The Participation Company
Open Government through Participation: Designing Successful Online Consultations View more presentations from Intellitics, Inc. I had a lot of fun this morning presenting at the SXSW Future 15 session on Government and Technology. Thanks again to Julie Germany for the invitation. Ten minutes is not a lot of time to get into much detail though [...]
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This week saw an unexpected focus on wiki-based dialogue and deliberation. To round out the series, here’s a list of shortcomings or challenges I observed back in 2007/2008 when I was reviewing the examples listed yesterday. With regard to Politicopia (January 2007): One challenge I see with a pure wiki approach in this context is the fact that [...]
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About a week after I put out an open research request to help collect a list of participatory politicians, I remembered a post of mine from way back when that provides a great example of the kind of activity I’m looking for. This came up during the June 2005 ODDC face-to-face meeting on “Deepening Online Deliberation”, [...]
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It took a couple of attempts (see here, here), but now it looks like web-based public participation will finally get some exposure at SXSW this year. Here’s the announcement: Future15 Lineup for 2011: Shorter is Better At the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival, we launched a series of short-form panel content called Future15s. These fast-paced sessions proved [...]
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We know there are a lot of (online) tools for participation available today, and we find out about more examples of how they are being used almost every day. About three weeks ago, someone asked me if I knew of any politicians strongly committed to voter participation who “have started to use these techniques sincerely [...]
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This is the third part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation (part 1 dealt with Institutional Backing, part 2 with Advocacy and Leadership). Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis on e-participation. Establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance, such as e-participation processes (or public participation processes [...]
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Following up on my earlier post, I was trying to find out how exactly the Programme for Government online consultation had been announced when it launched. When evaluating consultations, a lot depends on the commitment the sponsoring organization has made, their promise to the public. I couldn’t find anything on the website (on a side note, it’s [...]
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Shortly after the newly-elected coalition government in the UK took office this past May, they launched a website that invited the public to comment on their Programme for Government (their policy agenda for the next few years). The site went live on May 20, 2010 and stayed open for feedback for about three weeks, during [...]
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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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I had heard of the DAD acronym before (decide, announce, defend) but was unaware of SCID until it came up during training last week. Here’s what SCID stands for: Solicit (ask stakeholders for input) Consider Ignore Decide Obviously, this is not good practice as it violates a number of public participation principles (mainly, you don’t ask [...]
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Late last week, a new consultation was announced in Europe: Digital Agenda: Commission launches consultation on net neutrality A consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality has been launched by the European Commission today. It covers such issues as whether internet providers should be allowed to adopt certain traffic management practices, prioritising [...]
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This is the second part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation. Part 1 was on Institutional Backing. Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis research. Some e-participation projects originate from within (or from outside) public institutions, but are not decided at the top. Initiators of [...]
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The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) just put out a request for proposals to update their certificate program course materials and train-the-trainer program development. The first of the two RFPs (Updating Course Materials, PDF) notes that the current training materials “are lacking in the area of social media techniques.” Which brings up a few [...]
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This post is part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation. Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis research. In deciding if and what kind of e-participation processes to initiate, it is important to consider not only the capacity available on the side of the host [...]
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Over the past few weeks, our student intern has been busy working on his final thesis. He’ll be sharing a series of discussion starters on the “contextual aspects of e-participation” here on this blog starting this week. Please have a look and make sure to give him feedback in the comments. Thanks!
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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 [...]
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It took us a while, but we’re finally in the process of launching the first alpha release of Zilino, our new web application for online consultations. Zilino allows organizations (private, non-profit, government etc.) to engage their people (members, citizens, residents, other constituents etc.) in problem solving and decision making. The prototype went live earlier in April [...]
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Following up on my list of ten things to monitor, I’ve started a thread on GovLoop: Monitoring and continuous evaluation of OpenGov forums Here’s my initial post: As part of my ongoing efforts to monitor the various feedback channels that have been launched as part of the Open Government Directive, I’ll be tracking some basic [...]
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Now that a whole lot of agency.gov/open websites are live and many agencies have indeed set up a ”mechanism for the public to [...] [p]rovide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan” it’s time to figure out what to watch out for over the coming weeks and months in order to evaluate the success of these initiatives. As [...]
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Jane McGonigal is a leading game designer and game researcher with an interest in public problem solving. I just learned about a new game she’s been working on and which I’ll write about shortly. As a preface to my upcoming post I wanted to briefly share this video of a talk she gave at the [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere