Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Intellitics at SXSW 2010: Announcing Two Co-Panelists

Published by Tim on August 28, 2009 in Events. 0 Comments Tags: .

As you know, we’re trying to get our panel “14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work” accepted to SXSW 2010. Yes, the polls are still open so head on over to the Panel Picker and sign up to cast your vote of support, thanks!

I am very excited to join forces with two exceptional co-panelists, both experts in the field of public engagement:

  • Brad Rourke is an independent consultant based in Rockville, MD. Among the many pieces of work experience relevant to the subject of this panel, he has authored numerous issue guides for public dialogue for National Issues Forums Institute, Everyday Democracy and others (for example this one on healthcare that’s currently still being used). Check out Brad’s about page and you’ll agree he’ll make a great panelist. Read his prolific blog or follow @bradrourke on Twitter.
  • Taylor Willingham is the Director of Texas Forums, an initiative of the LBJ Presidential Library & Museum. She is a board member of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). Take the time and check out her extensive CV (PDF) and see for yourself why she’s such a great fit for this panel. Taylor lives in Salado, TX (near Austin). Find occasional updates on her blog or follow @taylorwill on Twitter.

Both Taylor and Brad were session leaders at the No Better Time conference recently.

My goal is to assemble the absolute best-available team for this panel. We may announce another co-panelist shortly, or we may just leave the remaining one or two spots unfilled until we know who’ll be at SXSW for sure. It would be very nice to welcome an international contributor or someone who has worked within government to make e-participation happen. Please contact me or leave a comment if you plan on going and would like to be considered.

Intellitics SXSW 2010 Session Proposal: “14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work”

Published by Tim on August 16, 2009 in Events. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Our panel idea for SXSW 2010 from a few weeks ago made it to the next round and is now up for community voting. Here’s the final phrasing as submitted:

14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work

What is public participation? (incl. definition of the term, design principles, common success metrics)
What are typical challenges of web-based participation? (incl. review of recent examples)
What are some of the tools that are currently being used for public participation online?
How to design an e-participation project from scratch?
What are some of the common risks and how to best address them?
How to pick the right tool(s)?
How to take things to scale?
Where to share your successes and failures (so others can learn from your experience)?
What’s *your* experience? (trying to keep it interactive)
What do *you* think? (trying to keep it interactive)
  1. What is public participation? (incl. definition of the term, design principles, common success metrics)
  2. What are typical challenges of web-based participation? (incl. review of recent examples)
  3. What are some of the tools that are currently being used for public participation online?
  4. How to design an e-participation project from scratch?
  5. What are some of the common risks and how to best address them?
  6. How to pick the right tool(s)?
  7. How to take things to scale?
  8. Where to share your successes and failures (so others can learn from your experience)?
  9. What’s *your* experience? (trying to keep it interactive)
  10. What do *you* think? (trying to keep it interactive)

Description: Using the web to engage citizens in public decision making is becoming increasingly popular. However, most online tools are not equipped to support the right processes. This panel of public participation experts will share 14 tips how you can get results despite these shortcomings and still make your citizens happy!

Please add your vote if you’d like to see this panel happen.

In case there’s enough support and the session does in fact move forward then I’d imagine we could do some nice collaborative prep work over the coming months. Time is usually very limited at these sessions so it would be helpful if we could provide a collection of materials and resources people could refer to prior to, during and after the panel.

John Godec’s Impressions from “Strengthening America’s Democracy 2″

Published by Tim on August 5, 2009 in Events. 0 Comments Tags: , .

At the Strengthening Our Nation’s Democracy 2 event in DC this week, IAP2 Director John Godec was one of the 100 or so attendees. He shared a brief summary on Facebook. With his permission, I am re-posting it here:

I had to run to catch a flight immediately after our Tuesday afternoon presentation to three key, attentive Obama administration staffers. This invited recommendation was the consensus and culmination of three very long and committed days working through a variety of issues at the ‘Strengthening America’s Democracy 2′ conference in D.C., hosted by AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, Demos, and the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Institute.

Three things stand out about the past few days; one, the philosophical and rhetorical committment by the Obama administration to the work that we do, they were there till 9pm Sunday, and back on Monday and Tuesday. Two, the exceptionally high number of organizations that are engaged in some form of this work, I thought I’d heard of most like-minded organizations and I wasn’t even close. And three, how little attention has been paid to the principles, ethics and code of conduct for this field, we have a lot of work to do in this arena.

As many of you know we (IAP2) recently worked with NCDD and a handful of other organizations to develop a list of ‘7 Core Principles’ (details at www.ncdd.org/pep/) that we could all agree on. This isn’t to dismiss in any way, or undermine the core values of IAP2 but rather to find that elusive consensus with our peers, on words that we can all share, live with and support. (IAP2’s core values were very influencial in this process.) That consensus list of core principles was included in the packet and background infomation for each of the attendees, but I have to tell you that it wasn’t an easy sell. I was asked to facilitate part of the small group discussions on Monday and ran into major resistance and misperception to the idea of this being a principle-based endeavor dearly on. Most groups tend to focus on ‘issues’ and ‘methods’.

I want to offer specific thanks to Sandy Heierbacher (NCDD), Leanne Nurse (USEPA) and our old friend/founder/mentor Jery Delli Priscoli (USACE IWR WWC) who participated and share many of our priorites. Without them it would have been alot lonelier.

There remains much work to be done but what was accomplished from Sunday through Tuesday is remarkable, and all in a room with nearly a hundred turf-guarding academics and other people who rarely have to listen for a living.

In the long run I’m quite confident that the group’s draft recommendation is one that will serve all of us well in the U.S. When the report is available we’ll get the details to you, but in the meantime here are the headlines of what was presented to the administration:

The 11 DRAFT Democracy Agenda Items (headlines of the recommendations) –

  1. Draft Statement of Principles (The preamble which will likely carry the definitions, values and ethics that we talked about)
  2. Democracy Skill Agenda (How to transfer knowledge and ability to do this work)
  3. Health of Democracy Report (The state of this imperfect union)
  4. National Demonstration Projects (To show the real world value of what we propose)
  5. Recognize and Support Engagement by Disenfranchised Communities (To ensure full inclusion)
  6. Institutionalize Participatory and Collaborative Governance (Embed it in federal, state and local institutions)
  7. Ensure Adequate Resources for Public Engagement (Paying for it)
  8. Adopt and Electoral Reform Agenda (Self explanatory — more later)
  9. Feedback on Consultation Efforts (Evaluation)
  10. Mechanism for Sustaining Leadership (Ensuring that this doesn’t disappear in four years)
  11. International Exchange (Learning from our global colleagues — citing IAP2 as a source)

I heard from some of you over the past days and appreciated your input and encouragement (thanks Max) and did my best to represent you/us — I was honored to do so.

This was a small but very important step for IAP2 and potentially, a giant leap for our field. Stay tuned.

You can follow John on Twitter, read his blog or connect with him on Facebook.

Feedback Survey for Participants in the Open Government Dialogue

Published by Tim on August 2, 2009 in Research. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A number of organizations (listed below) are doing a survey to capture participant feedback from the recent Open Government Dialogue. From the survey introduction:

On his first day in office, President Obama issued a memorandum to leaders of executive departments and government agencies calling for the development of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, that would instruct executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles of transparency, participation and collaboration outlined in the memo.

In late May, the White House launched a three-stage Open Government Dialogue (OGD) to seek public input and develop content for the directive. A number of leading organizations in transparency and civic participation (listed below) are collaborating to evaluate this process, and the White House Office of Public Engagement has shown interest in this assessment.

We appreciate you taking a few minutes to provide us with your reflections on the OGD process. There are 25 questions in this survey.

Please complete the survey by the end of the day August 14th.

AmericaSpeaks
Brennan Center for Justice
Deliberative Democracy Consortium
Everyday Democracy
Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government
International Association for Public Participation
League of Women Voters
Liberty Coalition
National Civic League
National Security Archive
National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation
OMB Watch
OpentheGovernment.org
Public Citizen

This is a good first step in the right direction, since gathering comprehensive participant feedback can help improve process over time. Future projects by the White House should have more feedback mechanisms built into the process (e.g. on an ongoing basis during a project or as part of an additional evaluation phase towards the end of a project).

In addition to participant feedback, it would be nice to know more about the overall evaluation process the White House has in place, e.g. the specific success criteria for each phase or project (with regard to both process and outcome), their evaluation models and techniques, lessons learned etc.

In the spirit of better government transparency, this evaluation process should be open to public view as much as possible.

Two Upcoming Online Consultations at the Federal Level

Published by Tim on August 1, 2009 in Radar. 2 Comments Tags: .

I just heard about two upcoming online consultations at the federal level that might be worth keeping an eye on.

First, the Department of Defense (DoD) Web 2.0 Guidance Forum. From their site:

The Department of Defense (DoD) Web 2.0 Guidance Forum is a new initiative to solicit input from the public that has been undertaken in the spirit of President Obama’s Open Government Directive. President Obama issued a memorandum on 21 January 2009 entitled, “Transparency and Open Government,” which emphasized the need to ensure public trust and to establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. We are using this blog as an approach to engage the public in Department of Defense (DoD) considerations of web 2.0 capabilities, and are excited to participate in this new facet to the President’s openness and transparency efforts.

The blog posts will be written by a number of different DoD participants.  The primary moderators will be Noel Dickover, a contractor supporting the DoD CIO, and Jack Holt, Senior Strategist for Emerging Media.  In some cases, we may post blog entries for other participants.  This will be annotated by the author’s name listed at the bottom of the blog post.

Thanx for joining us.

The site runs on the Wordpress blog engine. As outlined in the opening post, the project started yesterday, July 31 and will run through the end of August.

Participation is open to the general public, though they say they are most interested in hearing from certain specific stakeholder groups (e.g. families of military serving overseas, soldiers currently using web 2.0 tools).

Second, the Department of Homeland Security’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR). From their site:

What goals and priorities do you think should inform our nation’s Homeland Security policies for the next four years?

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano invites you to participate in the National Dialogue on the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR). This groundbreaking, web-based interactive dialogue is designed to allow a broader range of opinions and ideas to inform the QHSR process, and to strengthen the Department’s relationship with its vast array of partners and stakeholders, including other federal agencies, state, local, and tribal governments, law enforcement professionals, first responders, academic institutions, and the business community.

In order to capture this critical feedback, the Secretary is seeking your participation in three week-long, web-based dialogues. Each dialogue will build on the previous one, allowing participants to view and comment directly on proposed elements of the review before they are made final. Your invaluable participation will directly inform the work of the DHS study groups conducting the QHSR—and ultimately, our Homeland Security policies and priorities over the next four years. The final report is due to Congress on December 31, 2009.

What is the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review?

The Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) is a congressionally mandated, top-to-bottom review of the Department’s policies and priorities that will guide the Department and the nation for the next four years. The review is conducted by the Secretary of Homeland Security with key assistance from a set of study groups within DHS, each charged with reviewing a different aspect of the Department’s mission and operations. For more information, see http://www.dhs.gov/qhsr.

What is the National Dialogue on the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review?

The National Dialogue is a conversation between you, other Homeland Security stakeholders, and DHS on an innovative web-based platform. The National Dialogue is an iterative process, building on your input over the course of three dialogues. Each of the three dialogues will involve discussions on six topics being reviewed by DHS:

  • Counterterrorism and Domestic Security Management
  • Securing Our Borders
  • Smart and Tough Enforcement of Immigration Laws
  • Preparing for, Responding to, and Recovering from Disasters
  • Homeland Security National Risk Assessment
  • Homeland Security Planning and Capabilities

This unique experiment in 21st-century stakeholder consultation is being hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent, non-profit, congressionally-chartered institution, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The site is hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), which also hosted phase 1 of the Open Government Initiative. And once again, this is a three-phased project, with each phase taking about one week (and a few weeks in between phases). The first phase starts Monday, August 3.

It should be particularly interesting to watch if the conveners were able to incorporate any feedback from the various recent experiments of this kind and how their improvements play out.