That depends on the words ;)
Your excellent post reminds me of a participation project a few years ago for a government organisation. Ostensibly, it was going to ‘open up’ EU decisionmaking to the public via a series of events, coupled with an online platform.
The client said all the right things about edemocracy et al at the briefings, but as we entered the platform’s architecture phase I couldn’t get them to answer a simple question:
Q. “What exactly will you do with the ideas submitted by people via this site?”
No answer. So I spent a few minutes drafting the launch version of the site’s FAQs, setting out what I understood the answers to be based on the briefings. And asked them to sign them off.
Faced with a text designed for publication, setting out what true participation actually implied for their organisation, they gave me my answer:
A. “We’ll pretend to listen to them!”
So, does drafting a few FAQs qualify as prototyping? It certainly saved the team months of building systems that were never going to be used. And meant I didn’t waste any more time on a brochureware project ;)
