Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
In what is turning out to be a truly fun excercise, This Week in Participation (our new little internet radio show) has meanwhile cranked out a couple more episodes:
Both sessions came in at under 20 minutes each and together make for a nice follow-up to a lot of posts on this blog. If you’ve been reading here over the past year, you should enjoy the insights shared by both our guests.
Looks like I finally get to attend one of the many events on Gov 2.0 and Open Government:
The greater Northwest and Cascadia region is buzzing with innovative technology and civic engagement organizations, and a number of governments throughout the area have already launched open government directives. Hosted by the City of Seattle and Knowledge as Power, Open Gov West is bringing these leaders together to facilitate regional collaboration and share best practices across open government initiatives. Join us March 26 & 27 at Seattle City Hall!
The two-day event follows a hybrid format: day 1 will be a traditional conference, day 2 an unconference “with a spine of pre-determined topics”.
It’ll be my first time in Seattle, and there are plans under way for an NCDD dinner (watch their listserv for updates) as well as a get-together of local IAP2 members.
If you’re involved with NCDD or IAP2, please consider attending the conference. The thing about most of these Gov 2.0/OpenGov/Transparency etc. conferences and unconferences lately is that the public participation community is usually not very well represented. So this is a great (and inexpensive) opportunity to increase mindshare for this field. It would be great to see a few participation veterans turn out so we can maybe do a session together.
In other exciting news, I’ll be accompanied by our newly hired student intern from Germany. We’ll properly introduce him once he arrives in the Bay Area later this week.
Should be a fun trip!
And now for something fun: talking about participation — more often, with more people, and in ways that allow more people to tune in.
That’s the idea behind This Week in Participation (TWiP), a new program we just launched. Here’s what it’s about:
This Week in Participation (TWiP) is kind of like an internet radio show. Except it doesn’t follow a fixed schedule, isn’t always live and may include video.
We’re still in the middle of setting up all the pieces but you can check out the newly-launched blog here. The first episode went live last night: TWiP 1: Urgent Evoke
We’ll start out with a series of short, pre-recorded interviews but plan to add longer, more interactive live shows down the road (and probably video as well). The goal for now is to produce at least one episode per week.
From the website:
30 June – 2 July, 2010
Leeds University Business School, UKThe 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 of academic and applied backgrounds to provide a unique opportunity to better understand the notion of deliberation in a virtual environment and to discuss specific advances in online deliberation from a number of different disciplinary perspectives.
The conference is aimed at those who wish to update themselves on recent developments in online deliberation, understand how other groups are applying the tools and techniques and exchange ideas with leading international experts.
OD2010 follows the traditions of previous high-level scientific conferences. It is organized by key experts in the field and is supported by a multidisciplinary programme committee. This is the first time the conference has been held outside the USA.
The fourth OD conference focuses on, but is not limited to, the following topics:
- current research on online deliberation;
- research challenges which deliberation, and in particular online deliberation, pose for researchers, governments, communities and citizens;
- socio-technical design of online deliberative spaces;
- links between theories of deliberative democracy with experience with online deliberation;
- descriptions of tools and techniques that are already being tested or fielded;
- deliberative platforms using novel or unusual settings, technology or approaches;
- experiences and findings related to relevant technological theories (such as Web 2.0) and/or relevant social theories of deliberation and governance (such as public sphere, government 2.0 and civic intelligence); and
- case studies in applying and evaluating online deliberation in various formal and informal engagement domains.
Lots of deliberation heavyweights are involved. The final conference program is still forthcoming at this point.
I was able to spend a few hours at Tools for Participation, the 2008 conference, and enjoyed it greatly. Definitely check out this one!
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: 13,747
Users: 3,898
Growth is pretty linear, nothing too surprising happening (yet). At the very least, it seems that some agencies are slowly making progress with their outreach efforts.
The total numbers include active and inactive agencies alike. For comparison, here’s the same chart for NASA, the agency with the most overall activity (by our measurements):
Ideas: 122
Comments: 428
Votes: 2,453
Users: 340
It’s a bit hard to see but the last two days have seen a significant increase in registered users and votes.
There are more than three weeks left. Plenty of time to double or triple these figures.
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 Consumer Focus England, we are seeking to develop an equation for identifying costs and benefits associated with public engagement structures and processes. The proposed equation will be a practical tool, aimed at public sector workers who wish to make the case for effective engagement by exploring and quantifying the costs and benefits. It will also help authorities, civil society and the public to identify when public engagement is an effective use of public money. We need to work with public sector organisations to test our equation, in order to ensure it is useful and that it is able to be applied in a variety of circumstances.
[...]
Specifically we are looking for case studies which:
- Can demonstrate some tangible improvements in service outcomes as a result of the engagement, for example reduced crime levels, improved health outcomes, lowered bureaucratic requirements, or more targeted spending.
- Have some understanding of the costs and benefits of the exercise
- Includes some element of engaging with members of the public
- Occurred within the last twelve months
We are also interested in looking at examples which engaged people in issues around cuts in expenditure.
I look forward to their findings. In the spirit of moving this entire field forward, please make sure to make your cold, hard ROI data available.
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