Possibly not of global relevance (yet), but since it is my home town I thought I’d give it a quick shout-out:

Earlier today, Offenes Köln (Open Cologne) was officially announced. It’s a grassroots project by Marian Steinbach in Cologne, Germany that aims to make information, documents and data related to local government available (and accessible) to the general public by way of aggregating, enhancing and presenting government information from various sources from the “Ratsinformationssystem” (city council information system), the official platform of the City of Cologne.

Open Cologne appears to have been inspired by Frankfurt Gestalten, whose creator Christian Kreutz I interviewed a while back.

In light of the recent call for input regarding public participation best practices, it’s always interesting to compare how that question is being answered abroad.

Here’s a 2010 document by Planning Aid England, which is part of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the UK’s “leading planning body for spatial, sustainable, integrative and inclusive planning”: Good Practice Guide to Public Engagement in Development Schemes (PDF)

For developers, communities and decision makers, one of the biggest challenges in taking forward a development scheme is to ensure that public engagement is undertaken in a way which is meaningful, inclusive and brings benefits for all involved.

This guide is intended to provide practical advice for all those involved in public engagement in development schemes which require planning consent. It is illustrated by real examples of good practice and provides information and assistance to those planning, engaging in, or assessing community consultation.

The guide lists the following eight principles:

• Research and analysis – explore the context, history, different communities and groups in the area who may affected. Identify what will motivate people, what else is happening in the area, establish if it is connected and if so consider the potential to share events. Establish the goals – what are the benefits of engaging with communities and how will these be realised?
• Learn from the process – identify what people think of the way the consultation has worked. What could be done better, what else needs to be done, was it a balanced and inclusive process. Identify the lessons learned and take these forward into other projects.
• Continuing to engage – Has feedback been given and how will the relationships developed be continued into the construction and operational phases of a development project?
• Monitor and evaluate – monitor engagement and use the results to identify gaps and inform actions to widen the process and ensure a balanced community response is achieved. Consider the comments received and how they can be taken into account in the design – is further engagement required?
• Relationship building, knowledge and skills – develop links with key groups and individuals who can assist and advise on what matters in the area. Consider how existing community groups, networks and representatives might be involved, what barriers might exist and what help might be needed to build the capacity to engage.
• Communications – ensure that the information provided is clear, accessible and sufficient to tell people what they want to know, and to allow them to decide whether to engage. Be clear about what is fixed and why, and what is ‘up for debate’. Check that mechanisms are in place to allow information to flow in all directions and that response dates are clear.
• Timing – be realistic, allow sufficient time to achieve the goals set at the start. Provide a clear timetable for the project identifying consultation opportunities. Ensure engagement takes place when things can be changed and when it is cost effective to do so. Allow sufficient time for considered and informed response. How and when will feedback be provided?
• Inclusive – ensure under represented individuals and groups are included and that they have an equal opportunity to be heard. Be clear when making changes that these do not respond to a vociferous minority but are a response to a wider community view.

The “Delivering Good Practice” FAQ at the end seems quite useful, too, to help market public participation to planners, developers and the public.

The guide has been endorsed by IAP2 UK/Ireland.

Hat tip: IAP2 via Twitter.

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 in the public sector are available on the Internet. Applications are submitted on-line using a platform available on the opengov.gr website. See the latest Open Calls here (in Greek).

Electronic deliberation. Almost every piece of draft legislation or even policy initiative by the government, are posted in a blog like platform prior to their submission to parliament. Citizens and organisations can post their comments, suggestions and criticisms article-by-article. See the latest Electronic deliberations here (in Greek).

Labs OpenGov. An open innovation initiative that brings together ideas and proposals from citizens, the public and the private sectors. Labs.OpenGov.gr attempts to release the power of decentralised knowledge and explore new ways to tackle modern public administration problems. See the latest Labs events here (in Greek).

The online deliberation site runs on WordPress using at least one plugin (for up-or-down voting).

A couple of screenshots below (using Google Translate).

This particular “Public Consultation on the creation of new corporate structure” ran from November 22 through December 7, 2011. Two documents related to the consultation are available for download (PDF). The results are available for download as well (Excel) and include the list of full-text comments including number of positive and negative votes received.

If any of our Greek readers familiar with this site could share some additional information, that would be great. For example, how popular is this offering? How are comments being processed? The usual stuff. Ευχαριστώ!

Here’s another interesting conference that touches upon participation and technology: Social Cities of Tomorrow, February 17, 2012 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. From their background page:

A new take on community and participation models

Our focus on collective issues, resource management and governance does not mean that we simply follow in the footsteps of community or participation models, which have been around for a long time. Community approaches envision a tight sense of togetherness rooted in physical or virtual locality. Most city dwellers however firmly reject small-town parochialism. Besides, complex urban issues often transcend purely local interests. ‘Participation’ on the other hand is a term that is usually associated with the top-down approaches of urban policy: citizens are expected to ‘participate’ in the structures that urban institutions deem right for them.

In Social Cities of Tomorrow these classic paradigms are recombined in a ‘flat’ networked approach to engagement with urban life through digital technologies and culture. The advent of digital media technologies in the urban sphere offers opportunities to organise citizen engagement neither in local bottom-up fashion, nor in institutionalised top-down fashion, but in peer-to-peer distributed ways. This reconciles individual and collective action, local bottom-up and top-down organisation, and commercial, educational, civic and governmental initiatives.

This is a conversation we’ll likely see more of over the coming years. I won’t be able to attend in person but judging by their already quite active #socialcities Twitter stream it looks like there should be plenty of coverage. Added to the list!

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:

• Axel Bruns: Towards Distributed Citizen Participation
• Rebecca Schild: Engaging Policy Communities Online?
• Manuel J. Kripp: Electronic Decision making: bridging e-participation and e-voting
• Noella Edelmann and Peter Parycek: Collaborative Behaviours in E-participation

Sadly, I won’t be able to attend, but I certainly hope to follow the event remotely (as much as that’s possible). Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the Digital Government & Society blog
• Follow @e_society on Twitter
• Watch the #cedem hashtag

That’s a great start, of course, but I sometimes wish these niche conferences made remote attendance a core part of their offering. It would be great to get timely access to the slides, any audio or video recordings or better yet live audio or video. A kind of backchannel (chat room) to meet and mingle with attendees would be very useful as well.

Meine-Demokratie.de (German for my democracy) is a new directory of participation opportunities in Germany that launched a few days ago. The much-anticipated project describes itself as a central information hub for opportunities for political participation and allows users to find information about nearby projects and ways to participate.

From the about page (translation mine):

meine-demokratie.de – The democracy search engine

Democracy requires participations. However, participation requires visibility. There is no shortage of participation projects in Germany, but very often their discoverability is lacking. The result: citizens are oftentimes unaware of the many opportunities to participate that exist around them.

In order to change this, Netzdemokraten e.V. have launched the meine-demokratie.de platform. Their goal: to make democracy visible — by way of a geo data-driven search engine. The idea: users search for their city or zip code , and a map displays where and how they can participate in their area. [...]

[...]

meine-demokratie.de considers all forms of participation relevant, whether direct or indirect. This includes traditional forms of political participation, e.g. elections or planning processes, but also more informal forms such as demonstrations or citizen dialogues.

Here’s a screenshot of the homepage:

The site pulls in data from a variety of sources, including buergerhaushalt.org, another German site that tracks participatory budgeting efforts across the country. A separate form allows projects to be added manually.

Users can search by city or zip code or use the map to locate projects as well as filter by project type (e.g. participatory budget, petition, demonstration). A nice little bonus, the map includes information about German members of parliament (Bundestag).

As I wrote at the beginning of the year, Open Government needs public participation calendars. I truly hope meine-demokratie.de takes off as it is the closest realization of that vision I have seen to date (a comparable project in the UK seems to have stalled). Who knows, maybe now someone will finally build something similar for the US.

The European Institute for Public Participation (EIPP), a Bremen, Germany-based not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote better decision-making through public participation, just shared a new paper titled Making citizens’ voices heard — and listened to. Thoughts on public participation in Europe (PDF).

I found this definition of public participation useful (page 3/4):

Public participation, thus, is the deliberative process by which interested or affected citizens, civil society organizations, and government actors are involved in policy-making before a political decision is taken. It is collaborative problem-solving with the goal of achieving more legitimate policies.

Authors Patrizia Nanz and Simon Dalferth conclude (page 13/14):

Public participation has the potential to revitalize the political system and alleviate the disenchantment of citizens with politics. In this paper we have presented an approach to complement European representative democracies with effective participatory practices. We have discussed the advantages and shortcomings of public participation. We recommend that three steps be taken for public participation to come to fruition: a framework for public participation needs be adopted, a systematic methodology must be developed and a rigorous and continuous analysis of costs and benefits established.

If these steps are taken, public participation has the potential to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of European governance. By fostering deliberation among citizens over the nature of problems and the best way to solve them, participatory practices produce a pool of (transnationally) shared arguments which – disseminated by mass media – contribute to the emergence of a wider public sphere, in which policy choices of member states and the European Union are exposed to public scrutiny (Nanz, 2006). Through public participation, the process of political decision-making in the EU would be opened up both to the input of citizens’ concerns and to public scrutiny of the larger citizenry.

Good stuff. I look forward to meeting some fellow European public participators at the January 8 meetup.

Update 12/21: It appears that OpenEtherpad’s .com domain has expired. Please use the .org domain instead to RSVP for this event: http://openetherpad.org/opengovcgn

When it comes to e-participation, Europe really has it going on. It seems hardly a week goes by that doesn’t see some kind of workshop or conference or other activity in that area.

I only get to go back to Germany about once a year and somehow my timing is always off.  For this year’s trip, for example, by the time I get there in December I will have barely missed Future Democracy ’10, December 2 in London and an ePractice Workshop on e-participation, December 7 in Brussels.

So to take matters into my own hands and not completely miss out, I’ve found a few co-conspirators and together we are organizing an informal event in Cologne, Germany that will bring together people in the region who are working on advancing participatory governance:

Participation Meetup Cologne
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Coworking Cologne
RSVP: http://openetherpad.com/opengovcgn

We hope to bring together a broad range of folks from the open government and public participation communities as well as neighboring disciplines such as urban planning, architecture, information design, journalism etc.

This is hot off the press, so the details are still to be worked out. A lot will depend on turn-out. Provided we hit a certain group size we’ll probably go the unconference route, spend the afternoon doing some work together before we go out to dinner. Easy, peasy!

Should be fun. Be there!

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 one kind of internet traffic over another, whether such traffic management practices may create problems and have unfair effects for users, whether the level of competition between different internet service providers and the transparency requirements of the new telecom framework may be sufficient to avoid potential problems by allowing consumers’ choice and whether the EU needs to act further to ensure fairness in the internet market, or whether industry should take the lead. [...] The consultation will feed into a Commission report on net neutrality, which should be presented by the end of this year. All interested parties – service and content providers, consumers, businesses and researchers – are invited to respond to the consultation by 30 September 2010.

The project as well as the tool (email) have been added to ParticipateDB.

A quick mention over on techPresident the other day quoted Neelie Kroes, EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, as saying “The process will be as open as the internet!”, which prompted me to file this comment:

Open consultation?

With regard to the European consultation on net neutrality, it’s interesting to note that their technology of choice is email, not any of the more advanced (more deliberative/collaborative/social) tools that are available. From the questionnaire: “Responses to this public consultation should reach the European Commission by 30 September 2010 at infso-netneutrality@ec.europa.eu.” Not that using email is a bad thing, necessarily, it just means that the input gathering process is fairly one-way and not as open as it could be (certainly not as “open as the internet”).

It’s also not entirely clear if and when any of the input will be made public. Again, from the questionnaire: “Contributions, together with the identity of the contributor, may be published on the website of the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media”. Maybe? Maybe not?

Hm…

Once again, it would be great to have a more comprehensive FAQ available for participants that outlines the complete participation process in more detail.

Gütersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann Stiftung, one of Germany’s largest foundations, just launched vitalizing-democracy.org, the theme site for their 2011 Reinhard Mohn Prize.

From the welcome post: Welcome to our platform!

On 23 June 2010, the Bertelsmann Stiftung launched this website in order to search for prize-worthy projects for the Reinhard Mohn Prize 2011.

With the forthcoming prize in 2011, the Bertelsmann Stiftung will focus on the crucial issue of ‘Vitalizing Democracy through Participation’. The prize will be awarded to a governmental institution – possibly in cooperation with a non-governmental actor – which has initiated successful projects (or programs) to vitalize democracy, to integrate underrepresented citizens and to establish new forms of democratic problem-solving capacities through participation. [...]

The about page has more details:

The Focus of the Reinhard Mohn-Prize 2011

Democracy is the core of our modern society. It forms the basis for peaceful and self-determined cohabitation and places emphasis on human needs. Strengthening and preserving democracy is one of the most important priorities of our time. During the past decades, our democratic systems have continuously evolved and adapted to new conditions. Growing complexity, heterogeneity and rapid social developments place new demands on democracies. The following three challenges are the most crucial aspects of this development:

• Growing demands for problem-solving capacities – social developments are complex, heterogeneous and rapid, making it hard to react timely and appropriately to implement reforms effectively and to inform the public successfully about current political issues.
• New expectations for political participation – classical forms of political participation such as elections, membership of political parties and political associations no longer meet the needs and demands of modern societies. People increasingly prefer issue-based and more direct forms of participation. Therefore, more and more citizens are alienated by the existing political system.
• Under-representation of disadvantaged groups – migration and the growing gap between rich and poor lead to fewer people being able to participate in political decisions and represent their interests.

The site will be open for applications through August 22, 2010. Registered users will be able to rate and comment on the projects that have been submitted. A jury will pick the winners.

I don’t see it being mentioned specifically, but one would hope that the innovative use of information and communication technology (e.g. the internet) will play at least some role in this contest.

In Europe, the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference — titled Teaming up for the eUnion — is happening in Malmö, Sweden today and tomorrow. At a press conference this morning, the long-awaited Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment (212 KB) was presented to the public.

The declaration, which is regarded as “our joint policy priorities until 2015,” addresses a number of issues such as transparency, open government data, collaboration, privacy, open source etc. Here’s what it has to offer in terms of participation:

6. Through this declaration, we will build on past achievements and increase our collaboration on eGovernment. Our public administrations should jointly strive for the following policy priorities, to be achieved by 2015.

• Citizens and businesses are empowered by eGovernment services designed around users’ needs and developed in collaboration with third parties, as well as by increased access to public information, strengthened transparency and effective means for involvement of stakeholders in the policy process,
• [...]

[...]
Our Shared Objectives by 2015

Citizens and businesses are empowered by eGovernment services designed around users needs and developed in collaboration with third parties, as well as by increased access to public information, strengthened transparency and effective means for involvement of stakeholders in the policy process.

[...]

13. Involve stakeholders in public policy processes. We will actively develop and promote effective, useful and better ways for businesses and citizens to participate in the policy processes. Increased public engagement through more effective methods at all levels enhances government’s efficiency and effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions and services.

As a complement to this official declaration, the Open Declaration on European Public Services will be presented tomorrow. Here’s its take on participation, one of three “core principles for European public services”:

2. Participation: government should pro-actively seek citizen input in all its activities from user involvement in shaping services to public participation in policy-making. This input should be public for other citizens to view and government should publicly respond to it. The capacity to collaborate with citizens should become a core competence of government.

Last-minute endorsements of the Open Declaration are still being accepted.