The Participation Company
Like last year, the vast majority of session proposals for SXSW ’11 in the Open Government category seem to focus on transparency and open data. Here are five sessions that look interesting from a participation perspective (including ours, of course): Social Powered Community Planning – How Now Open Government through Participation: Designing Successful Online Consultations [...]
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Three interesting threads to highlight this week: For the second time, NCDD ran a “featured member” post and attracted a few good questions and answers: Today’s Featured NCDD Member: Healthy Democracy Oregon Over on the NCDD Forum, Matt Leighninger asks (great discussion, to be continued): Better to convene, or to aggregate? (and how?) My own [...]
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Over the past few weeks, Melbourne, Australia-based Ron Lubensky has written an series of posts explaining the concept of a Citizens’ Assembly and defending it against unfounded criticism: July 23, 2010: Open letter to Julia Gillard, Prime Minister July 26, 2010: Assembled citizens make sense July 26, 2010: Another good op-ed supporting Citizens’ Assembly about [...]
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Reading up on the Knight Foundation’s Technology for Engagement Inititative as they’ve just announced their first round of five projects to receive funding, I came across Boston, MA-based Engagement Game Lab. From their mission statement: The Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College is devoted to forging a place for games in urban civic life. The [...]
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In preparation for the upcoming series of NCDD 2010 Regional Events (including the one right here in the Bay Area, October 29), Sandy Heierbacher (Director, NCDD) has asked for input on a question I know has been on the minds of many in the NCDD community for the past few years: “How can we best meld/combine [...]
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I had the distinct pleasure to attend all five days of IAP2′s Certificate Training Course in Public Participation last month (check their training calendar for upcoming training opportunities in your area). As I mentioned at the time, it was time well spent! As per the training materials, here’s what the three training units encompass: Planning [...]
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Just a few threads to point to this week, a couple of which prompted me to highlight IAP2′s core values and code of ethics: Andrea di Maio covers a report by The Guardian on Programme for Government, I point out that this was not crowdsourcing and reiterate the list of possible reasons why this effort failed [...]
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This is the third part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation (part 1 dealt with Institutional Backing, part 2 with Advocacy and Leadership). Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis on e-participation. Establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance, such as e-participation processes (or public participation processes [...]
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As is the tradition with South by South West, they do a great job of allowing the community to help design the conference program. Their famous Panel Picker application went live this morning, and this is the session proposal we submitted: Open Government through Participation: Designing Successful Online Consultations Public participation—the process of engaging citizens and stakeholders [...]
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Last week, San Francisco saw the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, a five-day international event that included the two-day U.S. Conference on Initiative and Referendum. Due to scheduling conflicts, I was only able to attend on two days and not for very long but made a few good connections nonetheless. The San Francisco [...]
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Via the NCDD mailing list, I was just alerted to this upcoming conference. Looks interesting! Reinventing Governance Conference A conference to promote new forms of collaboration among community, business, and governmental leaders through engaged dialogue and case-study analysis. University of Colorado and the Millennium Harvest House Boulder, Colorado October 8-10, 2010 Reinventing Governance will challenge people to [...]
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Following up on my earlier post, I was trying to find out how exactly the Programme for Government online consultation had been announced when it launched. When evaluating consultations, a lot depends on the commitment the sponsoring organization has made, their promise to the public. I couldn’t find anything on the website (on a side note, it’s [...]
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Beth Offenbacker of Public Decisions just announced they will be hosting a weekly Twitter chat on public engagement, starting two weeks from now: Starting on Tuesday, August 17, PublicDecisions will begin hosting a weekly Twitter chat from 18:00-19:00 Eastern (New York) / 22:00-23:00 GMT on topics related to public engagement. (Check your respective time zone [...]
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It seems the topic of ethics and integrity in public participation is coming up more often these days (see my comments here, here). Just for the record, these are the rules by which we at Intellitics abide. First, we have IAP2′s Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation: Public participation is based on the belief [...]
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Shortly after the newly-elected coalition government in the UK took office this past May, they launched a website that invited the public to comment on their Programme for Government (their policy agenda for the next few years). The site went live on May 20, 2010 and stayed open for feedback for about three weeks, during [...]
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