Developing the Citizen Summit Method: Understanding citizens’ views on digital surveillance technologies

This article demonstrates how the citizen summit was transformed into the ‘Citizen Summit Method’ (CSM). Citizen summits are growing in popularity in policymaking. In their original form they are used as participatory fora to engage voters in deliberating matters of political and social importance. In their redesigned form, they retain their deliberative character while delivering high quality scientific data for use in policymaking and research. Interdisciplinarity was central to the CSM redesign, which involved the theoretical integration of interdisciplinary constructs into a theoretically derived model. The model ran through the CSMs different elements and ensured they cross-referenced each other, with the resulting research delivering in-depth and nuanced evidence about citizens’ views. The CSM was explored in an international study of citizens’ views on Digital Surveillance Technologies and whether they would be prepared to trade off privacy for security. The results showed that citizens did not perform a security–privacy trade-off and that institutional trustworthiness determined their support or opposition to digital surveillance. The CSM has huge potential for application in internet governance, where citizens are affected by many complex, high-risk policy and regulatory challenges. Options for intersectoral collaboration are discussed as well as the limitations of the CSM.