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Evaluating the Impact of the First U . S . Citizens ' Panel on ' Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy '

Consensus conferences, also known as citizens' panels -a collection of lay-citizens akin to a jury but charged with deliberating on policy issues with high technical content -are a potentially important way to conduct technology assessments, inform policy makers about public views of new technologies, and improve public understanding of and participation in technological decision making. European nations, particularly Denmark, have used consensus conferences for these purposes for a decade. The first Citizens' Panel in the U.S. occurred in April 1997 on the issue of "Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy." This paper evaluates the impact of this Citizens' Panel. The standard criteria to evaluate the impact of analyses focus on the "actual impact" and on the "impact on general thinking." To these standard criteria, this paper introduces the evaluation of two impacts related to learning: impact on the training of knowledgeable personnel; and the interaction with lay-knowledge. These new categories are particularly crucial for evaluating mechanisms for public participation because increasing the contact between experts and lay-citizens and providing lay-citizens with opportunities to hear and be heard are explicit goals of such mechanisms. The impact evaluation is based on a nearly comprehensive set of semistructured, telephone interviews with the participants in the panel -the citizens, the experts, the professional staff of organizing and sponsoring institutions, the media, policy makers, and any other identifiable consumers of the panel's work. Acknowledgement. The author would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance: Heather Barry, Laura Reed, Madeleine Scammell, Dick Sclove, Simon Joss, the members of the citizens' panel and the other people who answered questions for this research, and the members of his graduate seminar, The role of experts in the policy process, in the fall of 1997.