Technology seems to be changing everything, and community consultation is certainly not immune.

About five years ago, community consultation professionals went through a little navel gazing, according to Kylie Cochrane.

The Global Service Leader, Stakeholder Engagement and Communications at Aurecon has spent a quarter-century in community engagement, including as an adviser under three NSW Premiers, and serves on the board of the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2).

Cochrane says the need for reflection those years ago was driven by the difficulty of reaching stakeholders with busy lives and ‘huge chunks’ of the population not having their voices heard. This has driven a number of newer techniques.

“One was pop-up engagement, which is essentially taking the concept of pop-up retail and using it in the engagement space,” Cochrane tells intouch.  

Newer methods have been used since, with promising results from social media and digital engagement. She draws a distinction between the two, with digital including things like virtual/augmented reality and game technology, which is being used to try and attract younger participants.

Lake Macquarie Council is harnessing the appeal of virtual reality (VR) – arguably enjoying a breakout year – which it has adopted to tackle two challenges in the context of communicating rising water levels.  

The first is to engage the council’s younger citizens.

“Being able to put the Oculus Rift headset on and check it out has definitely attracted some of the younger people to come along and have a go and then we get talking to them about it,” Sharon Pope, Manager of Integrated Planning says.

The second challenge is to be able to show rather than tell during engagement. Communicating anticipated sea levels over time is difficult with aerial maps and 2D diagrams.

Information on the terrain, including contour information from LiDAR, was converted into a virtual environment.

“So we decided that if we could use virtual reality, that might help people understand that in some cases we’re talking ankle-deep; in other cases it might be knee deep,” Pope explains.

The use of newer technologies and platforms has great potential to bring younger people – who are users of public infrastructure and should therefore be a part of a conversation – into community consultation.

As IPWEA’s Practice Note 8: Levels of Service and Community Engagement points out, engagement is an outcome and consultation is a process. Engagement – the end goal – involves the whole community feeling a part of its governance.

One area where consultation has broadened in recent years has been in increasing the use of internet-based methods. Consultation has been improved and expanded in this way, believes John Howard, of Jeff Roorda and Associates and principal author of PN8, written in 2014 and covering levels of service and community engagement.

Howard says Launceston City Council’s website is a positive example of community engagement that has been followed elsewhere.

“It has the potential to engage with a greater number of people in greater detail at lower cost,” he tells intouch.  

The unprecedented levels of connectedness offered by mobility is reshaping many industries.

Cochrane believes organisations engaging in community consultation should take advantage of this to inform stakeholders and get their feedback, helping a project minimise problems like delays, appeals and redesigns, and supplementing traditional methods. Her company has had success with novel initiatives, including gaming-inspired tools to enable virtual driving through a post-project stretch of the Pacific Highway in northern NSW, and virtually walking through redeveloped urban areas.

Two projects she is pleased with involved augmented reality to show what the recently completed Wynyard redevelopment would deliver to commuters, and exploiting a recent vanity-based practice prevalent among younger people.

The interactive NovoView app for the Wynyard train station, in Sydney’s CBD, recently won the IAP2 judges’ encouragement and innovation award.

A user at the station, which expects to see 100,000 commuters daily, could use the app to see behind hoarding walls and view the ‘after’ version of different aspects of the station.

“So we put that on an app for a mobile phone, because most of our 100,000-plus commuters either have a phone or a tablet or something with them and are looking at that whilst they are commuting,” Cochrane explains.

“It was the best way of actually reaching all of those people – many of whom are hard to reach.”

Younger stakeholders might not be willing to show up to town hall meetings to discuss proposed development, but many of them are inclined to take pictures of themselves with their phones in various poses.

A project for an unnamed utilities company required community responses to tree- trimming, and made use of the selfie trend.

A brainstorming exercise with some of the office’s younger members led to the idea of a ‘selfie survey’. Members could respond to questions by taking a picture of themselves in front of a ‘Yes Tree’ or a ‘No Tree’, depending on their answer to one of a set of questions.

“So it’s a combination of using social media but taking it to the next level as well, and sort of thinking, ‘Okay, it’s one thing to use social and digital technologies and finding ways of reaching people who are harder to reach?’,” Cochrane explains.

“These days everyone’s using some kind of social or digital media to do engagement, so we’re trying to stay out in front and come up with different and other ways of using social and digital media to engage with communities and continue to ensure that our engagement is as inclusive as possible.”

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