The Participation Company
Tom Atlee will be presenting at this week’s NCDD Confab Call. From his blog: I’ll be doing an online dialogue in the 2-hour National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Confab Call on Tuesday, January 17th at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Ben Roberts, a principal in both weDialogue and Occupy Café, will be facilitating the call [...]
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Via Alex Moll on Twitter, I just came across OpenGov.gr, the website for the Greek Open Government Initiative. From the English language version: Opengov.gr has been designed to serve the principles of transparency, deliberation, collaboration and accountability and includes three initiatives: Οpen calls for the recruitment of public administration officials. Top level and mid-level openings [...]
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In December, the White House issued a request for input regarding the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Their list of seven questions included one on e-participation. To jog your memory, here it is once again: What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and [...]
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Peter M. Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, just announced the arrival of a new book he has co-edited with Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication in the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds: “Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation [...]
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The Assembly of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) recently adopted recommendations regarding Agency Innovations in E-Rulemaking (PDF) after having reviewed the websites and e-rulemaking initiatives of 90 agencies. The Conference studied the websites and e-rulemaking initiatives of 90 agencies, each of which had reported completing an average of two or more rulemakings during each [...]
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As you know, the White House is asking for input on public participation best practices and metrics, including for e-participation. I’m informally pulling together a few fellow IAP2 USA members to discuss how we might want to answer the technology part. We might take this opportunity to kick off our community of practice around online [...]
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Earlier this summer, I happened to come across an excellent new article on online deliberation design. Now that it’s out of draft mode, I can finally share it here. Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence (PDF, final working version) by Todd Davies and Reid Chandler is currently in press and will appear as chapter 6 in [...]
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Back in September, when the United States released its U.S. Open Government National Action Plan (PDF), I listed the initiatives it contains in the area of public participation: Open Government Partnership: Public Participation in the US National Plan One item I found particularly appealing. Under ”New initiatives”, the plan states that the U.S. will: Develop Best Practices and Metrics [...]
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It’s been a little over two months since we last took a look at We The People adoption metrics. Lucas Cioffi, NCDD Board member, on Thursday attended a meeting on the Open Government Partnership (OGP), specifically the U.S. Action Plan. He was able to score the following metrics: White House Meeting on OpenGov Action Plan Of [...]
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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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Yesterday’s first look at We the People was cut short since the site was experiencing performance or maintenance issues. Today, it’s back online again. Time to continue our review. First, a few screenshots: More first impressions: Petition detail pages use infinite scrolling to expose list of people who have signed the petition (infinite scrolling allows users to [...]
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A couple of weeks ago, I shared a few questions related to the public participation aspects of the new We The People e-petition site. Earlier today, the White House went into some detail answering all six of them: What the People Want to Know About We the People In the same post, White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips [...]
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The newly-announced We The People e-petition initiative by the White House has been getting a lot of coverage (for example, see here, here, here, here, here). I spent Saturday reading through comment threads on various sites to look for additional feedback, criticisms and concerns related to the public participation process, some of which I’m listing [...]
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As was hinted at late Wednesday night, the White House yesterday announced a significant new Open Government initiative: online petitions! From the official announcement: Something exciting is coming to WhiteHouse.gov. It’s called We the People and it will significantly change how the public — you! — engage with the White House online. Our Constitution guarantees [...]
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There’s an interesting new book project launching in Europe, scheduled to come out next year: Sustainable eParticipation Here’s the introduction: In the past 5-10 years, eParticipation emerged as a novel theoretical and practical domain, and it will further characterise the policy agendas of most industrialised and developing countries in the near future. By eParticipation, we mean [...]
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For those who have been following the Give a Minute project (our coverage here, here, here), they just launched in New York City, NY under a new name, Change by Us. According to the blog, a beta version had already launched back in April. The about page explains the site’s focus: users can share ideas, join or create [...]
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Catching up on tons of good stuff in my feed reader, I just came across a publication by the Knight Foundation that was released earlier this month: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks In the full report, I found an interesting tidbit about the recent Give A Minute Chicago project (emphasis mine): “An [...]
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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 [...]
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Next week, e-participation folks will gather in Krems, Austria for this year’s Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM11). The conference is hosted by Danube University Krems’s Center for E-Government and “brings together e-democracy, e-participation, e-voting and open government specialists working in academia, politics, government and businesses”. A number of sessions look quite interesting, for example: [...]
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Last week, Dave Briggs, a long-time commentator at the intersection of government and technology and recently the founder of UK-based Kind of Digital, kicked off what has turned out to be a very productive discussion: The need for micro-participation (that’s the original blog post, though the majority of comments seem to have come in via Govloop). From [...]
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