Introduction
Public decisions can affect entire communities, but the people most affected do not always have meaningful opportunities to contribute before those decisions are made.
Consultations can involve hundreds or thousands of people across different communities, languages and locations. Gathering those perspectives is one challenge. Understanding them together is another.
The Coalition for Grassroots Human Rights Defenders, a civic organisation used WatchTower to collect and understand community perspectives on a proposed public decision.
“They asked us what we thought, but we did not know what happened to what we told them.”
One response captures one person's perspective. But when hundreds of people share their views, questions and concerns, those responses can reveal broader patterns.
WatchTower helped bring these contributions together so the organisation could understand what communities were saying across locations and languages.
Hearing what the numbers can miss
A consultation report can summarise how many people participated. It may not show the range of concerns, questions and experiences within those responses.
People can express the same concern in different words or languages. Others may raise issues that were not anticipated when the consultation was designed.
Community reporting creates a way to capture these perspectives directly and understand them together.
How we listened
WatchTower was deployed to make it easier for communities to participate in the consultation and for the organisation to understand large volumes of community input.
Reporting in familiar languages:
People could share their views in languages they were comfortable using, making it easier to participate without first translating their experiences.
Voice and text reporting:
Participants could submit responses through voice or text, giving them different ways to express their views.
Translation and organisation:
WatchTower helped transcribe, translate and organise responses from different communities so they could be understood together.
Connecting related reports:
Responses could be explored across location, topic and time, helping the organisation identify recurring concerns, questions and areas of interest.
Privacy by design:
Personal information could be minimised or generalised where necessary, particularly when people were sharing sensitive views.
A picture began to emerge
As reports accumulated, individual questions started to connect.
- Related reports
- 132
- Communities
- 19
- Languages
- 5
- Reporting period
- 4months
Where reports came from
Community responses highlighted recurring concerns around local impacts, access to services, implementation, community priorities and how proposed decisions could affect different groups.
Together, these responses helped the organisation understand how perspectives varied across communities and which concerns were being raised repeatedly.
Explore on mapFrom evidence to action
Listening is only useful if what communities share can inform what happens next.
The organisation could use the evidence to bring recurring concerns into consultation discussions, identify issues requiring further engagement and provide decision-makers with a clearer picture of community perspectives.
The evidence could also help communities see how their concerns are compared with those raised in other locations.
Why it matters
Meaningful public consultation is not only about giving people a channel to respond. It also requires a way to understand what people are saying and bring those perspectives into decision-making.
When communities can contribute in their own languages and their responses can be connected across locations, AI can help organisations understand large-scale participation without reducing it to a single number.
WatchTower helps make community participation more visible at the scale at which public decisions are made.
