Archive for the 'Community' Category

NCDD on Twitter

Published by Tim on January 18, 2010 in Community and Resources. 4 Comments Tags: , .

Update (02/03/2010): There is now an official NCDD list at http://twitter.com/ncdd/ncddlist (already much more comprehensive than ours, so we recommend you follow it instead!)

* * *

And while we’re at it, why not create a list of Twitterers who are members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD)?

Here it is: @intellitics/ncdd

I had the distinct pleasure to attend NCDD’s past two conferences (in 2006 and 2008). It is an organization made up of so many great people, it’s truly amazing. So if you find following the conversations on Twitter worthwhile, consider supporting NCDD and become a member (at complete bargain rates, too, considering the value).

If you’d like to be added, just send me a direct message. Or leave a comment below in case I’m not following you yet (make sure to include your Twitter handle).

IAP2 on Twitter

Published by Tim on January 18, 2010 in Community and Resources. 4 Comments Tags: , .

Playing with Twitter’s (relatively) new list feature this morning, I’m putting together a list of Twitterers who are members of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2).

IAP2 is currently undergoing a member consultation about the future governance structure of the organization, and I find that following the discussion via people’s blogs and Twitter is always helpful.

There’s also a North America meeting in the works the last weekend of January in Phoenix, AZ and I expect some interesting tweets to come out of that.

Here’s the list: @intellitics/iap2

To be added to the list, simply send me a direct message. Or leave a comment below in case I’m not following you yet (make sure to include your Twitter handle).

IAP2 Kicks Off Global Member Engagement Process

Published by Tim on November 28, 2009 in Community and E-participation. 0 Comments Tags: .

This one should be worth keeping an eye on:

Starting today, the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) will be engaging its entire global membership base of more than 1,000 public participation experts in a three-months long consultation about the future of the organization.

From the president’s announcement email earlier today:

Dear Members,

I am very pleased to invite all IAP2 members to participate in our engagement process on the future organizational structure of our association.

The International Board is proposing that IAP2 move to a federation of affiliates. The Board believes that an organizational change is necessary to direct more focus on two critical functions: developing and advancing our practice at the international level, and extending our membership base and activity at a local level. After examining a number of options the federation of affiliates has emerged as the preferred model.

[...]

The Board is now seeking member input to confirm, or not, whether a federation of affiliates is the best way forward, and if so to assist with the decision making process about how it will function. [...]

All IAP2 members are encouraged to participate in this discussion on the overall structure of the association – those who are direct members of the international body and those who hold their membership with an affiliate, or both. We welcome questions, comments, suggestions and advice.

[...] In addition to the online forum there will be other opportunities for the conversation – in person for some chapters, or via webinar and teleconference.

This is the first time IAP2 has engaged all its members in a conversation of this magnitude. [...]

On behalf of the Board of Directors of IAP2 I look forward to hearing your voice in this vital conversation about our Association’s future.

Best

Dear Members,
I am very pleased to invite all IAP2 members to participate in our engagement process on the future organizational structure of our association.
The International Board is proposing that IAP2 move to a federation of affiliates. The Board believes that an organizational change is necessary to direct more focus on two critical functions: developing and advancing our practice at the international level, and extending our membership base and activity at a local level. After examining a number of options the federation of affiliates has emerged as the preferred model.
[...]
The Board is now seeking member input to confirm, or not, whether a federation of affiliates is the best way forward, and if so to assist with the decision making process about how it will function. [...]
All IAP2 members are encouraged to participate in this discussion on the overall structure of the association – those who are direct members of the international body and those who hold their membership with an affiliate, or both. We welcome questions, comments, suggestions and advice.
[...] In addition to the online forum there will be other opportunities for the conversation – in person for some chapters, or via webinar and teleconference.
This is the first time IAP2 has engaged all its members in a conversation of this magnitude. [...]
On behalf of the Board of Directors of IAP2 I look forward to hearing your voice in this vital conversation about our Association’s future.
Best

The board’s recommendation to adopt this new organizational structure was first presented during the annual general meeting at the 2009 IAP2 Annual Conference in San Diego, CA back in September.  During the meeting, it soon became clear that a fair number or members weren’t quite on board yet and may have even had some reservations about the proposed changes.  Out of these discussions, a broader engagement approach started to emerge.

The project’s main online forum is powered by Bang the Table, an Australian provider of online stakeholder engagement services.

Most if not all of the accompanying materials are publicly available, see for instance the Member Engagement Plan (PDF, 532 KB), which lists the objectives as follows:

Member Engagement Objectives:
(What do members and the Board need from this process?)

  1. All IAP2 members and chapter leaders have the information they need to understand the current challenges, the proposed federation model, and related governance issues.
  2. All IAP2 members worldwide are able to express their opinion on the proposal for a federation of affiliates (positive or negative), be involved in online discussions, provide ideas on how a new model could be implemented effectively in their area (if they are not already in an affiliate structure) and across the world, and offer alternatives if they do not support the federation model.
  3. Chapter leaders in North America are involved in specific online discussions (and possibly face-to-face) to consider how the affiliate model can best be implemented in their area/country, given their current leadership role and the tasks and support needed for implementation.
  4. The Board understands what members and chapter leaders think about the federation of affiliates, draws on member ideas for the details to put in place a federation of affiliates, knows what the members want from both the affiliate level and the International level, and in doing so, has the information it needs to make decisions.

At first glance, the project looks very well thought-out (as can be expected from this organization). It leaves considerable room for participants to self-organize (either face-to-face locally or online along some other line of shared interest), so as a nice side effect I look forward to getting to know a few fellow IAP2 members from around the world over the course of the next few months.

Quality Participation Doesn’t Waste Participants’ Time!

Published by Tim on June 2, 2009 in Community, E-participation and Events. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Over the past few days, the site that’s hosting the Open Government Brainstorm has been overrun with off-topic ideas and spam (most noticeably, there has been an avalanche of requests to “release President Obama’s birth certificate in order to prove his US citizenship”). See this snapshot of the tag cloud I took yesterday:

Open Government Brainstorm: Obama birth certificate spam attack

Steven Clift just posted an idea that suggests a tried-and-true way of how to better deal with this situation:

Move Off-Topic Submissions – Add an Out-of-Scope button to move off-topic posts to their own space

Since a few people seek to dominate any public space hosted by government regardless of the topic, re-establish some equity by allowing participants to flag submissions as “off-topic.” With 10 off-topic votes, instead of deleting such posts, simply move them to a proper tab for all *who wish to see* can view them. An online consultation should make engagement more efficient. The online consultation manager should be able to freeze this feature should a minority of users attempt to game the system by flagging clearly on topic posts as off-topic.

Why Is This Idea Important?

When government spends tax dollars (or lends their support to partners like NAPA) to host structured sessions to gather online input, it is a waste of resources if relatively few individuals seek to hijack the public space for their pet issue which is clearly off-topic from the promised theme or agenda. Such submissions should be channeled rather than deleted (which would be a potential violation of the first amendment in what appears to be a legally public forum).

Here’s the comment I left:

Leaving off-topic ideas and spam unmoderated also forces those participants who come to this site with a sincere intention to contribute to dig through layers and layers of unrelated material. This makes participating more cumbersome and a lot less productive (and less fun). Any convener of e-participation effort of this kind would be well advised to being more mindful of their participants’ precious time. In that sense, moderation and community management become a courtesy.

Aside from off-topic discussions and spam, I’ve also noticed an increased use of foul language, general rudeness, and name calling.

I’d argue that taking a hands-off approach to managing an e-participation effort such as the Open Government Brainstorm (especially in light of these spam attacks) is a violation of a couple of rules laid out in the Core Principles for Participation that were released a few weeks ago (see the  expanded text for reference). For example, the third principle advises to avoid “hostile, disrespectful or stilted conversations,” (which, of course, doesn’t usually happen on its own without any management).

In my view, it is the convener’s responsibility to design and manage a process, online or offline, that maximizes each participant’s chance of having an impact, and there’s a cost involved in not doing so: By tolerating abusive behavior and by allowing the quality of the conversation to degrade, a large portion of the participants’ overall time and effort (which in large-scale efforts such as this one can easily exceed tens if not hundreds of person months) will be spent on low-quality, low-impact activities (e.g. browsing duplicate entries) when the real opportunity lies in enabling participants to share the best they got.

Intellitics Is an eDemocracyCamp Sponsor (Again)

Published by Tim on February 27, 2009 in Community and Events. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In late 2007, I came up with the idea for eDemocracyCamp, a barcamp on e-democracy. One goal from the beginning was for it to be an open, participant-driven complement to the annual Politics Online Conference in Washington DC.

The first event took place on March 2, 2008 in Washington DC. About 70 or so people attended over the course of the day.

This year, we’re doing it again. Please join us for eDemocracyCamp2:

eDemocracyCamp is an unconference about e-democracy (using the internet to support democratic processes) with a particular focus on e-participation (using the internet to support public participation). The goal is to connect researchers, developers, practitioners, citizens and other enthusiasts for a day of intense collaboration and knowledge sharing. 

Like last year, Intellitics will contribute $100 towards funding the event. Not a huge sum, but even at this level it only takes a couple dozen sponsors in order to be able to provide for 100 attendees (and quite comfortably so). Please sign up on the wiki or leave a comment if your organization can chip in.

I’m making an extra effort this year to ensure that the sessions will be recorded so as to allow non-attendees to get a piece of the action, too.

By the way, the first time we sponsored a barcamp was back in 2007 when we supported BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, CA. As you can probably tell by now, we’re big fans of the format. It’s a great way to connect with people who share your passion, bounce off ideas, get feedback, learn and teach — all for the cost of showing up and participating in the sessions.

So go ahead and add your name to the wiki, share the event on Facebook or Upcoming, join the Google group, and — last but not least — follow @edemocracycamp on Twitter.

14 Facebook groups for the dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government and e-democracy community

Published by Tim on May 9, 2008 in Community and Resources. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

The following are a few Facebook groups we watch that deal with various aspects of dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government or e-democracy (membership numbers as of today):

  • C2D2 – Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (18 members)
    Community of interest on dialogue and deliberation. Conference held every two years.
  • Conversation Cafe (308 members)
    Conversation Cafes promote community, democracy and wisdom world-wide through generating millions of open, respectful public conversations.
  • e-democracy (346 members)
    For those interested in e-democracy, especially the efforts of E-Democracy.Org.
  • E-Demokratie.org (in German, 12 members)
    E-Government oder E-Verwaltung beschreiben die Darstellung von Regierungs- und Verwaltungshandeln. E-Government wird aber auch häufig synonym mit dem Begriff E-Demokratie (eDemocracy) verwendet. Im Detail muss dabei jedoch stark differenziert werden: so geht es bei E-Demokratie nicht nur um elektronisch gestütztes Regieren. Es geht um viel mehr, es geht um Legitimation, Partizipation und Öffentlichkeit.
  • ePractice.eu (97 members)
    epractice.eu is a good practice exchange scheme with a web portal, weekly newsletter, country factsheets, online library, practitioner profiles, events calendar and monthly workshops created by the European Commission for the professional community in eGovernment, e-Inclusion and eHealth. epractice.eu involves practitioners from all 27 Member States, EU-member candidate states and EFTA countries but others are welcome to join. The portal combines online activities with frequent offline exchanges: workshops, face-to-face meetings and public presentations. A large knowledge base of real-life case studies submitted by portal members is freely available. The Facebook extension is provided in order to bridge the gap between Facebook’s social and epractice.eu’s professional touch.
  • Everyday Democracy (53 members)
    Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center) is a national organization that helps local communities find ways for all kinds of people to think, talk and work together to solve problems. We work with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states, helping them pay particular attention to how racism and ethnic differences affect the problems they address.
  • Government 2.0 (205 members)
    A new governance construct is possible… Create it
  • I support participatory democracy! (395 members)
    This group is for people who believe that democracy only becomes meaningful when it involves its people in participatory decisionmaking processes.
  • ICT4Democracy (192 members)
    Gathering of citizens from across the world believing that Information and Communication Technologies can help in providing us with more and better democracy and are willing to do something about it … in their lifetime …
  • International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) (20 members)
    IAP2 is an association of members who seek to promote and improve the practice of public participation in relation to individuals, governments, institutions, and other entities that affect the public interest in nations throughout the world.
  • National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) (348 members)
    A group for those dedicated to solving tough problems with honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action. Join us if you agree with Einstein, that the problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
  • Participatory Budgeting (158 members)
    Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation of resources to more modest initiatives that confer voice during the development of the budget. This is a group for exchange of information among those interested in practices of participatory budgeting.
  • POLITECH INSTITUTE (European Center of Political Technologies) (112 members)
    POLITECH INSTITUTE is a not-for-profit international association (AISBL) and a European Center of Political Technologies located in Brussels, Capital of Europe, bridging public institutions, international institutions, governments, regional and local authorities, universities, research centers, think tanks, civil society and political leaders with technology actors for a better use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards the advancement of modern public governance and democracy.
  • The World Cafe (249 members)
    A group for practitioners of/people interested in the TWC.

Needless to say, most of these organizations maintain resource-heavy websites of their own.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but should give you a head start if you want to connect with people in this community via Facebook. If you happen to know of any additional Facebook groups in this area, feel free to leave a comment.