Public Participation as Community Problem Solving

I’ll be attending the Online Community Unconference 2010 in Mountain View, CA tomorrow. Been meaning to go for a while now and the date finally worked out this year.

I believe there is a lot of potential in figuring out ways we can make online participation more community-oriented. There will be a ton of pretty bright folks there, and I’d like to get their input. So here’s a session idea:

Community problem solving: how to make online participation a team sport

Or something along those lines…

Traditionally, web-based participation often looks an awful lot like this:

1. Make participants read a lot of text
2. Provide some sort of online discussion forum
3. Done

I’m exaggerating, of course (there are more sophisticated approaches). Too often, though, it seems as if online participation only knows how to engage participants at the individual level. And that leaves a lot of value on the table.

Here are three areas where enlisting a community of participants, rather than a group of strangers, might improve overall results:

• Outreach
• Collaborative learning
• Bridging the digital divide

Public participation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Participants are members of various, often overlapping communities. So if we can assume that there is community, how should we design our tools and processes to better harness the power of these connections?

Related posts:

1. What Is Community?
2. 14 Facebook groups for the dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government and e-democracy community
3. New European online community for e-participation and e-democracy

Tagged as: Community, ocu2010