Online deliberative engagement: a pilot study

The Wellcome Trust invited a team from the University of Surrey to explore the feasibility of developing an online tool that could be used to facilitate people‟s interest, deliberation and awareness around biomedical science. The key principles that we sought to embody in the tool were to enable people to engage on their terms, to address the questions they are asking and yet to embody a genuinely two way process. In a move away from „event-based‟ deliberation this tool rather sought to engage people in a way that approximates the more everyday processes of information seeking and sense making. In theory such a tool could be highly resource effective and could be used with large numbers of people. Along with partners from Brook Lyndhurst and White October, and in line with the Wellcome Trust objectives, an online tool was thus developed that was intended to have the capability to
a. provide an environment where participants felt able to consider new information and to feel able to provide both enquiry and comment about this;
b. provide feedback that was relevant and responsive to the particular comments and questions that people had made
c. build in methods of capturing the ways in which people had engaged with the tool.