Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
From the monthly archives:
44: The Obama Presidency, one of the Washington Post’s blogs, today came out with a new monthly feature where they’ll have a group of five experts (for today, that’s Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, Jon Henke, and David Weinberger) examine the new WhiteHouse.gov website: Grading WhiteHouse.gov
Excerpt:
For all the innovations of Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov — yesterday, officials announced that [...]
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Interesting article on BBC News regarding a list of 200 jargon terms recently “banned” by the UK-based Local Government Association (LGB):
Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon, with “predictors of beaconicity” and “taxonomy” among the worst horrors.
The Local Government Association says such words and phrases must be avoided for [...]
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I feel like sharing a few of the ideas that have accumulated on our wiki over the past couple or so years.
Most of these are related to the hosted e-participation service we’ve been working on, and hopefully some will see the light of day very shortly.
First, though, one general note on what has been driving a [...]
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Over the past few weeks, there has been an interesting discussion over on the main NCDD discussion list about “pseudo-dialogue” and “pseudo-civic engagement” and the need for some sort of quality assurance guidelines for the public participation efforts that the new administration is bound to undertake.
The discussion touches upon many principles and critical success factors of [...]
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About a couple of weeks ago, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) — in collaboration with a few other organizations in this field — launched the Public Engagement Principles project, an effort to craft a recommendation for the Obama administration as they work on the Open Government Directive. From the NCDD website:
Get involved [...]
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I stumbled across New York Law School’s Do Tank today (via via via). From their about us page:
About the Do Tank and the Democracy Design Workshop
The Do Tank strives to strengthen the ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing software and legal code to promote collaboration. Tools alone [...]
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Those who’ve been following this blog over the past few weeks have probably figured out by now that we’re working on something in the area of e-consultation, something that supports input gathering from large groups of participants.
One idea we’re pursuing is to allow the creation of a digest layer during and on top of a general forum [...]
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The latest edition of the European Journal of ePractice is dedicated entirely to the topic of e-participation. One article contained a useful description of the term e-consultation (actual quote taken from the PDF download, 135 KB): E-consultations: New tools for civic engagement or facades for political correctness?
2) Defining e-consultations
E-consultations constitute interactive “tell-us-what-you-think” on-line platforms where ordinary citizens, civic actors, experts, [...]
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There is, without a doubt, a plethora of online tools out there today which are commonly used for e-participation projects of all kinds and sizes — from the off-the-shelf discussion forum to the custom-tailored e-consultation solution, from the simple wiki to complex argument mapping (to name just a few).
I have been tracking this space for [...]
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In their FAQ, The Deliberative Democracy Consortium defines deliberation and deliberative democracy as follows:
What is “deliberation”?
Deliberation is an approach to decision-making in which citizens consider relevant facts from multiple points of view, converse with one another to think critically about options before them and enlarge their perspectives, opinions, and understandings.
What is “deliberative democracy”?
Deliberative democracy strengthens citizen [...]
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