The Participation Company
From the website: 30 June – 2 July, 2010 Leeds University Business School, UK The widespread diffusion of the Internet and a growing trend towards democratisation worldwide have encouraged new modes, projects and visions of citizen participation in decision making and governance. OD2010 aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners from a wide range [...]
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As promised, I’ve been tracking the numbers from the ongoing Open Government discussions on a daily basis (follow the thread on GovLoop for details). We’re now almost three weeks into this initiative. Here’s a chart that shows how the numbers have developed since February 9 (a few days after launch): Ideas: 993 Comments: 2,314 Votes: [...]
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Via the Public Decisions blog (co-organizer of the Including the Excluded online conference we’ll be attending), I just found out about a new research effort by Involve, a UK-based not-for-profit offering public participation consulting and services: Quantifying the Value of Engagement: A call for case studies Dear Colleague, Involve are embarking on an ambitious project with [...]
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For some time, I’ve been suggesting the creation of a national public participation calendar and project directory as a key component of the Open Government Directive: May 2009: Open Government Dialogue: “Create an Open Government Project Directory and Knowledge Base” January 2010: Open Government Needs Public Participation Calendars Based on this post on NextGov, it looks like [...]
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Following some peer recommendations (here, here), I just signed up for Including the Excluded – The 2010 Stakeholder Engagement Online Conference, March 2-4, 2010: About This Conference Conference Theme: Equity, Accessibility and Social Inclusion Effectively engaging diverse people or groups can be challenging; what works well for the majority may not work as well for some [...]
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A few days ago, a new site was launched that helps track activity across the 23 federal agencies that are using IdeaScale for their consultations on Open Government: OpenGov Tracker This webpage makes use of the IdeaScale API to aggregate data for all agencies which are making use of that platform. USDA and Health and [...]
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A number of people commented on last month’s post about the Los Angeles Budget Challenge (both online and offline), and most seemed to share my concerns regarding the survey design. Shortly after publishing the post, I reached out to the City of Los Angeles via the email address given on the site. I figured many readers might [...]
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Following up on my list of ten things to monitor, I’ve started a thread on GovLoop: Monitoring and continuous evaluation of OpenGov forums Here’s my initial post: As part of my ongoing efforts to monitor the various feedback channels that have been launched as part of the Open Government Directive, I’ll be tracking some basic [...]
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The report from last year’s No Better Time conference is now available: No Better Time: A 2010 Report on Opportunities and Challenges for Deliberative Democracy (PDF, 1.1 MB) Executive summary In July 2009, more than 250 campus and community leaders came together at the University of New Hampshire to talk about the “deliberative democracy” field, [...]
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Now that a whole lot of agency.gov/open websites are live and many agencies have indeed set up a ”mechanism for the public to [...] [p]rovide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan” it’s time to figure out what to watch out for over the coming weeks and months in order to evaluate the success of these initiatives. As [...]
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Update 2010/02/15: Added feeds for Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the list below, added National Archives to Pipes feed. The Open Government Directive, issued on December 8, 2009 stated: 1. Publish Government Information Online [...] e. Within 60 days, each agency shall create an Open Government Webpage located at http://www.[agency].gov/open to serve [...]
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Following up on my recent post about Quora’s approach to anonymous postings, here’s an example of a related feature. Peak Democracy is a “non-partisan company whose mission is to broaden civic engagement and build public trust in government.” Their Open City Hall™ service is a monitored online public comment process that promises “order and decorum [...]
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Jane McGonigal is a leading game designer and game researcher with an interest in public problem solving. I just learned about a new game she’s been working on and which I’ll write about shortly. As a preface to my upcoming post I wanted to briefly share this video of a talk she gave at the [...]
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There’s a flurry of conferences, unconferences and hybrids being planned that address Government 2.0 and Open Government, including — of course — the topic of participation. Here’s a list of events on our radar for the first half of 2010: February 5-7, 2010: Gov 2.0 Camp Los Angeles in Los Angeles, CA February 17, 2010: Open [...]
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