The Participation Company
Steven Clift just alerted me to a new report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government: A Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation (PDF), authored by Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University. I admit I haven’t fully read it yet, but a couple of issues jumped out that I wanted to point out really quick. 1) Terminology [...]
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My previous post on micro-participation included a definition of civic engagement that I hadn’t referenced before. According to Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, civic engagement can be defined as: Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern. I have [...]
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This is one of those posts that’s more of a mental note to myself than anything else. Don’t expect to learn anything new if you’re following these conversations already. Over on GovLoop, the difference between Government 2.0 and Open Government is being discussed (probably not for the first, much less for the last time). I [...]
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Regular readers of this blog are probably well aware that when it comes to describing the process of bringing stakeholders into an organization’s decision-making process with the goal of making better, more sustainable decisions, we prefer the term public participation. I have previously shared what I consider to be meaningful and well-established definitions (here, here). And while it [...]
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The following comparison of dialogue and debate seems to have first appeared in the Winter 1993 edition of Focus on Study Circles: The Newsletter of the Study Circles Resource Center (now Everyday Democracy). Thanks to the Wayback Machine’s vast internet archives, a snapshot from 2002 (?) is still available today: Comparison of Dialogue and Debate Dialogue is collaborative: [...]
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We already have one very good definition of public participation in the archives, but for comparison’s sake, here’s the official IAP2 definition as per their training material: IAP2 views public participation as any process that involves the public in problem solving or decision making and uses public input to make decisions. Public participation includes all [...]
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I came across this document from the National Democratic Institute (NDI): Civic Participation Terminology: A Guide to Frequently Used Terms and Phrases This Glossary is part of NDI’s growing library of publications that form the basis for the Institute’s efforts to create a new and precise lexicon to convey the concepts central to democracy and [...]
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The other day, I mentioned on Twitter how I sometimes wish there were a glossary of the key terms and definitions that guide our conversations around participation. With the Open Government Directive expected to be released within a few weeks, one challenge remains that people don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they discuss participation and [...]
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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 [...]
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Interesting article on BBC News regarding a list of 200 jargon terms recently “banned” by the UK-based Local Government Association (LGB): Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon, with “predictors of beaconicity” and “taxonomy” among the worst horrors. The Local Government Association says such words and phrases must be [...]
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The latest edition of the European Journal of ePractice is dedicated entirely to the topic of e-participation. One article contained a useful description of the term e-consultation (actual quote taken from the PDF download, 135 KB): E-consultations: New tools for civic engagement or facades for political correctness? 2) Defining e-consultations E-consultations constitute interactive “tell-us-what-you-think” on-line platforms where ordinary citizens, civic [...]
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In their FAQ, The Deliberative Democracy Consortium defines deliberation and deliberative democracy as follows: What is “deliberation”? Deliberation is an approach to decision-making in which citizens consider relevant facts from multiple points of view, converse with one another to think critically about options before them and enlarge their perspectives, opinions, and understandings. What is “deliberative democracy”? [...]
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I came across a fairly succinct definition of the term e-participation today that I find useful with regard to the things we are working on: In the context of current project, e-Participation means the use of ICT for enabling and strengthening citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. Depending on the aspect of democracy being promoted [...]
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Following a recent IAP2 Northern California chapter meeting, I came across this definition of public participation: What is Public Participation? Public participation is the process by which an organization consults with interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities before making a decision. Public participation is two-way communication and collaborative problem solving with the goal [...]
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Sandra S. Hodge, Ph.D. and Program Director Discovering Common Ground: Missouri Communities Deliberate at University of Missouri has a nice comparison chart that looks at the differences between debate and deliberation: Deliberation and Your Community: How to Convene and Moderate Local Public Forums Using Deliberative Decision-Making (training manual) (PDF, 1.1MB). The training manual is part [...]
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The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) provides a good definition of dialogue and deliberation, and describes how the two relate to each other: So what are dialogue and deliberation anyway? Dialogue is a process that allows people, usually in small groups, to share their perspectives and experiences with one another about difficult issues [...]
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According to Wikipedia: Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. … Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Politics consists of “social relations involving authority or power”. and refers to the regulation of a [...]
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