All posts in the topic Who's participating - disproving the doubters
Summary
- There are 2 posts — by 2 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by MJ Ray at 2006 Jul 13 15:08 UTC
Dear all,
I had to do some research to prepare for a presentation I gave a few weeks ago
and was pleasantly surprised to come across a statistic that came out of the
e-panel evaluation last year which I thought I'd share.
The statistic was that 44% of Ask Bristol (our e-panel) members had not
participated in public meetings or filled in surveys before.
One of the criticisms levelled at these kinds of online consultation activities
fairly often is that by taking consultations online, all I'm doing is providing
a new way for the 'usual suspects' to give their views. This statistic helps me
to disprove this.
The other criticism of online consultation/forums I've seen recently is that
the only people who participate are young, white and male. The statistics from
our users (about a third have given us some demographic data out of nearly 1500
members), don't disprove this completely but there is definitely a good range
of age groups (including some who are over 80 years old) and although there are
more males (60%) than females (40%), it's definitely not just males
participating.
Other headline stats are just over 90% are white and 6% have a disability.
Age groups are split as follows:
under 16 - 1%
16-19 - 3%
20-24 - 13%
25-34 - 35%
35-44 - 21%
45-54 - 17%
55-64 - 8%
65-74 - 1%
75 and over - 0.5%
I'd be interested to hear how our stats compare with issues forums or other
epanels who have collected data if anyone has any.
Carol Hayward <email obscured>>
> I'd be interested to hear how our stats compare with issues forums
> or other epanels who have collected data if anyone has any.
Anecdotally, those numbers seem similar to my experience.
It seems to be biased towards over-thirties and often involves
people who feel disenfranchised or detached from other council
consultations. Unfortunately, most e-democracy has no easy
transition to other consultations and it's a painful experience
when new activists hit the brash processes of local government.
I think that's one problem most places have yet to work out.
Another one - and the one I think may have scuppered me - is that
the different demographics(?) of e-democrats makes it hard to
connect with what I think is the younger/whiter/localer/maler
membership of other local online communities. I may be wrong on
that - there's even fewer statistics about them than e-democrats.
Thanks for the numbers,
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