The Participation Company
In the second chapter from his upcoming book, Tom Atlee picks up the topic of learning in deliberation, something he has written about previously. It’s a thorny issue and generally applies to public participation as well. One problem, as I see it, is that quality deliberation requires informed participants, but properly framing the issue and creating the [...]
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Early on during the Expertnet consultation last year, I shared the following (sadly, the Expertnet wiki is locked due to its paid subscription having expired, but Google still has most of it cached): re: Notifying Experts tbonnema Dec 18, 2010 12:43 am It looks like ExpertNet is trying to solve at least two distinct problems: [...]
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I’m quoted in the Economist today: Government by (all) the people [...] Successful examples of legislation by the masses are rare. Most people don’t know how to write laws. Tim Bonnemann, the founder of Intellitics, an American firm specialising in public-participation tools, says a better method is to canvas views widely but use a small [...]
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When Give a Minute launched in Chicago back in November, I asked what impact participants would have. This recent article in Fast Company’s Co.Design seems to confirm my doubts: Looking for Bold Ideas to Fix the City, New York Turns to Crowd Sourcing In Chicago, the project, which ran from the end of November through [...]
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Peter Levine wonders whether we could “crowdsource civic renewal” and in his post shares a couple of key observations that relate to the crowdsourcing of policy, its challenges and the need for deliberation instead (emphasis mine): At first national meeting of the Coffee Party, in Louisville, KY, the legal scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig electrified the [...]
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Give a Minute Chicago is a new web and mobile application that asks citizens in the greater Chicago area to submit ideas about what would encourage them to walk, bike or take public transportation more often. Here’s how CEOs for Cities, initiators behind this project, announced it on their website earlier this month: Give a Minute for [...]
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Looks like the Citizen Participation Platform, an idea introduced by the UK Conservative party during the campaign there earlier this year, won’t happen anytime soon. According to this report in The Guardian: [...] But another ambitious idea about how best to harness the power of the internet has also been dropped. The Tories announced a competition last [...]
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This year’s Future Democracy ’10 will address the issue of crowdsourcing in policy making, among other things. From the latest bulletin: The question of whether ‘crowdsourcing’ techniques – inviting open online comment from the public – are a meaningful way to develop government policy is one of the main topics of debate at this year’s [...]
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From an otherwise interesting post on Govfresh last week about the use of contests in citizen engagement: Collaborative innovation in open government: Is there an app for that? Could contests help us realize the vision of participatory democracy outlined by Thomas Jefferson, where citizens collaborate with government to solve the nation’s most difficult problems? The White [...]
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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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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: TWiP 2: Crowdstorming TWiP 3: Crowdsourcing in Urban Planning Both sessions came in at under 20 minutes each and together make for a nice follow-up to [...]
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Last week, Federal Computer Week published an op-ed they had invited me to write on the issue of crowdsourcing, public participation and how the former might be applied in the context of the latter: The outer limits to the crowd’s wisdom If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that this is something [...]
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This post is not a deep dive into the definition of crowdsourcing but rather a quick mental note for myself. Jeff Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing back in 2006, offers this “white paper version” of a definition in the sidebar of his blog: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a [...]
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Richard Fahey has a detailed post up about an interesting crowdsourcing idea that has been proposed by the Conservative Party in the UK: £1m prize for citizen participation platform Earlier this week the UK Conservative party promised to offer a £1m cash prize to a person or team that creates an online platform that can be [...]
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As I noted last week, I see widespread confusion around some of the key terms in the conversation about government 2.0 in general and participation in particular: public participation, crowdsourcing and “the wisdom of the crowds” — unless I am terribly mistaken, the three don’t mean the same thing and hence should not be used [...]
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David Wilcox reports on a talk Clay Shirky gave at the London School of Economics this past week about collective action in a political context and some of the discussions that have since ensued: Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise Clay Shirky, leading commentator on internet technologies and author of Here Comes Everybody, last night backed away [...]
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