The following are a few Facebook groups we watch that deal with various aspects of dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government or e-democracy (membership numbers as of today):
- C2D2 - Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (18 members)
Community of interest on dialogue and deliberation. Conference held every two years. - Conversation Cafe (308 members)
Conversation Cafes promote community, democracy and wisdom world-wide through generating millions of open, respectful public conversations. - e-democracy (346 members)
For those interested in e-democracy, especially the efforts of E-Democracy.Org. - E-Demokratie.org (in German, 12 members)
E-Government oder E-Verwaltung beschreiben die Darstellung von Regierungs- und Verwaltungshandeln. E-Government wird aber auch häufig synonym mit dem Begriff E-Demokratie (eDemocracy) verwendet. Im Detail muss dabei jedoch stark differenziert werden: so geht es bei E-Demokratie nicht nur um elektronisch gestütztes Regieren. Es geht um viel mehr, es geht um Legitimation, Partizipation und Öffentlichkeit. - ePractice.eu (97 members)
epractice.eu is a good practice exchange scheme with a web portal, weekly newsletter, country factsheets, online library, practitioner profiles, events calendar and monthly workshops created by the European Commission for the professional community in eGovernment, e-Inclusion and eHealth. epractice.eu involves practitioners from all 27 Member States, EU-member candidate states and EFTA countries but others are welcome to join. The portal combines online activities with frequent offline exchanges: workshops, face-to-face meetings and public presentations. A large knowledge base of real-life case studies submitted by portal members is freely available. The Facebook extension is provided in order to bridge the gap between Facebook’s social and epractice.eu’s professional touch. - Everyday Democracy (53 members)
Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center) is a national organization that helps local communities find ways for all kinds of people to think, talk and work together to solve problems. We work with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states, helping them pay particular attention to how racism and ethnic differences affect the problems they address. - Government 2.0 (205 members)
A new governance construct is possible… Create it - I support participatory democracy! (395 members)
This group is for people who believe that democracy only becomes meaningful when it involves its people in participatory decisionmaking processes. - ICT4Democracy (192 members)
Gathering of citizens from across the world believing that Information and Communication Technologies can help in providing us with more and better democracy and are willing to do something about it … in their lifetime … - International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) (20 members)
IAP2 is an association of members who seek to promote and improve the practice of public participation in relation to individuals, governments, institutions, and other entities that affect the public interest in nations throughout the world. - National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) (348 members)
A group for those dedicated to solving tough problems with honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action. Join us if you agree with Einstein, that the problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. - Participatory Budgeting (158 members)
Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation of resources to more modest initiatives that confer voice during the development of the budget. This is a group for exchange of information among those interested in practices of participatory budgeting. - POLITECH INSTITUTE (European Center of Political Technologies) (112 members)
POLITECH INSTITUTE is a not-for-profit international association (AISBL) and a European Center of Political Technologies located in Brussels, Capital of Europe, bridging public institutions, international institutions, governments, regional and local authorities, universities, research centers, think tanks, civil society and political leaders with technology actors for a better use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards the advancement of modern public governance and democracy. - The World Cafe (249 members)
A group for practitioners of/people interested in the TWC.
Needless to say, most of these organizations maintain resource-heavy websites of their own.
It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but should give you a head start if you want to connect with people in this community via Facebook. If you happen to know of any additional Facebook groups in this area, feel free to leave a comment.
Here’s another one:
Virtual eParticipation Network (45 members)
Creating a Virtual eParticipation Network
I’ll update the post accordingly once we have a few more of these gathered.
One more (via PEP-NET: Facebook helps knitting the net):
MySociety (164 members)
Without doubt the coolest UK based charity-hosted virtual political web hacking community, like, ever
Another one:
berlininjuly - e-democracy summit 2008 (8 members)
The european e-participation-scene gathered in “Berlin in August 2007″ to identify future aspects of the growing field of e-democracy. 25 Participants from 13 countries discussed for two days in the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (ehemaliges Staatsratsgebäude) what issues are emerging, discussed good and bad practices and tried to build up a network. The British Council Germany gave some funding for travel expenses.On July 17th and 18th 2008 there has been a follow up. The British Council offered room, diegesellschafter.de and the Bertelsmann Stiftung were also supporting the conference. Tom Steinberg, mySociety.org, Christoph Dowe, politik-digital.de and Christian Heise, e-politik.de / e-demokratie.org were bound to be the inviting group. The group of guests included some of the last year guests as well as some new people; important new networks in the field had been informed about the meeting. In total, there were about 40 people from all over the world attending to the unconference.
The list keeps growing:
eParticipation Network (25 members)
This one’s been around for a while but was accidentally omitted:
e-government for the citizens (48 members)
We need to move government beyond thinking of their own, internal aack office integration when building e-government….They need to demonstrate its value for the citizens…So join in and tell the stories of success and failure…
Open Forum Foundation (70 members)
The Open Forum Foundation was established to create a future where every person on the planet has a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, and that process begins in the United States with a focus on the US Congress. We have an exciting plan, but need your participation to bring it to fruition.
Scandinavian Network on E-government (SWEG) (54 members)
This network brings together researchers from or interested in e-government in Scandinavia. This is the link between the SWEG workhops held every February