Open Government Action Plan commitment 2: participation framework

1.1 Develop and begin to roll out a Participation Framework

Status: 🙂 On track

Work on the participation framework is nearing conclusion, with small improvements still being made to ensure that the guidance is accessible and relevant to civil servants. The framework will be uploaded to the Scottish Government Intranet early in 2021, with plans to work with a designer to develop a more intuitive format for the framework in the New Year.

A network has been brought together of colleagues from across Scottish Government with an interest in improving how we carry out public engagement. This is convened on Yammer (the SG social media site), and currently has just over 100 members. This group is intended to function as a community of practice, sharing learning and support. This community will also be an active part of the roll-out of the participation framework, with the Yammer page used to provide support for colleagues using the framework, and members of the network encouraged to access to training on how to use it.

As in most areas, the priorities within this work have shifted due to Covid. A new virtual Covid Public Engagement and Participation team has been brought together, with members from both Open Government and Digital Engagement, to establish appropriate governance to provide oversight and direction to public engagement carried out through Covid recovery and renewal. This team will also produce a strategy to set out what is required to ensure that public engagement can be carried out proportionately and effectively in the future – this of course ties into the roll-out of the Participation Framework. Ongoing conversations with the Scottish Parliament and COSLA ensure that this approach takes into account and aims to work as part of a whole system approach.

As part of the overall approach to public engagement around Covid, the team has delivered two online public conversations around Scotland’s approach to the coronavirus – further detail on these exercises is detailed in section 3 (Testing citizen participation enabled by technology). This group has brought together an Expert Advisory Group to advise on this work. This group has met 4 times – membership of the group and notes of these meetings can be found on the Scottish Government website.

1.2 Improve the formal consultation process

Status: 🙂 On track

Consultations guidance has been reviewed to create a new ‘Handbook’ for ‘traditional written consultation’. The ‘Handbook’ has was published on Saltire (the Scottish Government Intranet) in November 2019 in a series of useful, ‘bite –sized’ resources and use and comments are being monitored to ensure iterative improvement.

A review of the Scottish Government consultations is in progress. This is giving consideration to internal processes and will make a recommendation around resourcing needs to improve consultations.

The government Consultation Working Group continues to work with the Participation Framework Working Group in development of the Participation Framework. In addition, work is ongoing with Parliament and COSLA to develop a more coordinated and system wide approach to the involvement of people in the work of government.

1.3 Development of a strategic approach to participation specific to Children & Young People 

Status: 🙂 On track

The work to develop a strategic approach to participation is underway.  However, as with other areas of work across the Government, activity on participation has been adapted and re-directed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As part of this work, four working groups – Strategic, Resource, Access and Research – are being established to help develop the strategic approach. Volunteers from the third sector, local government, health and academia are working in partnership with the Scottish Government to take this agenda forward.

The Research Group was convened in early 2019, with a remit to consider the evidence base of existing guidance and research on the participation of children and young people in decision making and to identify practice examples and policy areas that have consulted with children and young people. In early March 2020, the ‘Decision-making: children and young people's participation’ webpages, developed by the Research Group, went live on the Scottish Government’s website.

The Access Working Group was established to consider how best to support and promote wider engagement with children and young people so they can participate in decision making, and will look at the methods that might be best utilised - including digital media.

In these unprecedented times, Scottish Ministers remain committed to ensuring that children and young people are at the heart of decisions which affect them. We want our young people to have the confidence and skills to influence decisions around them, including how we learn and recover from Covid-19. In May 2020, the Scottish Government established a Covid-19 Children and Families Collective Leadership Group to review regular intelligence on the impact of the pandemic with a focus on children, young people and families experiencing vulnerabilities. In June 2020, the Scottish Government established an Advisory Group to support the work of the Leadership Group and ensure that those children and young people considered most vulnerable during the pandemic are able to share their lived experience and participate in solution-based discussions.

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Status: ✔ Complete

Hosted two events and began growing community on this subject to explore openness. Events hosted in collaboration with civil society partners with government and non-governmental participants.
1) ‘Working in the open’ event as part of FireStarter Festival (Feb 2019)

Since the event, we have been building a community around the idea of working in the open. Has since linked up with gov/public sector/civil society across the UK to explore what ‘openness’ means in different contexts. Continues as virtual meet-ups organised on Twitter.

2) Exploring openness and participation in area of planning, design and architecture to reach new communities and an alternative approach to openness from different sectors, as part of Architecture Fringe Festival (April 2019)

Status: 🙂 On track

The Scottish Government continues to use Citizen Space (http://consult.gov.scot/) for consultations. Since it was introduced as the primary way to publish consultations in 2015, more than 550 consultations have been published. These range from niche stakeholder consultations to mass appeal. The platform provides a uniform and accessible way to access and respond to consultations.

A crowdsourcing/ideation platform was introduced to support government to engage the public in dialogue on challenging policy areas. This was used to host two public conversations around the Scottish Government’s response to and moving out of the coronavirus crisis. In one week over 12,000 people registered on the site submitting 4,000 ideas and 18,000 comments on developing the government’s framework for decision making in and out of the crisis.

There are a number of forthcoming challenges planned from various policy areas across the Scottish Government.   

There is work underway to identify how best digital platforms can support public engagement in policymaking and align with the Participation Framework. This will inform what types of tools will best facilitate the organisation’s digital engagement needs.

Tests have taken place in a number of policy areas. The principle of these is Scotland’s first citizens assembly, consisting of 100+ randomly selected citizens deliberating on the future of the constitution over 6 weekends. This work will be subject to independent research and evaluation to ensure the learning from the assembly can feed into the continued development of the Participation Framework. Scotland’s Climate Assembly will test many of the same deliberative methods, and learning will also be fed back into our approach. This includes research looking at the overall effectiveness of the assemblies, the experience and response of participants, and how the processes themselves have functioned.

Other explorations of methods which have taken place include:

• A review of citizen’s forums in attitudes to agriculture, environment and rural priorities, link to report below
• A citizen Jury on Patient involvement in health, reporting to Chief Medical Officer and being implemented
• Social Security’s use of Experience Panels to design their services

4.1 Participatory Budgeting

Status: 🙂 On track

Charter on PB has been coproduced and published – collaborative work between COSLA, Scottish Government and the PB network is actively driving improvement

4.2 Coproduction

Status: 🙂 On track

The Homelessness and Housing-Related Social Security Unit have continued to take a co-productive approach to policy development and implementation to end homelessness and rough sleeping.

In June 2020, the Housing Minister, Kevin Stewart, asked the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group (HARSAG) to reconvene and look at what could be done to tackle homelessness now and in the future, including changes to the 2018 Ending Homelessness Together action plan. The group, made up of various homelessness organisations such as Social Bite, Simon Community Scotland and Shelter Scotland, held two meetings in June, which informed a set of draft recommendations for national government, local councils, charities and other organisations working with people affected by homelessness.

Feedback on the draft recommendations was received from 66 organisations and groups, including people with lived experience of homelessness. The Change Team, a group of people with frontline and personal experience of homelessness, have been working with the Scottish Government to progress commitments in the action plan to end homelessness. Their feedback on the draft recommendations provided important insight into what matters most to people affected by this issue, and their contributions were key in helping to shape the final HARSAG report.

HARSAG published its final report in July which was used to review the action plan, an update to which was published jointly by the Scottish Government and COSLA on 8 October. The updated action plan emphasises the importance of prevention, highlights measures to reduce the risk of evictions and proposes phasing out night shelters in Edinburgh and Glasgow, replacing them with rapid rehousing welcome centres.

Status: 🙂 On track

Pace on the Digital Identity Scotland programme is building and a procurement is due to be launched in December 2020. The programme has continued to publish a range of documentation – most so via blogs.gov.scot – with the latest Blog including material which was prepared for a recent Industry Engagement day. Given the limitations on face to face events at present, a virtual event was prepared. We chose to publish material from the event – including the detailed video presentation which was produced - via the Blog to ensure it was widely available. Through the rest of the year we have shared other materials including on our attribute-led approach, prototype activity and Smart Entitlement Research. We have recently updated the landing page for Digital Identity Scotland and will shortly be updating the other pages and publishing a range of materials from the DIS Programme Board’s more recent meetings. Finally, plans are being formed to hold a National Stakeholder Group meeting to provide an update and hear views from all who are interested. We believe that continuing to take active steps such as these will only help to deliver a trusted system.

Additionally, Doreen Grove of the Scottish OGP team is part of an international team working with Open Government Partnerships to provide guidance on improving the use of deliberative techniques and with OECD’ s Open Government team’s Democracy Innovation Network to share learning on the use of deliberative democracy

Status: 🙂 On track

​​​​​Planning for an international workshop to examine current and future practice on gender sensitive policy making was put on hold during the height of the pandemic.  This has now resumed, with the intention for a shorter workshop to be held online in the new year. This is being developed with academics, feminist groups in Scotland and the Open government Partnership Break the Roles work stream, and in co-ordination with First Ministers Council of Women and Girls.  It will involve a number of international contributors.