IPS Online Forum on 6 May 2020 — Policy Responses and Lessons from Covid-19 Pandemic

We are glad to partner with Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore on their inaugural launch of IPS Online, a virtual series which examine issues related to Singapore’s governance, economy, society and culture.

Their first virtual get-together “Forum on Migrant Workers: Policy Responses and Lessons from Covid-19 Pandemic” was hosted on Zoom and Facebook Live on 6 May 2020. The virtual event attracted distinguished panellists from various academic institutions discussing various policy responses that can be done to look into the well-being of migrant workers in Singapore.

Our OPPI family is glad to support the virtual forum which looks at various perspectives shared by the participants and explore possible common grounds to derive a potential solution on this issue.

This blog will focus on the results of the poll so that survey participants can have a quick look and a sense of what others think. We will share further analysis of the poll at a later stage.

Results

Presented here are the results of the poll taken on 7 May 2020, after the online forum concluded.

It is worth noting that OPPI’s uniqueness and sophistication as a tool for public sentiments analysis lies in its emergent survey technology. An emergent survey is different from a traditional survey in that the statements that are voted on by the participants are co-created with the participants. In this forum, 10 seed statements were initially proposed by the organisers of the event, but a significantly larger number of 42 statements or perspectives were contributed entirely by the participants taking the survey. The added depth and breadth of perspectives by a much diverse and larger group of people serves to reduce biases or other cognitive blind-spots that decision makers could succumb to in making decisions on complex, polarising and divisive societal issues.

Here are the top three statements where the participants found common ground and were divided on.

While knowledge of the issues that divide the public is a key insight, it often is not a useful basis for facilitators to bring the discussion forward as stakeholders have an immediate tendency to focus on the divisions among themselves. OPPI differentiates itself from current technologies in facilitating complex discussion in that it highlights the common ground among the divisions, thus breaking potential deadlocks or impasses in future progress and collaborations between the groups that are divided.

Finding common ground is central to the ethos of OPPI because:

1. It provides the first step to resolution when it seems like a deadlock
2. It allows the facilitator to nurture trust with the people when she/he identifies what’s common for everyone instead of the divisions.
3. It starts the process for self-awareness among the facilitator and the participants that beyond the immediate concerns and perspectives that colour or tunnel-vision the debate, there are other opinions that matter to others as well.

From a first look at the data, it seems to show that almost all participants agreed that there should be some form of enforcement on employers who penalised migrant workers who sought medical attention. Next, there was majority consensus on the need for greater public scrutiny of the treatment of migrant workers. Third, there was overwhelming support for a substantial increase in standards of migrant worker dormitories.

Here are the three statements which people were most undecided about.

OPPI’s technology also allows the organisers of the forum to bring to the fore the statements that people were undecided upon because they help policy makers, members of civil society and the general public to organise and frame future debates, deliberations, focus groups and forums on issues that need further probing, research and exploration.

OPPI uses Artificial Intelligence to analyse voting patterns across diverse and large numbers of stakeholders to offer everyone a swift “lay of the land” or “helicopter view” of the most pertinent aspects of the debate. It instantly reduces information asymmetry among all the stakeholders by presenting both the “forest” (big picture) and the “trees” (details and supporting points) of the debate simultaneously. Time and energy is not lost debating unsubstantial points or details. Adequate resources could thus be allocated to the more important points while keeping everyone constantly aligned on the big picture.

There is an art and a science to facilitating and moderating complex debates. OPPI allows the facilitator to focus her/his cognitive bandwidth on refining the subtle craft or the “art” of the facilitation process by taking charge of the “science” completely.

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The real-time and emergent nature of the technology’s response to the input of views and opinions in the debate by large numbers of people augments the quality of the facilitators’ or organisers’ response. This in turn significantly increases trust among the stakeholders and the probability of a successful outcome in future collaborations and debates.

Three opinion groups were formed in this survey. People with similar voting patterns are grouped in the same opinion group.

The three groups differ slightly in terms of their level of agreement with each statement, with Group C participants placing more emphasis on the living conditions of migrant workers.

A first layer of analysis allows us to conclude that the participants in the three groups are not significantly divided or polarised. There seems to be some homogeneity in the responses across the three groups. OPPI sheds further light in the debate by offering insights on common ground across all three groups, between groups A and B, between B and C and between A and C. This deeper layer of insights not only gives policy makers the confidence to go ahead and implement solutions around the homogeneous aspects of the debate, but points them to other areas they can quickly move on as they have already been identified as common ground.

Who are we surveying?

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