Monthly Archive for July, 2009

TransparencyCamp West: August 8-9 at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA

Published by Tim on July 31, 2009 in Events. 0 Comments Tags: .

I’ll do my best to be at TransparencyCamp West next weekend, August 8-9 in Mountain View, CA. From their site, here’s what it’s all about:

This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

The event is organized by Sunlight Foundation. The first TransparencyCamp took place in DC earlier this year. Though the main focus is on — you guessed it — transparency, a number of sessions looked at participation and other neighboring topics as well (which makes sense, in my view, given the overlap).

Almost 200 people are signed up for the second edition already with a bunch of folks flying in from the East Coast (your chance to meet some of the most active players in this field).

The hashtag is #tcamp09 in case you want to follow the event on Twitter.

It’s important to get government insiders and practitioners from all levels to participate in events like these. So if you know people who work in government (including yourself), please by all means send them along.

TransparencyCamp is an unconference, meaning the agenda will be created by the participants the day of the event. I have a couple of session ideas:

  • Something at the intersection of transparency and participation (e.g. take a look at how the two are inter-related, how they can benefit from each other etc.)
  • Open Government Initiative (OGI) review and feedback round (what worked, what could be improved next time around etc.)

Please leave a comment if you’re interested in co-presenting. Thanks!

Creative leadership skills and public participation

Published by Tim on July 25, 2009 in Ideas. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Thanks once again to a most distinguished network of people we follow on Twitter, I came across an interesting paper yesterday: Leading Complexity: The Art of Making Sense (by Charles J. Palus and David M. Horth)

Introduction

This article is about developing and using creative leadership in the face of complex challenges. What has emerged from seven years of our research with over 500 leaders is a new and surprisingly useful definition: Creative leadership is making shared sense out of complexity and chaos and the crafting of meaningful action.

The following definition of complex challenges has been useful as a starting place in our work with leaders:

Complex challenges are situations or contexts that defy existing approaches or solutions. They are central in importance and demand decisive action. Yet because the organization, team, or individual does not know how to act, there is also a need to slow down and reflect.

Here’s how you know it’s complex:

  • You feel “stuck,” and the challenge is a source of real pain. Prior attempts at resolution have misfired.
  • The challenge seems outside current or proposed approaches. Existing formulas don’t fit. You may not even be sure exactly how to talk about the challenge.
  • The challenge involves a clash of basic assumptions, worldviews, or communities. People disagree about the nature of the challenge and what should be done.

In facing and resolving complex challenges, we have found that two sets of competencies are necessary. One is well known — rational skills such as planning, analyzing, and decision making. Most leaders are aware that they have to develop these in themselves and in their organizations. Indeed, excellence in these skills is typically what people are hired and rewarded for. The second set is less well known in the organizational setting. These creative leadership competencies are typically considered inappropriate and are therefore often neglected.

The paper goes on to explain the following six creative leadership competencies:

  1. Paying attention – the disciplined art of slowing looking down in order to discern the unfamiliar in the familiar, as well as the familiar in the unfamiliar
  2. Personalizing – adeptly tapping into one’s unique life experiences and passions to provide insight and perspective on shared challenges
  3. Imaging – making and using of all kinds of images — pictures, stories, metaphors, visions — to make sense of data and communicate effectively
  4. Serious play – generating knowledge through exploration, experimentation, rule bending, limit testing, levity, and sport
  5. Collaborative inquiry – the ability to sustain productive dialogue in addressing complex issues within and across community boundaries
  6. Crafting – the skillful synthesis of issues, objects, events, and actions into beautifully integrated, meaningful wholes

Sound familiar? I thought so. What struck me is that a very similar skill set is required in the context of dialogue, deliberation or public participation — and not just on the part of the leaders (the conveners or facilitators), but rather the participants themselves.

This is where education and training come in as important building blocks of successful public participation — a great opportunity for online offerings to support this kind of capacity building over time in a cost-effective manner.

2009 IAP2 Annual Conference, September 21-23 in San Diego, CA

Published by Tim on July 17, 2009 in Events and Public Participation. 5 Comments Tags: .

Intellitics will attend the 2009 IAP2 Annual Conference “Making Sustainable Decisions”, September 21-23, 2009 in San Diego, CA. From their website:

Making Sustainable Decisions

In recent years, sustainability has become the watchword for many human, social, corporate and governmental endeavors.  In some formulations, there are three “pillars” and in others there are four.  Others refer to this concept as the “triple bottom line.”  Whichever version one subscribes to, however, IAP2 sees people and governments around the world struggling both to incorporate sustainability into their decisions and with how to involve stakeholders in participating in those decisions.

Sustainable decision making has long been an underlying principle of public participation. IAP2’s emphasis on inclusionary processes is predicated on the belief that better decisions are made when community and social implications of that decision are fully factored into the decision making process.  When the IAP2 Core Values were reviewed and revitalized in 2005, sustainable decision making was explicitly added as part of our values going forward.

The 2009 IAP2 conference will provide the opportunity to discuss the multiple facets of sustainability.  In a kind of double entendre, we want to explore the state of the art both in terms of how to make decisions that reflect sustainability principles, as well as, how to make decisions that are themselves “sustainable.”  We believe these two facets feed into each other, but as the world’s premier organization focused on public participation in public decisions, IAP2 believes that the sustainability of the decision itself is in need of closer examination.

More from the preliminary conference program (PDF):

The 2009 IAP2 conference will provide the opportunity to discuss the multiple facets of sustainability. In a kind of double entendre, we want to explore the state of the art both in terms of how to make decisions that reflect sustainability principles, as well as how to make decisions that are themselves “sustainable.” IAP2 believes that the sustainability of the decision itself is in need of closer examination.

IAP2 wants to expand the definition of sustainability to encompass all the characteristics that make decision‐making processes and the resulting decisions sustainable. Specifically, presentations will be focused around the following themes:

  • Sustainable decision‐making processes: what characteristics are necessary for a public participation process to be sustainable?
  • Sustainable decisions: In what ways does public participation lead to decisions that are more workable and enduring than those made without public participation?
  • Sustainable outcomes: How do public participation processes and better decisions specifically contribute to the sustainability of projects and programs?

Starting September 18, additional training sessions will be offered via an extensive pre-conference program.

For conference updates, subscribe to the IAP2 blog or follow @iap2 on Twitter.

Session proposals for SXSW ‘10

Published by Tim on July 11, 2009 in E-participation and Events. 2 Comments Tags: .
The deadline to submit session ideas for SXSW ‘10 has been extended through Sunday, July 12 (midnight Austin, TX time).

Over the past few days, I have had a number of interesting conversations here at No Better Time about how the Open Government Initiative could have been improved.  I have a hunch that a significant level of improvement can be achieved in ways that have little if anything to do with the particular tools.  Hence my session idea: “How to do meaningful online participation using (almost) any tool!”
Some of the recommendations I have in mind:
  • Manage expectations: e.g. communicate your desired outcomes, expected impact, limitations, risks etc.
  • Follow basic facilitation techniques: e.g. communicate and enforce community ground rules, be present in the conversations
  • Be consistent: e.g. stick to your ground rules, show steady levels of convener engagement etc.
  • Make it easy to follow the conversations: e.g. compile daily digests, point people to high-quality content or emerging themes
  • Give guidance: e.g. explain what output you’re looking for specifically, give instructions/training as needed
Needless to say, this isn’t a complete list and each item would have to be fleshed out in more detail.
Online participation is becoming increasingly popular.  However, a lot of the online tools out there are fairly limited and won’t work off the shelf. Folks who are trying this out for the first time will be running into the same issues.  This session is an effort to bring good practice to these efforts and help people get the most out of their online experiments.
I’d like to submit this session as part of a multi-disciplinary team and look forward to finding a few collaborators.

Intellitics at “No Better Time” Conference, University of New Hampshire, July 8-11, 2009

Published by Tim on July 7, 2009 in Deliberation, Events and Research. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I’ll be taking the red-eye to Boston tonight on my way to what looks like a great conference: No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners

The conference is hosted by The Democracy Imperative and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

From their website:

What are the conference’s objectives?

Deliberative democracy has reached a critical point in its development. Over the last fifteen years, shifts in citizen capacities and attitudes have led to a dramatic proliferation of citizen participation and deliberative practices, and in 2008 they helped to produce an historic presidential election. On the heels of these changes, new opportunities for educators and practitioners are emerging in communities, in government, and on campuses. The primary goal of “No Better Time” is to take stock of these developments and to consider future directions for educators and practitioners in teaching, research, and in citizen‐centered initiatives.

We know what we want to happen: colleges and universities will make democracy central to their academic, governance, and public missions; researchers, practitioners, and other leaders will learn together better in order to improve the practice of deliberative democracy on the ground; educators will ensure that all graduates understand and know their responsibilities in a just, free, equitable society; students will become skilled in the arts of dialogue, deliberation and public reason, conflict management, and collaborative decision and policy making; the gap will close between researchers and practitioners and theory and practice…

We don’t know all that needs to happen to make these aspirations a reality. And we think that by bringing together a lot of smart, dedicated, and experienced people, we can figure it out. Convening people who care about deliberative democracy, learning from each other about what works, mapping out and prioritizing activities, and providing the space for innovation and collaboration; these are the objectives of this conference.

About 250 people are attending.

Below are some of the sessions I’m looking at (many run in parallel, so sadly I won’t be able to attend them all):

  • The “downside” of deliberative democracy (Alice Siu, Stanford University; Mary Jacksteit, Public Conversations Project)
  • Deliberative democracy in federal agencies (Roger Bernier, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Leanne Nurse, Environmental Protection Agency)
  • Embedding deliberative practices in local democracy (Terry Amsler, Collaborative Governance Initiative, League of California Cities; Will Friedman, Public Agenda; BongHwan Kim, Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, City of Los Angeles)
  • Funding and fostering democracy: What have foundations learned about the field, and what do they want to know? (Stuart Comstock-Gay, Vermont Community Foundation: John Esterle, Whitman Institute; Chris Gates, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement; Dick Ober, New Hampshire Foundation)
  • Renewing the research agenda (Jim Fishkin, Stanford University; Archon Fung, Harvard University; Peter Levine, CIRCLE)
  • A tech-savvy citizenry: New media for public participation, policy deliberation, and social change (Joe Peters, Ascentum; Brad Rourke, blog.bradrourke.com)
  • Embedding deliberative practices in national democracy (Carolyn Lukensmeyer, AmericaSpeaks; Pete Peterson, Pepperdine University and Common Sense California)
  • Making the case for this work: Improving the way we collect, report, and explain outcomes (Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University; Kristen Cambell, National Conference on Citizenship)
  • Choosing, combining, and adapting deliberation models and methods (Martin Carcasson, Colorado State University; Jim Fishkin, Stanford University; Sandy Heierbacher, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation; Joe Peters, Ascentum)
  • Participatory budgeting in local government (Malka Kopell, Community Focus; Harris Sokoloff, University of Pennsylvania)

Quite the line-up, eh?

A lot of pre-conference reading material is publicly available on the conference wiki.

For those wanting to follow the conference from a distance, the tag for this conference is nbt09 (or #nbt09 on Twitter).