I was recently invited to write a short article about ParticipateDB for the Spring edition of GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications’ Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (PDF, 3.4 MB).

Here’s a quote that describes one of the challenges ParticipateDB tries to address:

The Challenge

While public participation is at the core of our democracy, e-participation, as it is commonly referred to, is still a fairly young and emerging field with a much smaller and incomplete body of knowledge, and a tool landscape that can best be described as fragmented, if not confusing.

There is an almost overwhelming variety of tools and services available today that can be, and have been, applied in the context of public participation. Some of the more established tools were designed specifically for the purpose of e-participation, while others, such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and Facebook, are more generic and just happen to also support certain participation activities.

In addition, there is a considerable long tail of experimental applications and solution approaches covering different countries, languages, and participation areas, most of which never rise out of obscurity. No matter what tool is being used, information about actual implementations is often incomplete, distributed, or simply unavailable.

This poses a challenge that is twofold:

• On the demand side, practitioners often have very limited awareness of what’s available, what works, and what doesn’t, making it difficult to choose the right tool for the job.
• On the supply side, even some of the most innovative tools fail to get the exposure they need in order to gain enough traction to be able to validate their concepts and ideas through

ParticipateDB continues to grow.  While March and April were mostly about adding more content, we did manage to add one cool new feature earlier this month: ParticipateDB: Covering 23 Countries and Counting

Last week, Federal Computer Week published an op-ed they had invited me to write on the issue of crowdsourcing, public participation and how the former might be applied in the context of the latter: The outer limits to the crowd’s wisdom

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you know that this is something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around over the past few months, especially since the conversation on the web continues to be characterized by confusion about concepts and terminology. The article is a good interim summary of my efforts, and more aspects remain to be explored.

I would like to thank the many who have contributed to this discussion in the comments, via the NCDD mailing list, on GovLoop and elsewhere on the web. Sharing your thoughts so generously has certainly helped me clarify mine. Please keep it up!