Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
From the monthly archives:
Last week, Federal Computer Week published an op-ed they had invited me to write on the issue of crowdsourcing, public participation and how the former might be applied in the context of the latter: The outer limits to the crowd’s wisdom
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that this is something I’ve [...]
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Over at Sunlight Labs, they have some design suggestions today around how federal agencies should approach their new /open website sections with regard to data.
Here’s the comment I just left (pretty much the same point I made on the OSTP blog a few weeks ago when they were seeking input on an Open Government Dashboard):
In [...]
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Caroline Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and Francesca Polletta, Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at UC, Irvine, have just released the results of a survey they did in September/October 2009 and which garnered responses from more than 400 practitioners: The 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey: [...]
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As I suggested a few weeks ago, there might be a lot to gain if e-participation systems offered “more flexible ways of dealing with identity” than the one-size-fits-all approach that’s currently predominant:
By giving participants better overall control of how much information they want to reveal about themselves (vis-a-vis the application as well as other participants)
By [...]
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As was already mentioned at last week’s Open Government Directive Workshop event in DC (see video, starts at around 1:14:20), the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced it will offer IdeaScale to federal agencies free of charge in order to help them comply with the tight deadlines presented in the Open Government Directive. From the press release: [...]
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This just in via the The Democracy Imperative newsletter:
We’re happy to start the New Year with this announcement: the students who attended the No Better Time conference last July were inspired to take the initiative and host their own event, Connect the Dots: Public Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community Problem Solving & Action. If you missed NBT, [...]
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Update (02/03/2010): There is now an official NCDD list at http://twitter.com/ncdd/ncddlist (already much more comprehensive than ours, so we recommend you follow it instead!)
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And while we’re at it, why not create a list of Twitterers who are members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD)?
Here it is: @intellitics/ncdd
I had the distinct [...]
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Playing with Twitter’s (relatively) new list feature this morning, I’m putting together a list of Twitterers who are members of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2).
IAP2 is currently undergoing a member consultation about the future governance structure of the organization, and I find that following the discussion via people’s blogs and Twitter is always helpful.
There’s [...]
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Just came across a reference to this little gem of a conference right in our backyard:
2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy and U.S. Conference on Initiative and Referendum
“constitution making and direct democracy”
Saturday, July 31 through Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010
From the brochure (PDF, 588KB):
Dear Fellow Global Citizen,
We invite you to what we expect to be a [...]
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I came across this document from the National Democratic Institute (NDI):
Civic Participation Terminology: A Guide to Frequently Used Terms and Phrases
This Glossary is part of NDI’s growing library of publications that form the basis for the Institute’s efforts to create a new and precise lexicon to convey the concepts central to democracy and governance. Putting [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere
