The good people at Etalab, the French Prime Minister's task force on open government and open data, are doing interesting work, and I'm thrilled to be speaking at an informal meetup they're hosting at the Easter-egg office in Paris, France this coming Monday, July 4: Mapping digital engagement tools 7.00 to 9.00pm Easter Eggs 44/46, rue [...]
I'll be spending the day in Brussels, Belgium this coming Thursday, June 30 and look forward to attending the local EU Tweetup in the evening: #EUtweetup Brussels – Thursday, 30 June 2016 – Holyrood meets Brussels About the event: ‘EU tweetups’ are informal pub nights about EU politics. They are relaxed friendly gatherings of people [...]
The 7th International Conference on eParticipation (ePart 2015) is currently under way in Thessaloniki, Greece. Topic areas include: eParticipation and social media, deliberation and consultation, evaluation, and policy formulation and modeling. A number of interesting papers are being presented. Here's one co-authored by Todd Davies (mentioned here): Equality of Participation Online Versus Face to Face: Condensed Analysis of the Community [...]
Via the #worktogether15 stream coming live from Participation Week, I found this 2014 e-participation toolkit (PDF) by the Scottish Health Council. The toolkit is part of a comprehensive collection of resources on public participation, incl. a set of public participation standards and a couple of assessment reports from previous years. The toolkit recaps a number of commonly referenced pros and cons of [...]
The Directorate for Local Government and Communities in Scotland kicks off a weeklong event series today that aims to explore what a more people-centric and participatory government might look like. From Eventbrite: Participation Week is a chance for all of us involved in public services to learn together about how we involve people more in the development [...]
Today is European E-Participation Day! From the e-uropa website: About E-Participation is citizens’ participation in policies and policy-making through the help of ICT tools – e.g. signing an online petition for saving a forest or commenting on your mayor’s proposal to renovate a school. Many people don’t know that these online tools exist. We want [...]
Discuto is a new web-based service out of Austria that supports document-centric discussion and decision making (for more, read their beta launch announcement from December 2013). Over on their blog, John May shared a curious little formula right before the holidays: Measuring the Efficiency of Consultation, Participation and Engagement One thing is certain: there is [...]
Gütersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann Stiftung today released a new study on public participation in Germany, which shows increasing citizen demand for various types of participatory processes and which confirms a number of ways public participation yields positive impact (pages 4-5, in German): Vielfältige Demokratie: Kernergebnisse der Studie „Partizipation im Wandel – Unsere Demokratie zwischen Wählen, Mitmachen [...]
GovCamp, an annual unconference on all things (local) government, has been going strong in the UK and elsewhere in the world for several years now. Last week, Dave Briggs suggested to add a virtual edition. From the blog post: I’d like to propose VirtualGovCamp. [...] It will be an online event, lasting a month – [...]
Last July, UK-based Nesta launched Europe Commons as part of their Code for Europe activities, a site aimed at becoming "[t]he best place to find civic tech apps and services for better cities across Europe (the domain europecommons.org now redirects, see snapshot on Archive.org). From the blog announcement: Europe Commons is a new marketplace for [...]