The Participation Company
As was already mentioned at last week’s Open Government Directive Workshop event in DC (see video, starts at around 1:14:20), the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced it will offer IdeaScale to federal agencies free of charge in order to help them comply with the tight deadlines presented in the Open Government Directive. From the press release: [...]
{ 6 comments }
Via Twitter today, I came across a new online consultation by the City of Los Angeles: Los Angeles Budget Challenge How will you balance the City’s budget? The Mayor of the City of Los Angeles is given the responsibility by the City Charter to evelop a budget plan that must be presented for City Council [...]
{ 11 comments }
Here’s one reason why I believe Google Wave (or whatever similar service will emerge in the future) holds a lot of potential for the world of e-participation: As Bengt Feil outlined in his excellent interim summary of our e-participation wave, one potential application for using Wave are small-group online dialogues or deliberations. On the web, [...]
{ 4 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
Steven Clift points to this public notice by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Comment Sought On Moving Toward A Digital Democracy (PDF, 172 KB) From the introduction (emphasis mine): In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), Congress directed the Commission, in its development of a National Broadband Plan, to include “a [...]
{ 2 comments }
Over on the recently re-launched Ascentum blog, Joseph Peters (Partner at Ascentum) and Joe Goldman (Vice President of Citizen Engagement at AmericaSpeaks) just published a neat list of ten key questions to consider before launching an online public consultation: Open Policy Making 101: 10 Questions To Ask Before Launching Your Online Public Consultation 1. What do you want [...]
{ 0 comments }
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may well be one of the leading government agencies in the world when it comes to public participation. Their public engagement site offers a plethora of useful information including tools, definitions, case studies and much more. Their Public Involvement Network News electronic newsletter is another great resource. A feature article in [...]
{ 2 comments }
Probably the most memorable presentation at the 2007 Community Next conference in Stanford was “The Patent-Pending skinnyCorp Method for Creating Online Awesomeness and Other Cool Stuff” by Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of skinnyCorp, makers of Threadless and other entertaining projects large and small. As Kalmikoff pointed out in one of the stories they shared [...]
{ 4 comments }
In preparation for our potential panel at SXSW 2010 and in an effort to give people a better understanding what our topic is all about, I’m putting together a mini series of posts around some of the recommendations we plan to share. This post is the second part of this series and addresses the importance [...]
{ 3 comments }
I just came across this project today (a sure sign I need to refactor my RSS reading habits). From their about page: Background Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry declaration. We feel the [...]
{ 0 comments }
In preparation for our potential panel at SXSW 2010 and in an effort to give people a better understanding what our topic is all about, I’m putting together a mini series of posts around some of the recommendations we plan to share. This post is the first part of this series and addresses the importance [...]
{ 7 comments }
The deadline to submit session ideas for SXSW ’10 has been extended through Sunday, July 12 (midnight Austin, TX time). Over the past few days, I have had a number of interesting conversations here at No Better Time about how the Open Government Initiative could have been improved. I have a hunch that a significant level [...]
{ 4 comments }
On Monday night, the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Northern California chapter hosted a Mini-Symposium on “The Future of Public Participation” in San Francisco, CA. I had been asked to give a brief talk about social media in public participation. Having recently spent a considerable amount of time and effort monitoring and tracking various e-participation [...]
{ 2 comments }
Phase 2 of the Open Government Dialogue has been under way for almost a week now. Following the brainstorm phase, which ran from May 22 through May 28 (see our coverage here, here and here), this discusson phase was launched June 3 and is being hosted by the Office for Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). The tool [...]
{ 3 comments }
The White House Office of Public Engagement just shared in an email the agenda for the phase 2 discussion about citizen participation, which is scheduled to start Wednesday, June 10 over on the OSTP blog: As we wrap up the transparency conversation with a final posting about information access and the Freedom of Information Act tomorrow, [...]
{ 0 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
As mentioned a few days ago, the past week saw the first round of the Open Government Dialogue, a three-phased e-participation initiative launched by the White House that aims to gather public input for the crafting of the Open Government Directive. From their May 21 announcement: Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for [...]
{ 5 comments }
44: The Obama Presidency, one of the Washington Post’s blogs, today came out with a new monthly feature where they’ll have a group of five experts (for today, that’s Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, Jon Henke, and David Weinberger) examine the new WhiteHouse.gov website: Grading WhiteHouse.gov Excerpt: For all the innovations of Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov — yesterday, officials [...]
{ 2 comments }
Over the past few weeks, there has been an interesting discussion over on the main NCDD discussion list about “pseudo-dialogue” and “pseudo-civic engagement” and the need for some sort of quality assurance guidelines for the public participation efforts that the new administration is bound to undertake. The discussion touches upon many principles and critical success factors [...]
{ 11 comments }
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 [...]
{ 3 comments }
Conversations Elsewhere