The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) is hosting their first-ever summer fund drive.

From the announcement:

Since 2002, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation has served as a hub, a resource clearinghouse, and a facilitative leader for our dialogue and deliberation community. Together we have been the catalyst for extraordinary connection and progress across our field. NCDD is at a critical juncture, however, as foundation support has declined in recent years. We are turning to you to help ensure that NCDD remains viable and continues to serve these valuable roles.

The fundraising campaign is scheduled to go through August 10, 2011. The goal is to raise $10,000.

Intellitics has been an organizational member of NCDD since July 1, 2008 (prior to incorporation, actually). Being part of this network, we continue to benefit in many ways (and we don’t hesitate to say so).

We just gave $250, and so can you.

Looks like I never quite finished setting up the #edem IRC channel on Freenode last year, but with so many conferences and events coming up I thought I’d give it another try.

From the FAQ:

What is freenode about? Why is it here? freenode is a special-purpose, not a general-purpose, discussion network, currently implemented on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It exists to support specific communities. It provides an interactive environment for coordination and support of peer-directed projects, including those relating to free software and open source. Our aim is to help our participants to improve their communicative and collaborative skills and to maintain a friendly, efficient environment for project coordination and technical support. For more information about the network philosophy, please take a look here.

From the list of accepted on-topic use:

As a program of a not-for-profit entity, freenode was established to provide resources to specific communities for activities which advance the public good.

Among the categories considered to be “on-topic” they state that “non-geographical interest groups covering a variety of subjects may be on-topic.”

So, assuming that as a group of e-democracy and e-participations professionals and enthusiasts we would qualify, I’ve registered a new channel last night:

irc.freenode.net #edem

If you still use IRC, please stop by and check it out.

We’ll have our first coordinated group chat on Wednesday, May 4 at 2pm Central (3pm Eastern).

Having a persistent, real-time backchannel that goes beyond Twitter’s 140 characters should be especially useful around the many conferences and events that are happening globally and which the majority of us cannot attend in person.

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), in an effort to better cater to local member needs around the world, is currently making some changes to their governance model.  Part of this process will see the emergence of a new national organization in the US (until now, there were only a dozen or so local chapters).

I’m part of the transition team, and we just launched an interim website to keep members and the interested public informed about our progress:

http://iap2usa.wordpress.com

Please have a look, subscribe to our RSS or leave a comment of encouragement if you feel so inclined.

Things are still very much developing but if all goes well this should be exciting news for the public participation community here in the States.

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 face-to-face engagement with online engagement?”

NCDD is currently in the process of gathering “some of the best-of-the-best materials” to support the three topic areas the events will focus on (quality public engagement, online tools, collaborations that work). Here’s the forum thread regarding the question above if you’d like to check it out: Combining Online and Face-to-Face Engagement

Much to my disappointment, I wasn’t able to find any specific material about online/offline integration on our internal wiki (aside from a few very general tidbits which — unsurprisingly — seem to indicate we think favorably of the concept and would like to explore it further). That despite the fact that we’ve tossed this question around many times in the past and do have a few ideas as to what the app could do to make integration easier. Adding Web 2.0 insult to social software injury, my bookmark stream on Delicious came back empty as well, though I’m almost certain I’ve enjoyed reading about this topic elsewhere before.

I guess I’ll have to go back and try to dig up some of the sources I vaguely remember, but before I do that here is a list of ten things I’d probably look into first if I were in charge of online/offline integration for a standard public participation effort today. As an obvious disclaimer, any of these may have already been tried by someone during some project (please leave a comment if you are that person).

With that out of the way, here we go:

1. Start from the beginning: Make online/offline integration a core piece of your overall participation strategy (as with many things, success is probably much harder to achieve if the idea enters the project as an afterthought).
2. Use online to promote offline and vice versa: Think online event calendar or event notifications on your website or websites, and promotion of your various web properties at your face-to-face events, incl. hand-out materials.
3. Allow for each of the two channels to feed into each other: Post summaries/minutes of your face-to-face events online, make some time at the beginning or during an event or meeting to hear report-backs from online participants on how their part of the consultation is coming along. Live broadcasting (audio, video) of face-to-face events can be extremely valuable as well as a backchannel to allow for some level of remote participation.
4. Make your online content available offline: Many online consultations maintain a library for important documents and resources, some projects even allow the participants to add to this repository or express whether or not they find a particular resource helpful. In addition, participants are generally given the opportunity to create a lot of raw content (posts, comments, ideas etc.), and sometimes these are summarized and synthesized by a moderator or facilitator. To the extent it is reasonable, consider taking some of these materials to your face-to-face events. That obscure third-party impact study about the planned development in your neighborhood from two years ago that one online participant shared and that many others found highly valuable? Maybe a good candidate to share with your offline audience as well.
5. Identify the “bumble bees”: Ask participants to indicate if they plan to attend both online and in person and give them an opportunity to become ambassadors between the two channels. Their task can be quite simple: occasionally report back, generally help communicate between online and offline participants, help identify disconnects or gaps etc.
   (Note: for those unfamiliar with Open Space Technology, a Bumble Bee “moves from one group to another, cross-pollinating.”)
6. Get the media to attend both online and offline activities: As part of your regular media outreach, make sure the press is aware of your online activities and give them observer status. Furthermore, make sure they are comfortable using your online properties (e.g. discussion forum, idea generation tool etc.). Facilitate direct contact with online participants where appropriate (e.g. for interviews).
7. Bridge the digital divide: Ok, this is a tough one as digital divide issues can be hard to overcome. Don’t try to boil the ocean! Small things can have a positive impact and may be worth the extra effort. There are a number of things you can do to bring your online offerings closer to those people who don’t have access. Think partnering with public libraries or schools for computer access, installing kiosk systems at your face-to-face events etc.
   One particular idea we’re pursuing with Zilino is the ability for the facilitator to invite participants into the role of citizen reporter (if you will) and have them gather evidence (stories, ideas, concerns etc.) from people who lack online access or aren’t likely to participate at all (either online or offline).
8. Synchronize online and offline activities: Events done right — whether online or offline — can have huge drawing power. Orchestrate your overall activities in ways that link online and offline participation more tightly (e.g. an online discussion phase leading up to a face-to-face event, a face-to-face meeting designed as the kick-off for further dialogue online). In some instances, you might even consider running online and offline activities in parallel and allow for some level of exchange of content and ideas in real-time.
9. Encourage participants’ use of social media: Similar to item #3 above, social media can be a great way to enable participants help each other make sense of the process and share their findings. Luckily, there is a ton of material out there that explains how to do this kind of community building so I won’t go into detail here.
10. Encourage higher-bandwidth modes of communication: This all depends on the geographic realities one is dealing with, of course. Provided a large-enough group of online participants live in close proximity to each other, you could use your website to coordinate small groups to meet face-to-face (alternatively, a phone conference might do the trick). Just because someone can’t attend a public meeting at 5pm on a Thursday doesn’t mean they can’t meet their neighbors for coffee after church on Sunday. The web can be great at this kind of matchmaking and scheduling. You could take advantage of these ad-hoc gatherings by keeping a list of small group tasks handy or topics your participants ought to address. Or, leave it more open: simply provide them with a minimum amount of guidance (e.g. how to have a productive conversation) and let them focus purely on relationship building, something that may pay off immensely once they go back to engaging each other online.

Still reading? Here’s a bonus idea:

11. Ask your participants: Seriously, they are way smarter than you (often enough, at least). Let them help you figure out how to bridge online and offline in ways that work best for them.

And that’s it, ten pretty basic starting points to get going! Hopefully, this is enough of a collection to get the conversation started. Please leave a comment if you have feedback to share, more ideas to add or know of any interesting resources (confirming or contradicting anything I’ve said). Thanks!

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?

I was just playing around with Freenode IRC (trying to set up a permanent #edem channel), when I came across their channel guidelines. We’re still drafting our community ground rules for Zilino, and I found these very applicable:

Channel Guidelines

IRC is a low-bandwidth method of communication, in comparison with physical presence. Many of the cues of physical communication, tone of voice, facial expression, hand movements, etc., are missing in IRC, since only text is transmitted back and forth.

Speakers in physical proximity with each other communicate quite a bit of emotional context via this extra bandwidth. This context enables them to avoid misjudging the intent of their conversational partners. It also functions as an unconscious negative feedback mechanism to reduce the incidence of emotional “firestorms” which tend to disrupt the efficient flow of conversation. Human beings look for this feedback and indeed they may be designed to require it. In the low-bandwidth world of IRC, they must get emotional feedback via the text they receive.

This process is subject to exaggeration. Small amounts of emotion become magnified in the perception of the observer. So, it is very important to keep channels calm. An informal conceptual measurement of the emotional content of a channel is its “channel temperature.”

Think of a person’s emotional state as kinetic energy. Enthusiasm, happiness, anger, frustration, all add to the energy level. The more emotion is experienced, the “hotter” the participant. The average emotional state of a channel is its temperature. Emotions in IRC become exaggerated and conveying them directly increases channel temperature. Pent-up frustration, in particular, is often released as a series of inappropriate, “high energy” outbursts. An important objective of the freenode channel guidelines is to avoid “feedback loops” in channel interactions by reducing channel temperature.

The guidelines which follow are designed with the benefit of years of experience with IRC, beginning during the 1993-1994 period when the design limitations of IRC began to become clear due to the increasing scale of IRC networks. Adopting the guidelines will help improve the quality of your channel.

We intentionally avoid drawing a distinction between channel operators and users. Everyone is a user, regardless of their privilege level, and each user has the ability to influence the usability of the channel.

The site then goes on to list a few concrete recommendations. Here’s a selection:

• Polish your catalyst skills. The catalyst role is key to keeping channel interactions friendly and efficient.
• Look for the best in people. If you assume people have no self-control, they’ll confirm your belief. If you look for personal responsibility, and ask for personal responsibility, most people will respond well.
• Set a good example. Be what you want other people to be. If you want them to be calm, be calm. If you want them to be courteous and friendly, be courteous and friendy. The habitual behavior of people on a channel is the most powerful influence on newbies arriving on the channel.
• [...]
• Take critiques to private message. Criticizing someone’s behavior on channel holds them up to public scrutiny in a negative way. It’s usually overkill. In your messages, don’t address the subject of whether you have channel operator privileges; just be courteous. Request nicely that they change their behavior. In many cases you’ll discover that problem user you are dealing with is merely inexperienced. An aggressive tone makes for a longer and more involved discussion, and pent-up frustration which will raise the channel temperature sooner or later. You can always use channel operator privileges, or have someone else use them, as needed; but with a courteous tone, you’ll need to do that a lot less.

So, maybe not a complete blueprint but definitely good building blocks, for sure!

The concept of channel temperature or mood in online discussions is worth investigating further. Having a mechanism in place that indicates in real time when a conversation is in trouble could help improve the overall efficiency of allocating scarce facilitator resources.

As we’re gearing up for our trip to Seattle, WA to attend Open Gov West this Friday and Saturday, I saw Travis Kriplean on Twitter ask whether sessions will be recorded.

Here’s my plea:

I encourage every attendee to bring their audio, photo and video gear and help record as many sessions as possible. I find that often at events like this too much value is lost by not systematically capturing the great content that people put out. Not only is this quite unfortunate for attendees who have to decide between sessions that run in parallel. It’s even more of a bummer for anyone who can’t make it to the event in the first place or will find out about it after the fact.

Sometimes, not everyone will be comfortable with being recorded and that should be respected. However, most of the time, capturing the sessions (from taking and sharing notes to snapping a picture of the whiteboard, from audio to video to live streaming) does not hurt anyone. It isn’t that hard to do, it’s simply that somebody’s gotta do it.

So, in the spirit of sharing and in an effort to help spread the spirit of this conference wide and far, please pack your gear and volunteer to make the content available on the web somehow. People will thank you!

And by the way, in case you’re still undecided about attending, check out the kind of research the above-mentioned Travis, for example, is doing: he explores “the design of systems and processes that support more effective large-scale dialog”. Pretty interesting, right? Thought so. Can’t wait to catch up with him at the conference and maybe do a quick interview for This Week in Participation.

See you all in Seattle!

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).

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).

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

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.

If there was an award for most-overused term, I’m sure community would be a contender.

For future reference, here is one of the best definitions I’ve come across so far. It’s somewhat hidden in a blog post by Canada-based Myriam Laberge from a while back: Collaboration As A Living Emergent Co-Creative Process

A ‘community’ is created over time around shared purpose, language and meaning, and the development of shared values, reciprocity and mutual trust in the longer term from being and doing together.

Community doesn’t happen overnight. And it certainly doesn’t come out of the box with any online tool you might install.

An interesting relationship to point out is the one between community and participation. In my view:

• Participation often happens within or across existing communities
• Participation done right can have strong community-building effects
• Participation without the slightests levels of (a pre-existing) community fabric is difficult to imagine
• Especially for online participation, a lot of moderation and facilitation activities are often required that are commonly referred to as community management

Myriam will be in San Diego for the 2009 IAP2 annual conference next week, and I hope to get a chance to talk to her in more detail about this important interrelation.

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:

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.

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.

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.

I just joined a recently launched online community at epractice.eu, a portal created by the European Commission which connects practitioners from the e-government, e-participation, e-health etc. field from all across the European Union. It is “an interactive initiative that empowers its users to discuss and influence open government, policy-making and the way in which public administrations operate and deliver services.”

From the welcome message to their new eParticipation and eDemocracy Network:

Welcome to the eParticipation and eDemocracy Network

The eParticipation and eDemocracy Network is now open to all interested in issues such as eEngagement, eDeliberation, eInvolvement, eLegislation and eVoting, as well as eDecision, eRule and ePolicy-making. Despite this broad remit, however, these issues are all inter-related and contribute to new concepts and practices for the governance of our societies. Thus, it is also important not to see ‘e’ tools as separate from traditional democratic and participatory processes, for example there are potentially fundamental impacts on the relationships between representative and direct democracy. The community is an open platform for meeting and sharing experiences and knowledge, as well as for asking and providing support. It will encompass blog discussions, news items, good practices, promoting events and sharing documents and source material. It will also link to and help coordinate the various European Commission supported studies and projects directly relevant to eParticipation and eDemocracy. [...]

At Intellitics, that sounds like our cup of tea.

Already, a number of well-known European e-democracy practitioners and advocates have signed up. Given epractice.eu’s track record as a valuable resource in this field, I expect this community to get off to a great start.

Feel free to look me up. Look forward to insightful discussions and meeting great people.

This past weekend, Barcamp celebrated its 2-year anniversary at BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, CA.

For those who’ve never heard of the concept:

BarCamp is an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols.

From the BarCampBlock press release:

Who should be there? Anyone working on a new startup that wants to get some great feedback. Anyone looking for talent. Anyone talented looking for work. Anyone looking to invest in brilliant new ideas. Anyone looking to find partners for their brilliant new ideas. Anyone who wants to practice a presentation s/he is working on. Anyone who has a passion for blogging, wikis, design, coding and the web in general. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is encouraged to present. It’s totally free and an excellent source of what is hot, new and upcoming.

With a contribution of $100, Intellitics is a proud sponsor of BarCampBlock, long before we even incorporate. It’s our way of saying thank you to the many who — at previous barcamps or similar open events (and often without their knowing it) — have contributed so generously to the ideas we’re trying to implement. If you happen to have been at any one of these events and were involved in our discussions about civic participation and how to bring dialogue and deliberation to the web, this donation was for you:

• DCamp — May 12-13, 2006, Palo Alto, California
• WineCamp — May 26-28, 2006, Calaveras County, California
• Barcamp San Francisco — June 23-25, San Francisco, California
• Barcamp Stanford — August 25-27, 2006, Palo Alto, California
• Barcamp Berlin — September 29-October 1, 2006, Berlin, Germany
• Technology and Politics Camp — December 17, 2006, San Francisco California
• MeshWalk Palo Alto — July 25, 2007, Palo Alto, California
• BarCampBlock — August 18-19, 2007, Palo Alto, California

Yep, it’s all about giving back.

For more information about BarCampBlock, read the blogs, browse the pictures, or follow up on the session notes.