February 2009

Intellitics Is an eDemocracyCamp Sponsor (Again)

by Tim on February 27, 2009

In late 2007, I came up with the idea for eDemocracyCamp, a barcamp on e-democracy. One goal from the beginning was for it to be an open, participant-driven complement to the annual Politics Online Conference in Washington DC. The first event took place on March 2, 2008 in Washington DC. About 70 or so people [...]

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European eParticipation Day: March 4, 2009 in Brussels

by Tim on February 23, 2009

Worth checking out, if you happen to be in the area: European eParticipation Day, 4 March 2009 The development and wide use of powerful new ICT applications are transforming the political landscape. These new tools allow citizens to access more information and interact, debate and participate in public life in way not seen before. They [...]

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Public Participation and the Open Government Directive

by Tim on February 20, 2009

A few days after the launch of the new WhiteHouse.gov website, President Obama issued a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which announced that the new administration … is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public [...]

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Finding Appropriate Evaluation Criteria for Participant Input

by Tim on February 17, 2009

A common approach to trying to surface the most relevant, highest-quality or most agreed-upon items out of a large quantity of content is to allow participants to rate each other’s contributions and then expose the highest-rated items in a “most popular” list. Very often, a simple binary, up-or-down rating mechanism is used for this purpose. [...]

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Structuring Participant Input: Dynamic Facilitation, Brainstorming

by Tim on February 15, 2009

While I was assembling my off-the-cuff analysis of input types on Change.gov, I felt compelled to revisit two existing facilitation techniques that help guide participation by adding to the process the kind of structure that I believe could work very well for large-scale efforts. First, Dynamic Facilitation, a method I first learned about at the 2006 National Conference on [...]

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25 Types of Participant Input on Change.gov

by Tim on February 15, 2009

As I pointed out previously, some of the discussions we saw on Change.gov were all over the place even when they were supposed to focus on specific topic-related questions (e.g. “What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?”) or tasks (suggesting a question or an idea to the president-elect). At the massive [...]

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Clay Shirky on Change.gov and Crowd Wisdom

by Tim on February 9, 2009

David Wilcox reports on a talk Clay Shirky gave at the London School of Economics this past week about collective action in a political context and some of the discussions that have since ensued: Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise Clay Shirky, leading commentator on internet technologies and author of Here Comes Everybody, last night backed away [...]

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