The Participation Company
The following comparison of dialogue and debate seems to have first appeared in the Winter 1993 edition of Focus on Study Circles: The Newsletter of the Study Circles Resource Center (now Everyday Democracy). Thanks to the Wayback Machine’s vast internet archives, a snapshot from 2002 (?) is still available today: Comparison of Dialogue and Debate Dialogue is collaborative: [...]
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Lathrop & Ruma (eds.): Open Government: Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in Practice. O’Reilly, 2010. Years from now, people will look back at the Open Government movement and attribute its beginnings to the release of this book. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The movement has been live and at large since well before [...]
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Announcing that this was going to be a weekly segment on the blog may have been a bit premature (some weeks are just too busy while others are too slow), but let’s get back to presenting some of the interesting conversations we’re getting into elsewhere around the web, shall we? Last week, David Eaves (whom [...]
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We already have one very good definition of public participation in the archives, but for comparison’s sake, here’s the official IAP2 definition as per their training material: IAP2 views public participation as any process that involves the public in problem solving or decision making and uses public input to make decisions. Public participation includes all [...]
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The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) just announced a series of regional one-day events for later this Fall. The Bay Area event is scheduled for Friday, October 29, 2010 at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. From the website: The events will build on what we learned in the past year and a [...]
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Doing a bit of research on Spending Challenge the other night, Stephen Whitehead alerted me to his excellent post on the subject: Three lessons from the Treasury’s Spending Challenge fiasco The article touches upon three important concepts (great analysis, make sure to read it in full): Asking the right questions Collaborative brainstorming Objective-driven public participation I [...]
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I had heard of the DAD acronym before (decide, announce, defend) but was unaware of SCID until it came up during training last week. Here’s what SCID stands for: Solicit (ask stakeholders for input) Consider Ignore Decide Obviously, this is not good practice as it violates a number of public participation principles (mainly, you don’t ask [...]
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After a longer period of downtime, one of the most comprehensive resources in the area of dialogue and deliberation is back in business. From the blog post: NCDD resources are back online (all 2,392 of them!) The Resource Center describes and categorizes close to 2,400 resources — including many dialogue guides, D&D methods, online tools, [...]
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Late last week, a new consultation was announced in Europe: Digital Agenda: Commission launches consultation on net neutrality A consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality has been launched by the European Commission today. It covers such issues as whether internet providers should be allowed to adopt certain traffic management practices, prioritising [...]
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This is the second part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation. Part 1 was on Institutional Backing. Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis research. Some e-participation projects originate from within (or from outside) public institutions, but are not decided at the top. Initiators of [...]
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Update 07/06/2010: Apparently, the site isn’t new at all (new to me, though). My bad. Still… nice work! Once again, the UK leads the way and shows us what’s possible… The newly launched TellThemWhatYouThink.org is a website that promises to bring citizens a lot closer to the consultations that affect them. From the website: We collect government [...]
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As an experiment, I’m adding a weekly segment to this blog that shows our conversations elsewhere (a simple list of posts where we have commented). Over on the PEP-NET blog, Simone Gerdesmeier of Berlin, Germany-based Zebralog provides a comparison between AmericaSpeaks’ “Our Budget, Our Economy” project that happened this past weekend and Zebralog’s upcoming Citizen [...]
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The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) just put out a request for proposals to update their certificate program course materials and train-the-trainer program development. The first of the two RFPs (Updating Course Materials, PDF) notes that the current training materials “are lacking in the area of social media techniques.” Which brings up a few [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere