The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) just announced a series of regional one-day events for later this Fall. The Bay Area event is scheduled for Friday, October 29, 2010 at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. From the website:

The events will build on what we learned in the past year and a half from our involvement in the White House’s Open Government Initiative, and through efforts like the creation of the Core Principles for Public Engagement. With the increase in national and local attention to open government and public engagement, members of the dialogue and deliberation community are focusing in on three priorities:

• Learning how to use online tools and technology more effectively, to help people discuss contentious issues and have a greater impact on policy decisions.
• Engaging and working with public officials, and working within government structures in more effective and sustainable ways.
• Educating more public managers about what constitutes quality public engagement and how to connect with public engagement organizations and practitioners.

Our fall one-day events will connect practitioners, researchers, and public managers locally around these three priorities. NCDD feels that building knowledge and capacity in these three areas will better position members of our professional community to successfully navigate new opportunities that are emerging in open government and online engagement so they can make a greater impact in their communities.

This will be a great opportunity to meet fellow NCDD members from up and down the West Coast. Intellitics will be there.

I’m in Tucson, AZ this week attending the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution’s sixth national ECR Conference: ECR2010: Environmental Collaboration and Conflict Resolution – Evolving to Meet New Opportunities.

I had been eyeing this opportunity ever since I first heard about the conference back in October of last year. A number of people highly recommended it, and their strong technology track this year finally won me over (see the conference agenda here).

This morning during the breakfast plenary session, they launched The ECR Technology Network, a new community hub for practitioners.

As one of the first resources there, you can find the latest draft version of the Guiding Principles for Incorporating Technology and ECR (PDF, 304 KB).

The document lists the following guiding principles:

1. Clearly Articulated Process Goals and Design

2. Impartial Process

3. Inclusiveness and Accessibility

4. Openness and Transparency

6. [sic.] Accountability

7. Meaningful Engagement and Implementation

8. Quality Dialogue

1. Surveys / polling / comment collection & analysis

2. Social Networking

3. Web forums / email lists

4. Trade off Analysis / Decision
Aiding / Online deliberative tools

5. Modeling /simulation

6. Visioning /Scenario development / Mapping / Visualization

7. In‐Meeting Tools / Synchronous Online Meeting Tools

8. Project Management / Scheduling

9. Implementation and Monitoring

10. Governance Support

It’s very refreshing to see this level of interest in the use of technology and the web for collaborative governance among the attendees, and the sessions definitely reflect that.

If you have a few minutes, you can help them get off to a good start by completing this brief survey: ECR Tech Training Needs Assessment.

Towards the end of last week’s Open Gov West conference/unconference in Seattle, WA a series of follow-up meetings on the West Coast was announced, the first of which is scheduled to happen in San Francisco, CA the week after next:

San Francisco OGW Meetup: April 12th 6-8 PM

We’re continuing the conversations from the Open Gov West conference by taking them on the road to meetups across the West Coast.

Open Gov West brought together a diverse range of government folks, electeds, nonprofits, citizens, and technologists on March 26th & 27th. Recomendations on open gov funding, standards, and policy were made, partnerships were launched, open gov ideas were formed.

Hear from San Francisco-based attendees of Open Gov West and hear their reports back from OGW, engaging local open government folks in the conversations and ideas that came out of the conference. Reportbacks start at 6:30 PM and finish at 7 PM. Doors open at 6.

Network with others involved with “gov 2.0″ and “open gov.” Explore ideas for applying lessons from OGW in San Francisco and meet great people to partner with on open gov projects.

This might be a good opportunity to discuss a potential Bay Area event of the same caliber. A bunch of people and I have already been tossing around ideas for doing something later this year with a special focus on participation.  Since neither IAP2 nor NCDD will be doing any major conferences this year there may be room for a sizable local/regional event.

I would like to see an open government event that includes participation as the core component that it is and not as an afterthought (though Open Gov West was certainly the best I’ve seen so far in that regard).

The two-day Open Gov West conference (and un-conference) in Seattle this past weekend, organized by Knowledge as Power, brought together a diverse crowd of open government thinkers and practitioners. A number of private sector innovators, academics and non-profit leaders joined public administrators and officials from the Seattle area as well as those visiting from British Columbia in a multi-faceted discussion on topics ranging from data liberation to public engagement. Day one of the conference followed a traditional format of speeches and panel discussions, while on the second day, a bar camp format was chosen to facilitate small-group dialogue in sessions put forth by conference participants in the morning.

Illustration: Our Open Gov West Twitter word cloud (click on the image for a link to the raw data)

The New York State Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin, who was invited as the keynote speaker, presented his work which by many is considered a landmark effort in the field. While the event’s focus was on open government, and the majority of participants were active in the open data movement as well as the area of citizen engagement and IT services for public administration, some work on participation projects was also introduced. Travis Triplean for example of the University of Washington presented some research on process and systems design for large-scale consultation platforms, and Rob Hoehn of Ideascale was there to speak about that company’s experiences with the realization of the federal government’s open government initiatives across all departments. A common theme throughout the discussions at Open Gov West was how to work with governments and how to successfully engage a broad range of citizens. The fortunate presence of a considerable number of “non-techies” ensured that discussions produced ideas for very wholesome approaches to citizen engagement and public dialogue. The importance of face-to-face communication has not been rendered void by the increasingly dazzling number of iPhone apps and governmental blogs or 311 systems.

Photo: Intellitics founder and CEO Tim Bonnemann (left) and intern Sebastian Haselbeck (middle) at the wrap-up session at the end of day two

Overall, the event connected a very interesting group of people with each other. Many creative ideas were tossed around and one future collaboration or the other was kicked off. The event was organized quite well, and especially the first day was quite amazing. On the downside, the second day saw a sharp drop in the number of attendees, and many of the later sessions suffered from that and the way the sessions were introduced and distributed. An earlier promotion during the event of the OGW wiki would have yielded a powerful knowledge base around the event’s debates and could have served as a launch pad for ideas, networking and idea-gathering.

As we’re gearing up for our trip to Seattle, WA to attend Open Gov West this Friday and Saturday, I saw Travis Kriplean on Twitter ask whether sessions will be recorded.

Here’s my plea:

I encourage every attendee to bring their audio, photo and video gear and help record as many sessions as possible. I find that often at events like this too much value is lost by not systematically capturing the great content that people put out. Not only is this quite unfortunate for attendees who have to decide between sessions that run in parallel. It’s even more of a bummer for anyone who can’t make it to the event in the first place or will find out about it after the fact.

Sometimes, not everyone will be comfortable with being recorded and that should be respected. However, most of the time, capturing the sessions (from taking and sharing notes to snapping a picture of the whiteboard, from audio to video to live streaming) does not hurt anyone. It isn’t that hard to do, it’s simply that somebody’s gotta do it.

So, in the spirit of sharing and in an effort to help spread the spirit of this conference wide and far, please pack your gear and volunteer to make the content available on the web somehow. People will thank you!

And by the way, in case you’re still undecided about attending, check out the kind of research the above-mentioned Travis, for example, is doing: he explores “the design of systems and processes that support more effective large-scale dialog”. Pretty interesting, right? Thought so. Can’t wait to catch up with him at the conference and maybe do a quick interview for This Week in Participation.

See you all in Seattle!

Looks like I finally get to attend one of the many events on Gov 2.0 and Open Government:

Open Gov West

The greater Northwest and Cascadia region is buzzing with innovative technology and civic engagement organizations, and a number of governments throughout the area have already launched open government directives. Hosted by the City of Seattle and Knowledge as Power, Open Gov West is bringing these leaders together to facilitate regional collaboration and share best practices across open government initiatives. Join us March 26 & 27 at Seattle City Hall!

The two-day event follows a hybrid format: day 1 will be a traditional conference, day 2 an unconference “with a spine of pre-determined topics”.

It’ll be my first time in Seattle, and there are plans under way for an NCDD dinner (watch their listserv for updates) as well as a get-together of local IAP2 members.

If you’re involved with NCDD or IAP2, please consider attending the conference. The thing about most of these Gov 2.0/OpenGov/Transparency etc. conferences and unconferences lately is that the public participation community is usually not very well represented.  So this is a great (and inexpensive) opportunity to increase mindshare for this field.  It would be great to see a few participation veterans turn out so we can maybe do a session together.

In other exciting news, I’ll be accompanied by our newly hired student intern from Germany. We’ll properly introduce him once he arrives in the Bay Area later this week.

Should be a fun trip!

From the website:

30 June – 2 July, 2010
Leeds University Business School, UK

The widespread diffusion of the Internet and a growing trend towards democratisation worldwide have encouraged new modes, projects and visions of citizen participation in decision making and governance.

OD2010 aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners from a wide range of academic and applied backgrounds to provide a unique opportunity to better understand the notion of deliberation in a virtual environment and to discuss specific advances in online deliberation from a number of different disciplinary perspectives.

The conference is aimed at those who wish to update themselves on recent developments in online deliberation, understand how other groups are applying the tools and techniques and exchange ideas with leading international experts.

OD2010 follows the traditions of previous high-level scientific conferences. It is organized by key experts in the field and is supported by a multidisciplinary programme committee. This is the first time the conference has been held outside the USA.

The fourth OD conference focuses on, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• current research on online deliberation;
• research challenges which deliberation, and in particular online deliberation, pose for researchers, governments, communities and citizens;
• socio-technical design of online deliberative spaces;
• links between theories of deliberative democracy with experience with online deliberation;
• descriptions of tools and techniques that are already being tested or fielded;
• deliberative platforms using novel or unusual settings, technology or approaches;
• experiences and findings related to relevant technological theories (such as Web 2.0) and/or relevant social theories of deliberation and governance (such as public sphere, government 2.0 and civic intelligence); and
• case studies in applying and evaluating online deliberation in various formal and informal engagement domains.

Lots of deliberation heavyweights are involved.  The final conference program is still forthcoming at this point.

I was able to spend a few hours at Tools for Participation, the 2008 conference, and enjoyed it greatly. Definitely check out this one!

See the conference program (PDF) for details.

The conference is presented by PublicDecisions, a provider of online, “live” training, professional development events and conferences on stakeholder engagement.

Should be interesting both because of the topics and speakers as well as the virtual nature of the conference format.

NCDD members qualify for a discount. Use discount code “NCDDSpecial” when you sign up.

The report from last year’s No Better Time conference is now available: No Better Time: A 2010 Report on Opportunities and Challenges for Deliberative Democracy (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Executive summary

In July 2009, more than 250 campus and community leaders came together at the University of New Hampshire to talk about the “deliberative democracy” field, the tide of civic change on campuses and in communities, and what those changes mean for the practice and teaching of democracy. No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners (NBT) was hosted by the Democracy Imperative (TDI) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), two organizations that work to promote best practices, research, and teaching for a strong democracy.

A number of factors made this conference timely: an historic election, increasing use of dialogue and deliberation in communities across the country, record-setting youth political engagement, a presidential administration that is experimenting with e-democracy to increase transparency and public participation, and a growing interest on campuses (without distinct ownership in any one academic department or administrative office) in teaching democratic principles and practices.

All of these developments seemed to highlight the need for more just, comprehensive, democratic systems and the need to educate and prepare citizens to be more effective participants in those systems. People working in these areas were asking questions about how to “embed” democratic principles and practices in the daily routine of campuses and communities.

The conference gave people a chance to make progress on these challenges as a field. The discussions seemed to coalesce around eight priorities for “embedding” democracy, and conference participants generated a number of plans, proposals, and new activities for moving forward in each area. For each of these priorities, we will give the context preceding No Better Time, summarize the conversation at the conference, and describe what has happened since.

Priority #1 – Rethinking what we call this work (see p. 7)

Priority #2 – Connecting deliberative democracy, advocacy and organizing, and social justice (p.

Priority #3 – Preparing students more comprehensively for citizenship and leadership in a democracy (p. 9)

Priority #4 – Restoring higher education’s role as an agent for democracy and social change (p. 10)

Priority #5 – Fostering international exchanges and initiatives to advance global democracy (p. 12)

Priority #6 – Routinizing and democratizing evaluation and measurement (p. 12)

Priority #7 – Understanding and incorporating online tools for democracy and participation (p. 13)

Priority #8 – Working with the Obama Administration (p. 14)

From the email the conference organizers sent out this morning:

In response to the survey, many people expressed an interest in hosting a local conference like NBT.  So we created a “Step-by-Step Guide” that describes how No Better Time was organized. All of our work product is included, like those witty FAQs and clear instructions on leading a learning exchange.  This is available on line, at http://www.unh.edu/democracy/guidebook.html.

There’s a flurry of conferences, unconferences and hybrids being planned that address Government 2.0 and Open Government, including — of course — the topic of participation. Here’s a list of events on our radar for the first half of 2010:

• February 5-7, 2010: Gov 2.0 Camp Los Angeles in Los Angeles, CA
• February 17, 2010: Open Government Directive Workshop in Washington DC
• March 6, 2010: Gov 2.0 Camp New England in Cambridge, MA
• March 26-27, 2010: OpenGovWest in Seattle, WA
• March 27-28, 2010: TransparencyCamp 2010 in Washington DC
• May 4-5, 2010: Open Government & Innovations Conference in Washington DC
• May 25-27, 2010: Gov 2.0 Expo 2010 in Washington DC
• June 3-4, 2010: Personal Democracy Forum ‘10 in New York City, NY
• June 5, 2010: PDF Unconference and/or ParticipationCamp in New York City, NY
• June, 2010 (exact date tbd): Gov 2.0 Camp Rocky Mountains in Denver, CO or Bolder, CO

Please leave a comment in the likely case we missed anything.

Update:

Added the next Open Government Directive Workshop, February 17 in DC.

Update 2:

Added the Open Government & Innovations (OGI) Conference, May 4-5 in DC.

Update 3:

Added Gov 2.0 Camp Rocky Mountains, June 2010 in Colorado

This just in via the The Democracy Imperative newsletter:

We’re happy to start the New Year with this announcement: the students who attended the No Better Time conference last July were inspired to take the initiative and host their own event, Connect the Dots: Public Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community Problem Solving & Action. If you missed NBT, you might want to attend this conference.  And please send this out to students you think would be interested.

The conference, which is being hosted by the David Mathews Center for Civic Life, will be March 3-6, 2010 in Clear Point, Alabama. If you check the conference web site, you will find links to the conference schedule, proposed workshops, and registration information.  There will be workshops in models and methods of public dialogue and deliberation, facilitation, intergroup dialogue, leadership, social and political equity, Sustained Dialogue, National Issue Forums, organizing community-wide dialogue-to-change initiatives, issue framing, and more.

The call for proposals deadline is February 1.

We hope that campuses will send teams – and we’ll see you there

No Better Time was a great conference, and this “national student conference on public dialogue, deliberation, community problem solving and action” sure looks like an interesting follow-up.

Please leave a comment if you plan on going. Definitely leave a comment if you plan on doing something in the area of e-democracy.

Just came across a reference to this little gem of a conference right in our backyard:

2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy and U.S. Conference on Initiative and Referendum

“constitution making and direct democracy”

Saturday, July 31 through Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010

Earlier today, the FASTForward Blog hosted a webinar discussion with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, titled: Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government

A recording of the webinar is available on the FASTForward Blog. I was lucky enough to get one question in (starts at around 45:50):

With regard to public participation, what are the next milestones for the Open Government Initiative as we’re going into 2010?

Here’s what Beth Noveck had to answer (transcript mine):

Number one, the creation of an Open Government Directive that will ask every government agency to develop its own Open Government plan, a plan that will ask agencies to develop strategic priorities around the release of data, the development of citizen engagement pilots and projects and the greater use of collaboration and the kind of collaborative problem solving and really the use of innovative policy approaches that we mentioned a bit of on the phone.

So I think that that’s very important and everything that will follow from that in terms of the institutionalization, organization  and best practice sharing, and idea exchange.

I think the second big milestone will be the move towards development of new platforms, in other words, making technologies more widely available across government as we learn what works and what doesn’t work so that people can take advantage of the new tools to do these things. So for example, there already is — completely ad hoc — a group who are sharing best practices and tools around employee brainstorming and innovation. So one agency was already doing it, asking employees for ideas and advice, several other agencies said “We’d like to do the same thing” and they spontaneously essentially come together to share code, to share ideas about how to do that. So institutionalizing those practices and platforms around a range of more open projects.

The last thing is really trying also to link up more effectively major presidential priority areas around specific open government projects. In other words, you’ve seen something like the VA’s project to reduce the backlog of veteran benefits applications. Similarly, other kinds of priority areas like that where there is really an imperative to get something done, whether it’s around STEM education (science and technology, engineering and math), or entrepreneurship, or climate change, in which I think the application of these principles of transparency, participation and collaboration and the tools that enable them can be brought to bear to enable us to address these problems more effectively and in new ways.

So I guess that means we can expect to see more e-participation pilots at various levels of government. Very exciting times indeed!

Session notes and related resources from the “No Better Time” conference at the University of New Hampshire back in July are now available for download on their resources page.

Measuring and metrics was a hot topic that was discussed at the following learning exchanges:

• Embedding Deliberative Practices in Local Democracy (session notes, PDF):
  This would need some further digging into, but lots of interesting tidbits and potential starting points for assessing impact and ROI, various ways to measure “embeddedness” over time etc.
• Making the Case for this Work: Improving the Way We Collect, Report, and Explain Outcomes (session notes, PDF):
  The goals of this session were “to a) Identify where the field/participants are with regard to evaluation; b) Identify where the field/participants want to be with regard to evaluation; and c) Identify strategies to get the field/participants to that place (how are going to get there?)”
• New Frontiers for Assessment and Measurement
  No session notes available, but check out “Impacts and Outcomes of Participatory Processes in Brazil and Canada” (download, PDF)
• Renewing the Research Agenda (session notes, PDF)
  Only a brief outline here (“Assessment was the main theme. One view was that questions about what works, under what conditions, and why can be broken down into researchable parts and studied (quantitatively or qualitatively), with the gold standard being a randomized experiment.”), would be nice if someone could add some detail.
• The “Downside” of Deliberative Democracy (session notes, PDF)
  Very little detail, except “doing ‘diagnostics’ and ‘assessment’ before planning a deliberative project” was discussed, apparently.

Please leave a comment if you have additional notes or comments you can share. Thanks!

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 of expectation management in public participation.

The idea behind the session proposal “14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work” is to share tips that aim to increase the likelihood of success of any online participation initiative regardless of the particular online tools or services that are being used.

One fairly obvious but nevertheless important thing to keep in mind is that participation cannot happen without participants. In order to attract and retain participants and keep them engaged throughout the project, it is probably a good idea to make sure they get to enjoy a good participation experience.

While creating a good participation experience depends on many factors (we’ll touch upon more of those in later posts), one sure way to ruin it for participants is to disappoint them. Disappointment occurs when expectations aren’t met. The fallout from failing to meet participants’ expectations can negatively impact the entire participation initiative and hence is to be avoided.

By inviting participation, the project organizer makes a promise to the participants that they will have some sort of impact on the decision making process. For a general overview, see IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation (PDF). They list the following “promises to the public” (one for each of their five public participation goals, here marked in bold):

• Inform: We will keep you informed.
• Consult: We will keep you informed, listen to and acknowledge concerns and aspirations, and provide feedback on how public input influenced the decision.
• Involve: We will work with you to ensure that your concerns and aspirations are directly reflected in the alternatives developed and provide feedback on how public input influenced the decision.
• Collaborate: We will look to you for advice and innovation in formulating solutions and incorporate your advice and recommendations into the decisions to the maximum extent possible.
• Empower: We will implement what you decide.

You can see right there that these commitments differ vastly in scope. In order to set the right expectations it is necessary to be very specific with regard to the impact participants will have as well as the roles both the conveners and the participants will each have to play.

For multi-phased projects, different phases can fall into different areas of the spectrum. Again, it is necessary that participants have a clear understanding of what they can expect during each phase.

To further adjust participants’ expectations, it is helpful to provide them with a good orientation of the overall process and how they fit into the bigger picture. This may include answering questions such as the following:

• What is the ultimate decision at stake?
• What is the overall timeline? (identify the various phases of the decision making process, where the process currently stands and when decisions are due or will likely be made)
• Who will make the decision? Who, if anyone, can block the decision?
• Who are the stakeholders?
• What is the scope of the participation initiative at hand? (incl. anything deemed off topic, any constraints or limitations, decisions that have already been made etc.)
• What other participation efforts have occurred or are still planned?
• What are the risks that the participation initiative will fail to have the intended impact and how are these risks being addressed?
• Etc.

There are several ways this information can be communicated:

• Create a project description or FAQ page (e.g. on an accompanying blog or wiki) that clarifies and makes explicit the project goals as well as any implied promises or commitments to the participants
• Ask participants to “sign off” on this description (e.g. upon registration for whichever tool is being used)
• Continue to mention project goals and “promises” via your regular communication channels (e.g. project blog, email newsletter etc.)
• Over the course of your participation initiative, put interim results in context and explain how they relate to your participation goals
• Engage directly with participants whenever they express misconceptions or appear to have unrealistic expectations

Keeping participants’ expectations in line with what you can deliver is key, both for online and face-to-face participation. For online participation, providing this information should not be difficult. It’s just something that needs to get done.

As you know, we’re trying to get our panel “14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work” accepted to SXSW 2010. Yes, the polls are still open so head on over to the Panel Picker and sign up to cast your vote of support, thanks!

I am very excited to join forces with two exceptional co-panelists, both experts in the field of public engagement:

• Brad Rourke is an independent consultant based in Rockville, MD. Among the many pieces of work experience relevant to the subject of this panel, he has authored numerous issue guides for public dialogue for National Issues Forums Institute, Everyday Democracy and others (for example this one on healthcare that’s currently still being used). Check out Brad’s about page and you’ll agree he’ll make a great panelist. Read his prolific blog or follow @bradrourke on Twitter.
• Taylor Willingham is the Director of Texas Forums, an initiative of the LBJ Presidential Library & Museum. She is a board member of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). Take the time and check out her extensive CV (PDF) and see for yourself why she’s such a great fit for this panel. Taylor lives in Salado, TX (near Austin). Find occasional updates on her blog or follow @taylorwill on Twitter.

Both Taylor and Brad were session leaders at the No Better Time conference recently.

My goal is to assemble the absolute best-available team for this panel. We may announce another co-panelist shortly, or we may just leave the remaining one or two spots unfilled until we know who’ll be at SXSW for sure. It would be very nice to welcome an international contributor or someone who has worked within government to make e-participation happen. Please contact me or leave a comment if you plan on going and would like to be considered.

Our panel idea for SXSW 2010 from a few weeks ago made it to the next round and is now up for community voting. Here’s the final phrasing as submitted:

14 Ways to Make Online Citizen Participation Work

What is public participation? (incl. definition of the term, design principles, common success metrics)

What are typical challenges of web-based participation? (incl. review of recent examples)

What are some of the tools that are currently being used for public participation online?

How to design an e-participation project from scratch?

What are some of the common risks and how to best address them?

How to pick the right tool(s)?

How to take things to scale?

Where to share your successes and failures (so others can learn from your experience)?

What’s *your* experience? (trying to keep it interactive)

What do *you* think? (trying to keep it interactive)

1. What is public participation? (incl. definition of the term, design principles, common success metrics)
2. What are typical challenges of web-based participation? (incl. review of recent examples)
3. What are some of the tools that are currently being used for public participation online?
4. How to design an e-participation project from scratch?
5. What are some of the common risks and how to best address them?
6. How to pick the right tool(s)?
7. How to take things to scale?
8. Where to share your successes and failures (so others can learn from your experience)?
9. What’s *your* experience? (trying to keep it interactive)
10. What do *you* think? (trying to keep it interactive)

Description: Using the web to engage citizens in public decision making is becoming increasingly popular. However, most online tools are not equipped to support the right processes. This panel of public participation experts will share 14 tips how you can get results despite these shortcomings and still make your citizens happy!

Please add your vote if you’d like to see this panel happen.

In case there’s enough support and the session does in fact move forward then I’d imagine we could do some nice collaborative prep work over the coming months. Time is usually very limited at these sessions so it would be helpful if we could provide a collection of materials and resources people could refer to prior to, during and after the panel.

At the Strengthening Our Nation’s Democracy 2 event in DC this week, IAP2 Director John Godec was one of the 100 or so attendees. He shared a brief summary on Facebook. With his permission, I am re-posting it here:

I had to run to catch a flight immediately after our Tuesday afternoon presentation to three key, attentive Obama administration staffers. This invited recommendation was the consensus and culmination of three very long and committed days working through a variety of issues at the ‘Strengthening America’s Democracy 2′ conference in D.C., hosted by AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, Demos, and the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Institute.

Three things stand out about the past few days; one, the philosophical and rhetorical committment by the Obama administration to the work that we do, they were there till 9pm Sunday, and back on Monday and Tuesday. Two, the exceptionally high number of organizations that are engaged in some form of this work, I thought I’d heard of most like-minded organizations and I wasn’t even close. And three, how little attention has been paid to the principles, ethics and code of conduct for this field, we have a lot of work to do in this arena.

As many of you know we (IAP2) recently worked with NCDD and a handful of other organizations to develop a list of ‘7 Core Principles’ (details at www.ncdd.org/pep/) that we could all agree on. This isn’t to dismiss in any way, or undermine the core values of IAP2 but rather to find that elusive consensus with our peers, on words that we can all share, live with and support. (IAP2’s core values were very influencial in this process.) That consensus list of core principles was included in the packet and background infomation for each of the attendees, but I have to tell you that it wasn’t an easy sell. I was asked to facilitate part of the small group discussions on Monday and ran into major resistance and misperception to the idea of this being a principle-based endeavor dearly on. Most groups tend to focus on ‘issues’ and ‘methods’.

I want to offer specific thanks to Sandy Heierbacher (NCDD), Leanne Nurse (USEPA) and our old friend/founder/mentor Jery Delli Priscoli (USACE IWR WWC) who participated and share many of our priorites. Without them it would have been alot lonelier.

There remains much work to be done but what was accomplished from Sunday through Tuesday is remarkable, and all in a room with nearly a hundred turf-guarding academics and other people who rarely have to listen for a living.

In the long run I’m quite confident that the group’s draft recommendation is one that will serve all of us well in the U.S. When the report is available we’ll get the details to you, but in the meantime here are the headlines of what was presented to the administration:

The 11 DRAFT Democracy Agenda Items (headlines of the recommendations) –

1. Draft Statement of Principles (The preamble which will likely carry the definitions, values and ethics that we talked about)
2. Democracy Skill Agenda (How to transfer knowledge and ability to do this work)
3. Health of Democracy Report (The state of this imperfect union)
4. National Demonstration Projects (To show the real world value of what we propose)
5. Recognize and Support Engagement by Disenfranchised Communities (To ensure full inclusion)
6. Institutionalize Participatory and Collaborative Governance (Embed it in federal, state and local institutions)
7. Ensure Adequate Resources for Public Engagement (Paying for it)
8. Adopt and Electoral Reform Agenda (Self explanatory — more later)
9. Feedback on Consultation Efforts (Evaluation)
10. Mechanism for Sustaining Leadership (Ensuring that this doesn’t disappear in four years)
11. International Exchange (Learning from our global colleagues — citing IAP2 as a source)

I heard from some of you over the past days and appreciated your input and encouragement (thanks Max) and did my best to represent you/us — I was honored to do so.

This was a small but very important step for IAP2 and potentially, a giant leap for our field. Stay tuned.

I’ll do my best to be at TransparencyCamp West next weekend, August 8-9 in Mountain View, CA. From their site, here’s what it’s all about:

This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

The event is organized by Sunlight Foundation. The first TransparencyCamp took place in DC earlier this year. Though the main focus is on — you guessed it — transparency, a number of sessions looked at participation and other neighboring topics as well (which makes sense, in my view, given the overlap).

The hashtag is #tcamp09 in case you want to follow the event on Twitter.

It’s important to get government insiders and practitioners from all levels to participate in events like these. So if you know people who work in government (including yourself), please by all means send them along.

TransparencyCamp is an unconference, meaning the agenda will be created by the participants the day of the event. I have a couple of session ideas:

• Something at the intersection of transparency and participation (e.g. take a look at how the two are inter-related, how they can benefit from each other etc.)
• Open Government Initiative (OGI) review and feedback round (what worked, what could be improved next time around etc.)

Please leave a comment if you’re interested in co-presenting. Thanks!

Intellitics will attend the 2009 IAP2 Annual Conference “Making Sustainable Decisions”, September 21-23, 2009 in San Diego, CA. From their website:

Making Sustainable Decisions

In recent years, sustainability has become the watchword for many human, social, corporate and governmental endeavors.  In some formulations, there are three “pillars” and in others there are four.  Others refer to this concept as the “triple bottom line.”  Whichever version one subscribes to, however, IAP2 sees people and governments around the world struggling both to incorporate sustainability into their decisions and with how to involve stakeholders in participating in those decisions.

Sustainable decision making has long been an underlying principle of public participation. IAP2’s emphasis on inclusionary processes is predicated on the belief that better decisions are made when community and social implications of that decision are fully factored into the decision making process.  When the IAP2 Core Values were reviewed and revitalized in 2005, sustainable decision making was explicitly added as part of our values going forward.

The 2009 IAP2 conference will provide the opportunity to discuss the multiple facets of sustainability.  In a kind of double entendre, we want to explore the state of the art both in terms of how to make decisions that reflect sustainability principles, as well as, how to make decisions that are themselves “sustainable.”  We believe these two facets feed into each other, but as the world’s premier organization focused on public participation in public decisions, IAP2 believes that the sustainability of the decision itself is in need of closer examination.

More from the preliminary conference program (PDF):

The 2009 IAP2 conference will provide the opportunity to discuss the multiple facets of sustainability. In a kind of double entendre, we want to explore the state of the art both in terms of how to make decisions that reflect sustainability principles, as well as how to make decisions that are themselves “sustainable.” IAP2 believes that the sustainability of the decision itself is in need of closer examination.

IAP2 wants to expand the definition of sustainability to encompass all the characteristics that make decision‐making processes and the resulting decisions sustainable. Specifically, presentations will be focused around the following themes:

• Sustainable decision‐making processes: what characteristics are necessary for a public participation process to be sustainable?
• Sustainable decisions: In what ways does public participation lead to decisions that are more workable and enduring than those made without public participation?
• Sustainable outcomes: How do public participation processes and better decisions specifically contribute to the sustainability of projects and programs?

Starting September 18, additional training sessions will be offered via an extensive pre-conference program.

For conference updates, subscribe to the IAP2 blog or follow @iap2 on Twitter.

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