams. (Fayard et al. 2012) The platform was designed to appeal to a range of different motivations. When designing the platform, Tom Hulme was inspired by Karim Lakhani’s framework for participatory motivations. (Fig 3) (Hulme 2013) “We made a conscious decision not to use the most extrinsic of all motivators: cash. Our conclusion was that it would compromise collaboration and misalign other motivations that would be sufficiently powerful alone.” (HULME, T. 2013 DESIGN FOR MULTIPLE MOTIVATIONS (ONLINE ARTICLE) AVAILABLE AT: HTTP://WWW.HUFFINGTONPOST.COM/TOM-HULME/MOTIVATION-IN-BUSINESS_B_3866303.HTML [ACCESSED: 15TH JANUARY 2014]

FIG 3 EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS. FRAMEWORK BY KARIM LAKHANI

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Growing a community In the same interview, Waterhouse explained the importance of nurturing your network:

One of the problems with having closed platforms, where you just ask for ideas – and nothing happens at the end, is that all the pressure lies on the person managing the challenge. You have to think – if this is long-term game for you, and your objective is to have long-term open policy engagement, and you want to build up that resource and that muscle, you’ve got to commit to getting back to those 30,000 people. NATHAN WATERHOUSE 2014 INTERVIEW

If you fail to close the feedback loop and respond to participants, you risk turning the whole system bad. It only takes a small percentage of people to get upset for it to ripple through the community, Waterhouse adds. When asked about how to build a long-term capacity he suggests that you start by rewarding your community in the right ways. Despite most people thinking it’s a “soft” motivator, even very small forms of acknowledgements can contribute to citizens feeling like they’re participating in something rewarding. (Waterhouse 2014)

How does OpenIDEO reward participation? To ensure that participants feel that their time and contribution has been worthwhile, challenge and community managers spend a lot of time writing and communicating. This might be by featuring people’s ideas on the site and in emails to the community, highlighting particular commendable efforts. When the impact begins to emerge, or ideas are prototyped in the real world their stories are featured in the impact phase and get emailed to the whole community. The Design Quotient rewards people with points for different types of participation. Every month, an active user gets featured as the ‘Monthly Ideator’, and others are invited to take on roles as ‘Community Champions’ and write updates for the site (Waterhouse 2014)

Impact throughout the process Sometimes in OpenIDEO challenges, impact is seen as early as in the ‘Research phase’. This was the case with the challenge sponsored by Stanford University, which focused on Bone Marrow donation awareness. One of the ‘missions’ set in the first phase asked community members to go out and swab your cheek for the bone-marrow registry, and tell their friends about it. This resulted in more than 100,000 new cheeks on the bone-marrow registry well before the challenge had finished. (Covaria 2014) If you can measure mindset or behavioural change from the outset you can start predicting what might happen later, with the ideas that are more scaled up, so it’s a good lead indicator of being on the right track. (..) We see impact as a throughput of the challenge as well as the end outcome NATHAN WATERHOUSE 2014 INTERVIEW

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

Lessons

What might open policy-makers and thinkers learn from OpenIDEOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s approach to open innovation?

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

1. Invest in framing the question To avoid a situation like that of change.org, where the open call for suggestions resulted in networked groups pushing for their interests, it may help to set some boundaries for citizen participation. If you ask the wrong question, you’re likely to get the wrong answer. It’s worth investing time in framing the question if you want to utilise the wisdom of a large group of people. Set the frame and allow them to build context around the problem before they come up with ideas or suggestions. By clearly defining a scope, and at the same time making the question compelling and human, it’s possible to enable broad and creative thinking but at the same time help the community to stay focused on the issue. (Hulme 2013)

2. Have a process Another way to avoid ‘madness of the masses’ is by tailoring both open and closed parts of the process. Involving a crowd in strategic decisionmaking can be difficult, whereas the more divergent stages are ideal for diverse input It would be interesting to experiment with a more phased approach to open policy making. Perhaps involving a group of people who are both affected by a specific problem, or will be the ones implementing a contingent policy. A process could look like this: - Involving citizens first at the initial stage of developing policy, where they contribute with real-life insights that help define the problem and build context around it. -Policy-makers and experts synthesise all the input and identify key problems and opportunity areas for improvement. -The same citizens are involved again, and asked to suggest ideas for improvement or new policies -Policy-makers and experts select interesting ideas and develop new policies based on them - Citizens are involved in testing the new initiatives and providing feedback and evaluation It would also be relevant to measure whether involving a group of people in policy-making results in a more successful implementation of the new policies by that particular group, due to them having gained a better understanding of both the problem and the new policy.

3. Design for long-term engagement If your goal is to create a network of engaged citizens who will become a valuable resource in future open policy-making projects, it’s vital to commit to rewarding your community by recognising their efforts and activity – even if their input or ideas don’t make it to the final stages of the policy making process. (Waterhouse 2014) Rewarding participation can be done in different ways. Perhaps the platform itself allows participants to track their contributions, like the Design Quotient on OpenIDEO, Simple commenting also goes a long way, and community managers can play a key role in making people feel like they’re being listened to.

4. Close the feedback loop Citizens will be most likely to engage with government if they believe they can make a real difference or where the issue affects them (PASC 2013, Public engagement in policy-making, Page 31 paragraph 38) Transparency about the process and how the diverse inputs is being used and considered is also important to ensure that community members are able to see that their participation has contributed to real life change. Reporting back is vital, even if that means replying to 30,000 comments A core benefit of open policy-making is that people who have participated in the process may feel more positive about new policies, which have been the product of their engagement, rather than arbitrary decision-making in Whitehall. This sense of empowered citizenship may ripple through communities and is vital for democracy.

5. Empathise with the citizen Work may need to be done to ensure a wider education in what it means to open up policy making and why it’s beneficial. (PASC 2013)] In line with the principles behind both Design Thinking and HumanCentered design, gaining empathy with the end users, in this case the citizens who participate in open policy-making is key. One way to do this, could be by running a pilot version of the challenge, only for Civil Servants and policy-makers. By going through the experience of online open policy-making themselves, civil servants and other policy-makers will be better equipped to engage with citizens in future open policy-making challenges.

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO? CONCLUSION

OpenIDEO demonstrates that large numbers of people can be successfully engaged in innovative approaches to problem-solving. If this model were adopted by open policy-makers, it would improve the current methods employed by them, overcoming the weaknesses outlined above.

Thanks Thanks to everyone who has contributed their time, knowledge and thoughts to help me understand the issue and frame the question. Thanks especially to Joanna Choukeir, Sarah Parkes, my colleagues at IDEO and classmates at London College of Communication for your support.

What might open policy-makers learn from OpenIDEO?

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Figures All images have been designed by the Author. Fig 3 is based on a framework by Karim Lakhani