It’s that time of year, and SXSW Interactive (that week-long mass pilgrimage of web, film, music and — for the first time this year with a conference track of their own — education innovators to beautiful Austin, TX) is almost around the corner.

Since there’s a good chance I’ll make the trip out there yet once again, I thought I’d take a quick look at the schedule. Here are some of this year’s sessions in the areas of politics, open government, crowdsourcing and the like that look particularly promising:

Friday, March 9, 2012

• Rethinking Civilization for the Social Age

Saturday, March 10, 2012

• Crowdsourcing a Revolution: Can We Fix Healthcare?

Sunday, March 11, 2012

• How Is Internet Helping People Make Their Own Laws
• We the People: Creating a Consumer’s Bill of Rights
• Fixing Broke(n) Governments Through Serious Games
• Public Lab: Mapping, DIY Activism & Civic Science
• But Hasn’t Politics Always Been Social?
• What Civil Society Can Learn from Social Web
• A New Culture of Learning: Gaming, Tech, Design

Monday, March 12, 2012

• Sunspots: The Promise and Pitfalls of Gov 2.0
• Utah.gov: Breaking the Mold for eGovernment
• Future of Cities: Technology in Public Service
• Play Time?: Kids and Game-Based Learning
• The Next Frontier of Public Services
• Artists in Labs: Participatory Design at Eyebeam
• Democracy 2.0 in the German Parliament
• How Social Media Imperils Political Parties
• Open Innovation: Millions of Us Solving Problems

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

• Do People Really Want Participatory Government?
• 2012: Social Media’s New Role in Politics

Obviously, there’s lots more to look forward to (and I’m not just talking about the sessions). Hope to see everyone there!

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 on the Maestro conference call platform (which enables questions, voting, breakout groups, etc.).

Tom will cover various themes from his new book “Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics” (to be published in August 2012), including this question related to e-participation:

• What is gained and lost in the choice between online and face-to-face citizen engagements? Do conference calls and video conferencing have a potential role to play in formal citizen deliberations? Is it actually possible to have quality online deliberation among ordinary citizens – especially if they are randomly selected? What do we need to know and do in order to achieve high quality online deliberation?

Great question, and I look forward to the conversation. Our short answer is that a combination of good process, skilled facilitation and the appropriate technology can make high-quality online deliberation possible, whether stand-alone or in combination with face-to-face.

Head over to Maestro to RSVP for this event.

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!

A quick advertisement this morning. This is exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping to work on when I signed up to be a member of the Board last year:

Monthly Practitioner Call Kick-Off: December 5, 2011

As part of our 2012 goals around community of practice, we’re launching a monthly practitioner call — the first of several new member programs and services to be rolled out next year.

Practitioner calls are simply phone conferences intended to provide an informal environment for public participation practitioners to come together, ask questions, share experiences and help each other with advice.

For now, calls will be a member-only, though in the future we may decide to open them up to non-members on occasion. From month to month, call attendees will take turns informally moderating the conversation.

Our first call is next week, December 5, at 11am Pacific Time. Details here: Monthly Practitioner Call Kick-Off: December 5, 2011

If you’re already an IAP2 USA member, please join us. If you’re not a member, please consider taking advantage of our Fall membership campaign (special pricing good through January 31, 2012).

We have more exciting things planned for next year. Stay tuned!

Update: This post is being continuously updated. Check the comments section for the change log.

It’s that time of year again, and so I’ve started to add a few 2012 events to my calendar, both the kind I hope to attend in person as well as the ones I’ll likely have to follow remotely.

The core focus of this list are events at the intersection of public participation and technology (e.g. e-democracy, e-participation) plus events with overlap from neighboring areas such as dialogue, deliberation, conflict resolution, facilitation, planning, local government, open government, civic engagement etc.

Got any other events on your radar? Please let me know, and I’ll update the list. Thanks!

Dates to be announced

Open Gov West 2012 (OGW2012)
May 2012
Website: http://www.opengovwest.org

Fifth International Conference on Online Deliberation (OD2012)
Summer 2012
Location TBA
Website: http://online-deliberation.net

2012 NCDD Conference (unconfirmed)
October 2012
Seattle, WA

January 2012

TransportationCamp DC
January 21, 2012
Washington DC
Web: http://transportationcamp.org

February 2012

9th Scandinavian Workshop on E-government (SWEG 2012)
February 9–10, 2012
Copenhagen (Denmark)
Website: http://www.cbs.dk/sweg2012

Social Cities of Tomorrow
February 17, 2012
Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Website: http://www.socialcitiesoftomorrow.nl
Note: According to their background page, the conference will explore  a “new take on community and participation models”, from traditional top-down to more horizontal models.

March 2012

ASPA 2012 Annual Conference
March 2–6, 2012
Las Vegas, NV
Website: http://www.aspanet.org/public/Conference/CONFERENCE_HOME/Conference/Home.aspx

South by South West Interactive (SXSWi)
March 9–13, 2012
Austin, TX
Details: http://sxsw.com/interactive

IADIS International Conferencee-Society 2012
March 10–13, 2012
Berlin (Germany)
Website: http://www.esociety-conf.org

International Conference: Participatory Budgeting in the US and Canada
March 30–31, 2012
New York, NY
Website: http://pbconference.wordpress.com

April 2012

2012 National Planning Conference
April 14–17, 2012
Los Angeles, CA
Website: http://planning.org/conference/index.htm

Collective Intelligence 2012
April 18–20, 2012
Cambridge, MA
Website: http://www.ci2012.org
Related post: Collective Intelligence 2012: April 19-20, 2012 in Cambridge, MA

CampaignTech 2012
April 19–20, 2012
Washington, DC
Website: http://campaigntechconference.com

International Conference on e-Democracy, e-Government and e-Society (ICDGS 2012)
April 25–27, 2012
Venice (Italy)
Website: http://www.waset.org/conferences/2012/italy/icdgs/

Transparency Camp 2012
April 28–29, 2012
Greater Washington DC area (details to be confirmed)
Website: http://transparencycamp.org

May 2012

International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2012 (CeDEM ’12)
May 3–4, 2012
Krems (Austria)
Website: CeDEM12

International Association of Facilitators North America Conference 2012
May 9–12, 2012
Halifax, NS (Canada)
Website: http://www.iafna2012.org

2012 ACR EPP Section Conference
May 21, 2012
Tucson, AZ
Website: http://www.acrepp.org

ECR2012: Working Across Boundaries
Seventh National Conference on Environmental Collaboration and Conflict Resolution
May 22–24, 2012
Tucson, AZ
Website: ECR2012: Working Across Boundaries

Digital Governance in Latin America, LASA 2012 XXX International Congress
May 23–26, 2012
San Francisco, CA
Details: http://www.certop.fr/DEL/spip.php?article2465

June 2012

2012 Digital Government Society Conference (dg.o 2012)
June 4–7, 2012
University of Maryland
College Park, MD

2012 American Democracy Project and The Democracy Commitment Annual Meeting
June 7–9, 2012
San Antonio, TX
Website: http://aascu.org/Meetings/adp12/

University Network for Collaborative Governance 2012 Annual Meeting
June 10–12, 2012
Syracuse, NY
Website: http://www.policyconsensus.org/events/uncg_2012.html
Notes: The conference theme is “Embedding Collaborative Governance in Universities, Communities, and Government”.

Personal Democracy Forum
June 11–12, 2012
New York, NY
Website: http://personaldemocracy.com

12th European Conference on eGovernment (ECEG 2012)
June 14–15, 2012
Barcelona (Spain)
Website: 12th European Conference on eGovernment– ECEG 2012
Notes: Mini track eParticipation (call for papers)

25th Bled eConference
June 17–20, 2012
Bled (Slovenia)
Website: http://www.bledconference.org
Notes: special interest track eDemocracy: From eRevolution to eParticipation (PDF)

9th Annual Games for Change Festival
June 18–20, 2012
New York City, NY
Website: http://www.gamesforchange.org

The 11th International Online Dispute Resolution Forum (ODR2012)
June 27–29, 2012
Prague (Czech Republic)
Website: http://www.odr2012.org

July 2012

7th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA 2012)
July 5–7, 2012
Tilburg (The Netherlands)
Website: http://www.ipa-2012.org

5th International Conference on Electronic Voting (EVOTE2012)
July 12–14, 2012
Bregenz (Austria)
Website: http://www.e-voting.cc/topics/conference2012

The Democracy Imperative (TDI) National Conference
July 18–21, 2012
Boston, MA
Website: http://unh.edu/democracy/

Frontiers of Democracy 2012
July 19–21, 2012
Boston, MA
Website: http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/?pid=1096

IADIS International Conference e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice (ED 2012)
July 21–23, 2012
Lisbon (Portugal)
Website: http://www.edemocracy-conf.org

August 2012

No events yet.

September 2012

Fourth International Conference on eParticipation (ePart 2012)
September 3–6, 2012
Kristiansand (Norway)
Website: http://www.epart-conference.org

International Conference on Electronic Democracy (EDEM 2012)
September 3–7, 2012
Vienna (Austria)
Website: http://www.dexa.org/egovis2012

League of California Cities Annual Conference & Expo
September 5–7, 2012
San Diego, CA
Website: http://www.cacities.org/AC

Association for Conflict Resolution 12th Annual Conference
September 12–15, 2012
New Orleans, LA
Website: http://www.acrnet.org

2012 NAGW National Conference
September 12–14, 2012
Kansas City, MO
Website: http://nagw.org/national-conference

IAP2 Canada National Conference (tentative)
September 26–28, 2012
Halifax, NS (Canada)

October 2012

98th ICMA Annual Conference
October 7–10, 2012
Phoenix, AZ
Website: http://icma.org

EAINZ Annual Conference 2012
October 24–25, 2012
Sydney (Australia)
Website: http://www.eianz.org

November 2012

Involve 2012
November 13-14, 2012
Nottingham (United Kingdom)
Website: http://www.profbriefings.co.uk/involve2012/

Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy
November 14–16, 2012 (tentative)
Montevideo (Uruguay)
Website: http://www.2012globalforum.com

December 2012

No events yet.

Josh Lerner (Co-Director, The Participatory Budgeting Project) shared this conference announcement via the NCDD listserv:

International Conference: Participatory Budgeting in the US and Canada
March 2012
New York City, NY

From the email:

In a time of widespread budget crises and plummeting trust in government, politicians and community members are searching for more democratic and accountable ways to manage public money. Participatory Budgeting (PB) offers an alternative. PB is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. The process was first developed in Brazil in 1989, and there are now over 1,000 participatory budgets around the world. Most are for city budgets, but counties, states, towns, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions have also used PB to open up public spending to public participation.

PB is now common in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa – and in some cases even required by law. Yet it has only recently appeared on the radar in the US and Canada, with a few Canadian processes starting in 2001 and some initial US experiments starting in 2009.

This first regional conference on PB will take place in New York City to allow participants to observe and celebrate the closing of the city’s first PB cycle. The conference will provide a space for participants and organizers of the initial PB processes in the US and Canada to share and reflect on their experiences so far, alongside interested activists, practitioners, and scholars.

[...]

Conference Themes

As an opportunity to reflect upon early PB initiatives in the US and Canada, and build new relationships and collaborations between practitioners, the conference will focus on the following questions. We encourage all submissions relating to these and other similar themes.

1. What is the current state of PB practice in the United States and Canada? How are current experiments progressing and what efforts to establish new PB’s are underway?
2. What common themes or conditions underlie PB experiences in the US ad Canada?
3. How do experiences in these countries differ from PB in other parts of the world?
4. How do PB experiences in the US and Canada inform key ongoing debates on PB worldwide?
5. How can PB practitioners, activists, and participants in the US and Canada support each others’ efforts?

The call for proposals ends January 1, 2012.

Participation around money and budgets is an exciting field with plenty of opportunities for online engagement, and a lot of good work in that area is already happening around the world. Being based on the West Coast, this conference sounds like a great excuse to visit New York City.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to check out this exciting event the IAP2 NorCal Chapter is putting on (I’m chapter co-chair): IAP2 NorCal Event: Fixing Broke(n) Governments through Serious Games, November 17 in San Francisco

Governments around the world are all facing budget shortfalls, spending cuts and reduced services. All of us — ordinary citizens, elected officials and community leaders — know that we must make dramatic changes to solve these crises, and yet governments remain gridlocked. How do we move beyond this impasse? How do we create an approach to budgeting that is both participatory and scalable? The answer is serious games!

Join Luke Hohmann, CEO and founder of the Innovation Games® Company, to learn how serious games are creating real change through encouraging public participation in government. Luke will talk about the specially designed Innovation Game® Budget Games and how it was used by the city of San Jose, CA, to bring together more than 100 community leaders and ordinary citizens to collaboratively prioritize possible cuts to the city budget.

Come prepared to participate, because we’ll also be playing a version of the Innovation Game® to get a real-world understanding of how serious games can be more effective way to get accurate and actionable data than traditional polling methods.

It’s Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 6.30pm. We’ll be back at the Citizen Space, one of San Francisco’s premier co-working spaces and fabulous community watering hole. Please see Eventbrite for details and to RSVP.

After a long period of low activity, our local IAP2 USA chapter is starting with precious little funding, so we definitely need to break even with this event. Please consider the sponsoring opportunities we’re offering. Thank you!

In preparation for this event, the chapter has started its own presence on Twitter and Facebook. Check it out!

IAP2 Canada together with Noreen Rude from the City of Calgary are hosting a Twitter chat about online engagement next week:

Thursday, October 20, 2011
9.30-11.00pm MST (that’s 8.30pm Pacific)
Hashtag: #IAP2chat

From the flyer (PDF):

Online tools for  Engagement?!?! Social media to engage? IAP2 Canada and Noreen Rude from the City of Calgary are hosting a live TweetChat. Participants in the  ‘A Journey of Change: It’s not just about an open house anymore’ session at the IAP2 Australasia Conference will be watching this livechat as an example of an online engagement tool.  We will be sharing results from this TweetChat after the conference at: http://iap2canada.ca/

Follow the hashtag #IAP2chat and join the discussion about ”the use of online tools for public engagement including the use of  social media”. A follow-up conversation is scheduled to take place, October 24-26: http://iap2onlineengagement.ideascale.com

I look forward to joining this Zócalo/New America Foundation event as co-panelist, October 26, 2011 at Stanford. From the announcement:

Zócalo in Palo Alto: Can Technology Save California Governments?

California has more than 4,500 local governments, yet it still often feels ungoverned. Proponents of so-called “e-government” say technology can change that: the digital world, they argue, offers a better way to connect citizens to government and provide services faster and more efficiently. A new report, “Hear Us Now?,” surveys how California governments use technology and proposes ways of measuring the success of their e-government initiatives. April Manatt, principal of April Manatt Consulting and the author of the report; Greg Hermann, senior management analyst for the city of Carlsbad; Tim Bonnemann of San Jose participation company Intellitics, Inc.; and Dakin Sloss, executive director of California Common Sense, visit Zócalo to discuss the future of e-government and whether it can solve the challenges facing local communities.

The panel will be moderated by Joe Mathews, Irvine Senior Fellow, New America Foundation. Check the website for venue details and to RSVP.

E-government has many dimensions, one of which is e-democracy, the “use of electronic communication vehicles, such as e-mail and the Internet, to increase citizen participation in the public decision-making process” (source). The current state of e-participation in California and opportunities in this area will be my area of focus.

I’d you’d care to help me prep, please share your thoughts in the comments, tweet using hashtag #opengovca, or answer this (slightly rephrased) question on Quora: How should California’s 4,500 local governments apply technology to help improve governance?

Thanks, and see you on the 26th!

I’ll be heading out to Dayton, OH tomorrow to attend the Kettering Foundation’s Deliberative Democracy Exchange 2011:

[...] This collaborative event is the Kettering Foundation’s annual opportunity to share our research and to get acquainted with people who have just learned about our work and are looking to learn even more. These research exchanges are also a chance to continue conversations and develop collaborations that would not be as easy or even possible at other times during our program year. These research exchanges also include Kettering Foundation colleagues from other countries who participate in the Deliberative Democracy Workshops (DDW). Taken together, the workshops and research exchanges held during DDEx offer a unique opportunity to engage in a stimulating exchange of ideas about democracy.

I’ll be part of a workshop on Digital Strategies for Deliberative Politics, which aims to “explore the opportunities offered by digital/social media to advance deliberative politics with other DDEx participants, to share experience from this field, and perhaps spark collaborations.”

The 300 or so attendees come from all around the world (going through the list, I can count at least 25 countries from all continents). Quite the international crowd!

About the Kettering Foundation:

The Kettering Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan research organization rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Everything Kettering researches relates to one central question: what does it take for democracy to work as it should? Or put another way: What does it take for citizens to shape their collective future?

All lines of Kettering’s research relate to these questions in one way or another. The foundation explores ways that key political practices can be strengthened through innovations that emphasize active roles for citizens. Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people collectively can do to address problems affecting their lives, their community, and their nation.

I understand participants are being encouraged to share their live impressions online. You can follow the newly-launched @KetteringFdn on Twitter, keep an eye on the #DDEx hashtag or like Kettering Foundation on Facebook for occasional updates.

On Thursday, I will attend SFOpen 2011, a forum discussion on Open Government with nine of the candidates currently running for the office of Mayor of San Francisco. The event is sponsored by Change.org, GovFresh, WordPress, and various others. From the event site:

SFOpen 2011 brings together the 2011 San Francisco Mayoral candidates for a discussion on open government, civic engagement, technology and innovation.

As expected, the event has sold out quickly. You can try to get on the wait list or catch the live video.

In preparation for the forum, technology/civic engagement questions are being solicited online. Among them, three relate directly to public participation:

• Do you support participatory budgeting processes?
• Do you support new technologies to improve engagement and accessibility for community based planning?
• How will you involve citizens in city decision-making processes?

Would be nice to get at least a couple of these in front of the candidates. Add your votes if this is your cup of tea.

Following my previous post about the upcoming Deliberative Poll here in California, I have been invited to attend the event as an observer. From the invitation email:

I am writing to invite you to observe an exciting civic engagement event this summer that will help chart the course for California’s future.

On June 24-26, a broad coalition of reform-oriented organizations will bring together a random sample of 300 Californians in Torrance for California’s first-ever Deliberative Poll. “What’s Next California?” is an unprecedented attempt to bring Californians into the conversation of whether California’s governance can be improved, and if so, how. “What’s Next” will allow a microcosm of the state to spend a weekend working together to better understand and share their views on a range of issues including legislative representation, fiscal and tax policy, whether local governments should have more autonomy and control over public services, and the initiative process.

“What’s Next California?” will also present an unusual opportunity for policy makers and advocates to observe a deep discussion among Californians and experts with whom they will have the change to consult throughout the process that differs dramatically from dialogues among self-selected members of the public and officials or conventional opinion polling.

The deliberative poll is being organized by the New America Foundation, California Forward, the Public Policy Institute of California, the Nicolas Berggruen Institute, Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute, California Common Cause, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. It is being managed by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford and PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer Productions. The weekend will be moderated by Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour and videotaped for a documentary to be broadcast on PBS stations in California and elsewhere.

More information about “What’s Next California” can be found at nextca.org.

I’m delighted to be able to attend and have gladly accepted the invitation. I plan to be there for the kick-off on Friday night as well as for parts of either Saturday or Sunday.

As an observer, some of the obvious things to look at might include the following:

• Event logistics and setup
• General mood and attitudes among the participants
• Quality of the dialogue
• Use of information resources (evidence)
• Decision-making processes
• Overall process facilitation

Given what you know about this project, what else would you like the observers to keep in mind or watch out for during the event? What would you monitor if you could be there in person?

Though I may or may not be able to do extensive live reporting during the event, I will definitely share my impressions afterwards. If you have any suggestions or recommendations for this observer, please share them in the comments below, and I’ll be your eyes and ears. Thank you!

The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2011) kicked off yesterday in College Park, MD. Their topic this year is “Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times”. While I have yet to attend dg.o in person, it’s been on my radar for a while now, and their 2011 edition looks interesting once again. For example, here are some of the panels and sessions on the program (PDF) through Wednesday, June 15:

• Panel 1 — Massively Participatory Urban Planning and Design Tools and Process: the Betaville Project
• Session 4 — Enterprise Architecture [...] Analysis of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks in the Contextof E-Participation
• Session 5 — Social Media In Government

A couple of weeks ago, I contacted the organizers and pitched the idea of using #edem IRC as an additional backchannel to better connect conference attendees and non-attendees. Thanks to Andrew Philpot (tech lead) and John Bertot (conference co-chair), dg.o 2011 is the first conference to officially support this fledgling IRC effort.

If you haven’t bookmarked the channel yet, please do so right away and make sure to check in regularly over the next three days:

irc.freenode.net #edem

If you’re new to IRC, check out the comment section on this earlier post, which lists a few resources to get started. Using the web interface at http://webchat.freenode.net is probably the easiest way to jump right in.

I had a great time co-instigating the first CityCampSF last year, and wanted to give a shout-out to the upcoming sequel:

CityCampSF
Saturday, June 18, 2011
from 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
San Francisco Department of Technology Atrium
1 So. Van Ness
Second Floor
San Francisco CA
RSVP: http://ccsf2011.eventbrite.com

From the event description:

CityCampSF is municipal employees, journalists, developers and neighborhood leaders working on solutions for better communities and government. CityCampSF is also happy to join with SFOpen 2011 and TechCentralSF in four full days of open government and technology innovation events, beginning June 16 with an opengov mayoral forum and running through Sunday with a gamification and technology conference.

I wasn’t able to join the organizing team this year, but I look forward to attending.

I’m thinking of doing a session on public participation at the local level. I’m looking for recent examples of public participation projects here in the Bay Area. If you have anything to share, please leave a comment or contact me. Same thing if you’d like to co-host the session. Thanks!

See you all on the 18th!

We had another good trial run today, with a number of new people joining the #edem IRC for the first time. Thanks for coming, everyone!

Nothing too momentous was discussed, aside from some general resource sharing and logistics planning for futures chats. If you’re curious, Michael Allan of Votorola has put up a log of today’s session on his site.

Please mark your calendars for the July session:

Wednesday, July 6
at 2pm Central (3pm Eastern / 9pm Berlin)
irc.freenode.net #edem

We’ll stick with the 2pm Central time for now but will look into better accommodating people in other time zones (e.g. Australasia) in the future.

Earlier tonight, I reached out to the first of a number of upcoming conferences in Europe and the US that might benefit from adding this channel to the mix, particularly to connect attendees and non-attendees. I’ll report what I hear back in next month’s session. See you then!

Following the inaugural IRC chat earlier this month, we’ll be meeting again this coming Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 2pm Pacific Central (9pm 11pm 9pm Berlin):

irc.freenode.net #edem

The idea is to establish this as an additional standing backchannel to be used especially during conferences and events related to e-participation and e-democracy. In the meantime, we’ll do monthly sessions to talk about issues of the day, sign up a few more folks and get everyone comfortable with the technology.

Hope you can join!

The other day, this promising-looking conference popped up on my radar: Collective Intelligence 2012.

From the site (emphasis mine):

Overview

Collective intelligence has existed at least as long as humans have, because families, armies, countries, and companies have all–at least sometimes–acted collectively in ways that seem intelligent. But in the last decade or so a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: groups of people and computers, connected by the Internet, collectively doing intelligent things. For example, Google technology harvests knowledge generated by millions of people creating and linking web pages and then uses this knowledge to answer queries in ways that often seem amazingly intelligent. Or in Wikipedia, thousands of people around the world have collectively created a very large and high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control, and almost all as volunteers!

These early examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence are not the end of the story but just the beginning. And in order to understand the possibilities and constraints of these new kinds of intelligence, we need a new interdisciplinary field. Forming such a field is one of the goals of this conference.

Among the topics of interest listed are the following:

• Crowdsourcing
• Group memory and problem-solving
• Deliberative democracy
• Public policy design
• New technologies for making groups smarter

More details can be found on the scope page:

Intellectual scope

Collective intelligence is groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent (Malone, Laubacher, & Dellarocas, 2009).

We recognize that this definition is ambiguous. Indeed, it is purposefully so in order not to prematurely constrain what we believe to be an emerging discipline.

We seek papers about behavior that is both collective and intelligent. By collective, we mean groups of individual actors, including, for example, people, computational agents, and organizations. By intelligent, we mean that the collective behavior of the group exhibits characteristics such as, for example, perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving.

There doesn’t appear to be an option to subscribe to email updates, so monitor the site’s recent changes or follow the two conference chairs on Twitter, Thomas Malone and Luis von Ahn.

I’ll be in San Francisco this Thursday night to meet up with fellow members and friends of the IAP2 NorCal chapter. From the IAP2 USA blog:

NorCal Chapter Meetup This Thursday in SF

As promised, here are the details for this week’s get-together of the Northern California chapter:

IAP2 NorCal Meetup
Thursday, May 5
from 6:00 pm
at Thirsty Bear, 661 Howard Street (between Hawthorne St and Third St)
San Francisco, CA

This is going to be an informal social event (no speakers) with local chapter members and others who will be in town for the IAP2 Certificate training. You can find us in the area near the bar.

It’s been a while since the last in-person event, but there are plans in the works to get back to meeting three or four times a year. If you have friends or colleagues in the area who might be interested in learning more about IAP2 USA, please feel free to send them our way and help us kick off this new phase of our chapter. Thanks!

For questions or to RSVP, please contact the chapter co-chairs, Janet Thomson or Tim Bonnemann (contact info on our chapter page).

Let us know if you can join us. See you there!

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.

It’s great to see the IAP2 Affiliates form in the US and Canada. IAP2 USA, where I serve on the Board, is making great progress, and Canada is only a few weeks behind us it seems.

Anyway, I would love to go up to Vancouver for this one:

IAP2 BC Chapter Spring Symposium
May 19, 2011
The Listel Hotel
1300 Robson Street, Vancouver, BC

Making the Business Case for Public Participation

Symposium Overview

More than ever government and business decision-makers are critically weighing the value of each business tool they employ / fund. While the discipline of public consultation has earned a legitimate spot as a practice: its strategic value is often challenged; its use viewed as a required administrational “check-list”; and its associated opportunity is often watered down or never realized.

How do we as practitioners ensure that public consultation is used as a valuable and strategic business tool that is sustainably aligned with existing practises, and integrated into how an organization conducts itself and its “business?” This full-day discussion will consider how public consultation can be better stitched into organizational and project paradigms and become viewed by leaders and decision-makers as a valuable strategic asset that delivers a positive / acceptable return on an organization’s investment (money, time, reputation, & outcome).

The agenda is available for download (PDF).

It’s as if someone had read my tweet from last October:

Let’s hope they capture a lot of it and share it on the web.