Struggles of the lab organizers in performing their roles

policy plan. This bottom-up approach really consumed a lot of time and resources. ” (Lab fellow J, focus group) “Time spent in getting acquainted with the community members might be useful for engaging them in the prototyping stage… the longer time spent in talking to community members might help with more discovery about their experience… But it is a trade-off… there is a question of worth in spending ten hours to identify one single point. ” (Lab fellow L, focus group)

Necessarily, a bottom-up decision making approach consumes much time and energy in getting acquainted with the community, listening to stories of community members, understanding theirexperiences,and relating their experiences to themaking ofpublicpolicies. There was no ready consensus on the bottom-up community engagement approach among lab fellows from government offices, amidst the efficiency discourse common in public policy making.

Another concern about bottom-up community engagement in public policy making was the extent that the collected views could represent views of those who have not participated. “We came to understand the user habits from those who were willing to participate…I don’t think these personal views are very representative. (Lab fellow M, focus group)

The cost benefit of bottom-up community engagement was further undermined as validity of the collected views was questioned in terms of representativeness. A way that some lab fellows from government offices proposed to resolve the mixed feeling about the bottom-up approach in public policy making was to delegate the community engagement task to a third party that was not directly related to service operation. “We represent the landlord to enforce management rules in the market… We are the rule enforcers… I have been thinking if the tenants might be more ready to speak their mind if the engagement is done by a third party ” (Lab fellow H, focus group)

As listening to the users and responding to their needs might conflict with the civil servants’ role as rule enforcers, an impartial third party was considered more appropriate to fulfill the community engagement functions for feeding back to policy makers.

Struggles of the lab organizers in performing their roles

“Bottom-up” was also ethos of the social lab project. Nonetheless, organizers in the Market Lab recognized that it was more complicated than it seemed to realize the “bottom-up” approach in the Market Lab process. Constantly, they had to balance between leading and cocreating when they played out their role as facilitator. “In the first place we want to be someone leading people to the shared goal, the one holding the flag, but it didn’t mean we could decide everything, as we very much treasure co-creation, and very much believe that every fellow has his/her own background, their own strength to contribute to the lab. At the same time, our roles were facilitators, triggering the potential, doing things together. ” (Lab organizer D, individual interview)

Thelaborganizersalso had to mediatebetweendifferent parties in theMarket Lab process to reconcile their different expectations and concerns.