Two key factors made the project innovative. Firstly an innovated procurement approach was chosen by the Australian Federal Government. Rather than working with established, bigger corporations, the BRII initiative utilized skills from start-ups and SME's to co-create a solution that was fit for purpose. This offered an agile and cost effective approach to development of solutions in addition to providing critical investment to smaller companies. Secondly, the AI technology developed in the project has provided an innovative approach to dealing with large amounts of qualitative data often encountered with community and stakeholder engagement. The solution makes it easier for people to explore data and form insights so they can focus on high value work such as collaboration and communication of outcomes and with stakeholders.

Converlens is now being used in The Independent Review of the Australian Public Service and other federal engagements such as the Review of the Melbourne Declaration, as well as other state and local government community engagements. This is has demonstrated that the solution can be successfully applied across all levels of government.

Converlens worked closely with several agencies and departments within the Australian Government throughout the project. This included the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science (DIIS), the Department of Social Services (DSS) and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C). All departments involved helped direct the development of the solution ensuring it was fit for purpose.

The project involved stakeholders and users varying from Australian Government officials who were using the solution to facilitate engagement, as well as citizens, civil society and industry who participated in the Australian Public Service (APS) Review. Government use of the product meant they could realize efficiencies when running the engagement. Community members who engaged with the APS Review were provided a better opportunity to be heard by contributing through the solution.

It is easy to reflect on the technological innovation in this process, such as natural language processing, data visualisation or AI-powered capabilities. However, the real breakthrough was applying this innovation to the challenges raised within government agencies by the administrators running such engagements. By listening directly to these issues, a better understanding emerged of what was and was not working, coupled with a deliberate approach to avoid being prescriptive about how government ‘should’ conduct engagements. The empirical observations of the process, stakeholders and outcomes revealed resource constraints on staff (such as budget, time, knowledge) as a significant limiting factor. This directed the design and application of these AI, NLP, analytics and communications technologies. The main innovation was combining the technology with a discovery process designed to address government’s greatest engagement pain points.

Converlens was new to larger spheres of public participation when it won the BRII’s million-dollar grant in 2017. Although this grant allowed the team to look at digital community engagement with fresh eyes—it was nonetheless a challenge to gain a comprehensive grasp of the problem domain, as well as determine the viability of the solution within the four-month period of the feasibility study. Within this framework, there seemed to be a clear disconnect between agencies: they were repeatedly trying to solve the same set of problems while struggling to find consensus on why certain failures continued to re-materialise. Co-creation was certainly a core element of solving the challenge: even so, challengers were also required to innovate by producing solutions without too much government input. In a word, Converlens needed to maintain a balance between interpreting the BRII’s upfront information, asking additional questions and calling on original insights from its own investigations.

A key factor of success in the development and successful deployment of the innovation was the co-design process used. One of the main drivers of the BRII challenge was to look for innovative procurement of solutions for the government. Rather than reaching out to established, bigger companies and consultancies to solve the challenge of "Digitally enabled community engagement in policy and programme", they brought in SME's to come up with a solution. This provided a cost saving to the government, offered investment to start-up businesses and created genuine co-creation dynamic. Open access to government employees and stakeholders allowed fluid and rich ideation that really informed the development of a the Converlens solution. In turn the end product was focused on solving the real problems associated community engagement face by government employees.

Converlens is now helping government departments at a federal, state and local level. This has demonstrated that problems faced by large government departments can also apply to smaller departments, namely processing efficiency. Converlens provides efficiency with sourcing of input from stakeholders and communities as well as processing, analysis and management of data, and this has now been replicated and scaled across the different applications at all levels of government.

Solving government-innovation challenges from government’s point of view turned out to be crucial. As intuitive as this may sound, government’s requirements don’t often feature upfront within the community-engagement spectrum. Focusing on community requirements — such as exploring means to increase citizen voices — will make scant difference to government decisions if no one addresses the practical issues of conducting government-led engagements. After all, governments hold the key to opening up the space for community participation. Several factors may lead to poor community participation and experiences: engagements resulting in rubber-stamped decisions; necessary specialist expertise not being brought into the conversation; and citizens receiving zero feedback on the outcome of their consultation. Was their contribution even read and considered? Rising public expectations and declining trust in government mean that government agencies are working under increasingly tough time and cost constraints. However, a surprising learning—given stereotypical characterisations of “government doesn’t care”, “they don’t listen” and “nothing ever changes” — was seeing how well government understood the issues at play. Instead of finding an indifferent, apathetic civil service, Converlens met skilled staff struggling with very real, practical resource issues. More often than not they were hamstrung by budgets, staffing and time pressures. The problem clearly wasn’t that government didn’t care. It was a general capability quandary dictated by system limitations. The deep scepticism of “software solutions” promising answers after years of repetitive failures delivered the insight that technology wasn’t the full answer: Converlens had to find human-tailored solutions to help staff execute their functions effectively and capably.