 Hello everybody and thank you very much to my society for giving me this opportunity to share an early part of my research with you and thank you all very much for coming in here this afternoon. It has been a really exciting conference and I know we're winding down towards the end so I'm going to keep it fairly snappy and short and I'll move on to the good stuff straight away hopefully. The concept of community is the theory I'm looking at and I will show you a really nice case study. I call it an exemplar of e-participation or citizen engagement and that's from a care opinion platform from the UK. I started out my journey as a PhD from which was a social science background, sociology and politics and I found myself in an information systems department doing an MSC and I found I really liked it, I liked the mix between technology and people very very much and I think that's been useful in applying my work to e-participation. I came across crowdsourcing and I thought wow this is really exciting and also public value which is a theory that looks at the value that goes beyond dollars and cents it looks like what we intrinsically value in society or for the public good. I thought there has to be something great I could do out there with e-participation and I started off as all PhDs do really bouncy and happy this is so exciting and I thought I'd try an unusual tack which is maybe because I'm an older student and I went to see what would encourage people to participate because I read all the research and said you know these e-participation platforms are out there if you build it they will come kind of thing it was a little while ago and of course now we know that you can build it and often they don't come or it doesn't work out quite as one intended. So I came across this theory sense of community from community psychology and I discovered it had loads and loads of benefits that would be really really great for e-participation. It had if you could create this sense of community had great impacts on behavior and as you can see from above a strong predictor of information sharing and self disclosure but also has cognitive benefits because sense of community is the cognitive dimension of social capital. So I went out and I had a little look at what was out there and I got the opportunity to examine the Irish Open Government Partnership platform with the company CivicQ and we ran an online forum for people to discuss their value they received from using the platform and being involved in the process and probably not surprising to a lot of people out there because I would say you have an awful lot more knowledge of the area than I have. I'm here to listen and learn from you that because of the lack of responsiveness on the platform by government officials they felt that they hadn't been listened to and as a result their perceptions of value was very much affected. So I thought I'm going to have to amend this some way. There is no community out there there is no community of interactions over a long long period of time so if I bring that down and I try and create some sense of community rules of engagement so I use the same theory but I amended it and when I amended it I found these three main design rules if you like that identity had an impact on people's feeling of sense of belonging. I changed the interaction element of it in the original theory you had influence that was very important and shared emotional connection and this I amalgamated into two new levels as you can see there identified participation which is talking about a deeper level of engagement and equitable interaction which is probably the aim of most citizen engagement projects and then of course value which neatly aligned with needs fulfillment. I got help from people on the knowledge hub and their online facilitators community and we ran a webinar and I benchmarked these sense of community rules of engagement and these are very much drawn from the literature I'm not going to go through them you can look at them or have a peek through but they follow the three main design areas that I mentioned earlier and I discovered that these new type of engagements that I mentioned that they seem to work they were identifiable within that test run and then I very kindly got permission from Care Opinion in the UK to examine the interactions on their platform. I spent a long time looking for a platform that would be useful for examining interactions between citizens and government type officials and I'm not an expert in the health area but Care Opinion are and this is a little bit about them they are we talk about bottom up or top down engagement but this is a third type if you like they're an intermediary they're an independent platform they're 13 years old they were started by a doctor and it very much it's if you like it must have been built from the inside out so he knew what he was talking about he had very much domain knowledge and you can see clearly their motivation is for people to be able to share their experiences of care and it's moved from being called patient opinion to care opinion to reflect all different types of care settings and you can see their mission statement there they want to be able people to share their experiences in a safe and simple way leading to learning and change so they're setting their stall out really clearly and really early so it's an open collaboration platform and it's been in England for a little while and it's doing really really well a quarter of a million stories told over that time for me what's really kind of magical about it is the responsiveness rate it's anything from 80% at the moment on the whole of the UK and Scotland and up to 100% in Scotland in Scotland in 2013 the platform was endorsed by the Scottish government for for being a feedback platform so this is how it works a person uses some care and they have an experience of that care or in that hospital setting and they submit the story and that story is sent into care opinion and the story is moderated now this moderation system seems to work extremely well they have amassed an awful lot of knowledge about how to do this their platform is very intuitive and very open and transparent as you can see on the right hand side of the screen it uses a traffic light system to show people what the status is of their story and stories are usually moderated quite little because a lot of the stories are very positive with stories can be amended if there's any legal content people aren't named individually so I as an external reader wouldn't be able to identify anybody and when the story is published alerts are sent directly to the hospital or the care setting that the story is about so your story that the citizens submit is sent directly and it's really really useful and also the story is seen by loads and loads of people so the patient submits one story but it's seen by money and of course it's all open and transparent it's open for everybody to see and these are a little example of two responses now you can see from the one on the left that it's possibly that it's quite a serious topic but the responder has shared her picture and her full job title and it's been seen by many many people it's been like so people get a chance to like what they see or I've experienced this or I haven't so that the platform is very good at kind of seeking every level of engagement they can find and what I did is I analyzed the responses to see what kind of language was being used and what kind of information was being used using the framework there's a positive and a negative story there and you can see that the language is pretty similar there's no difference it's still socio-emotional language there's still information being shared and it's still personal and direct as you can see from the bottom people can use it in different ways when they sign up to the platform they have access to reports from the platform but just the feedback from the patients often people will share within their circles within hospitals and it's good for staff morale but it also can be used for creating further improvements or even planning in the future or planning changes this is the back end of what the staff will can receive the managers can analyze the positive and negatives that are found the stories are tagged by the users the citizens originally and as you can see most of these are really really positive the green are all positive with the pink being negative and you might spot communication just about in the middle there communication is always there you know so is good but communication is generally the problem so I'll just show you what my qualitative analysis showed I had I couldn't examine a sense of belonging particularly well except to say that people shared information really freely on this platform there were two different levels of identity sharing patients are their cares or whoever was submitting the story are anonymous but they go through the moderation process and therefore it's all very ordered and there's there's no slanging matches online or anything like that so you can see I've got identified participation then the socio-emotional language in there and equity interaction and needs fulfillment out in the side what I was hoping to show from this it's just the broad concept of what's going on is that there's both intrinsic and extrinsic values from it there's some people get a change out of it some people the staff might get a boost to morale from being told they were doing a good job or their bosses concede or they're doing a good job too but oftentimes it's just getting that socio-emotional response is that someone is listening to me I I submit a story someone listen to me I feel a little bit better about that and this is how it works out in the different types of interactions there are different types of socio-emotional interactions divided up by type and level there it took a little while to roll through these and this is a template that I'll be looking at the rest of the platform with or as much of that I can manage the different levels of contact are quite interesting too that in the more negative stories people are quite open about saying this is my number please contact me so we can move from online to offline and the last one so two levels of identity have been recognized as workable within this platform the moderation seems to have had a huge impact on this platform it's all respectful and they're very very good norms of participation the socio-emotional part is key to the platform and it leads to great information sharing and back on to offline as as required and for for all the stakeholders there is value being created and not just the citizen or the patient who's getting a reply but also for the the staff who are hearing more about their work and they're open to improve their work which is is really good and that comes through in the platform so the motivation behind the whole thing is is really positive and clear so I'd love to hear what you think about it later or at the end or whenever and thanks very much your time