Public Consultation
Various public bodies such as Local Councils and Police Forces have a statutory obligation to hold public consultation meetings where members of the public are invited to attend, hear about future plans, put their point of view across to senior officials of those bodies and ask questions to them. In the past these meeting would have consisted of a one-way communication process where the officials of the public body, usually senior managers or elected officials, would give their presentation and then possibly ask questions to the audience (How happy are you with the Police presence in your neighbourhood?) and ask the audience to respond with a show of hands – something that some people are not happy with doing in a public environment.
Interactive voting system use now means that these types of meeting can be genuine two-way event as the presenters can gain real-time feedback on the presentations and to the questions that they put to the audience. Rather than ask participants to respond to verbal questions with a show of hands, the question is put as a multiple choice type question via the overhead projection system and participants press a button on the keypad that corresponds with the answer they want to give. The results are gathered in quickly and the results shown as a graph on the screen.
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The first couple of questions are usually light-hearted ones that get the participants used to the voting system, the next few questions are usually demographic in nature where the participants self select the sub group that they go into. The question, Are You... 1. Male; 2 Female, is the simplest demographic question, other demographic questions could relate to ethnic background, time in the area, employment status for instance
The next stage of the session would be to ask the questions to which answers are required. Some of the results gathered could be cut by the results of the demographics questions to see where there are differences between the different parts of the meeting
Other questions could be used to start a discussion based on an initial vote, and then the question can be revoted on after the discussion, and the two results compared side by side to see if there had been any change in views.
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Another issue is related to what use the data is put after the event and we have developed a software called Events Analyzer which is a unique voting software data analysis package that makes comparison of data from different meetings simple and easy. Events Analyzer allows data from different meetings to be combined or compared, it can track differences in views by location, or over a period of time, and it also allows a sophisticated drill down of data that is an improvement on the normal demographic question features of voting softwares. This screen picture shows how three different locations (shown by different coloured bars) answered the same question.
Events Analyzer can also be used to import data from web based surveys and combine it with data from interactive voting sessions.
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