The other day, I mentioned on Twitter how I sometimes wish there were a glossary of the key terms and definitions that guide our conversations around participation.
With the Open Government Directive expected to be released within a few weeks, one challenge remains that people don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they discuss participation and participatory government. While some use the same terms for slightly different concepts, others rely on different terms for essentially the same ideas.
Here’s a list of just a few of the general concepts that seem to be commonly implied in these conversations (in no particular order):
- Participation as general citizen-related activities: this includes voting in elections, attending local city council meetings, writing a letter to the editor etc.
- Participation as general community activities: e.g. volunteering
- Participation as involvement in decision making: giving people meaningful ways to be part of and contribute to a decision-making process, maybe following IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation (PDF) or the recently released Public Engagement Principles developed by NCDD and others (our endorsement here)
- Participation as consensus building: getting everyone to agree on something
- Participation as interaction with government data: for example, citizens building applications or mash-ups using open government data
In order to be effective, the Open Government Directive will have to clarify the concepts it tries to promote. Maybe we can expect some very specific language, who knows?
At any rate, more people using more precise language would be very helpful. Here’s one working definition we prefer.
A few weeks into this fun side project, we just added “projects” to ParticipateDB. As I mentioned at launch, the idea is to show where the various tools are being used in practice and how (there are only a handful of fairly unrefined entries available yet but you get the idea).
The project entries don’t aspire to be full-fledged case studies (far from it — if case studies or other related materials exist they will be linked to). Instead, entries should give the reader a quick overview of what each project was about. At a bare minimum, we’d like to capture the following project information:
- Title
- Description (specifically goals and outcomes)
- Time/duration
- Convener/organizer
- Country
What else is missing and would be useful? Please comment below.
We will be adding “resources” next (links to related online articles and resources for both project and tools, such as white papers, product brochures, case studies etc.) and add more seed content. We hope to let in a first round of beta testers in late November.
I finally got my invite to Google Wave a few days ago. It’s definitely one of the more interesting things I’ve seen in a while.
Over the past few months, I’ve talked to a number of people who had expressed interest in trying out Google Wave for the purpose of e-participation.
To provide a space where some of us can explore potential use cases, I started the following wave this morning: Google Wave for online dialogue and deliberation and other forms of e-participation
Just contact me with your Google Wave account information and I will add you.
“Google Wave for online dialogue and deliberation and other forms of e-participation”
http://bit.ly/2wdTOp Google Wave for online dialogue and deliberation and other forms of e-participation”Contact me with your Google Wave account information and I’ll add you.
I usually refrain from embedding other people’s hard work unless I have at least some additional value to add. In this case, however, I’m simply glad to see my German hometown embrace public participation:
About Zebralog:
Zebralog is a not-for-profit organization that supports modern democratic decision making through the use of interactive media. Zebralog offers every service that is needed to run online dialogues: institutional embedding, marketing, technical backbone and moderation. Its members have a strong background in participatory planning processes, social science and face-to-face moderation. In Germany, they were among the first to conduct online consultations for various state bodies, among them the government of Berlin or Frankfurt.
Zebralog has also offered consulting and research to organizations that plan to stage online dialogues, among them the Federal Parliament of Germany and the Federal Ministry for Development. Last but not least, the members of Zebralog are very engaged in networking activities to exchange experience among dialogue designers, make the opportunity of e-participation more known and work towards standards of excellence. Currently, Zebralog directs its creativity to the challenge of transnational and multi-lingual online dialogues and is very interested to find international partners for cooperation.
Finally, it’s worth noting that this presentation was held at a conference in China: International Conference “Participatory Budgeting in Asia and Europe: Key Challenges of Participation”, August 17-19, 2009, University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China
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