The Participation Company
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 [...]
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In December, the White House issued a request for input regarding the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Their list of seven questions included one on e-participation. To jog your memory, here it is once again: What are the most effective forms of technology and web tools to encourage public participation, engage with the private sector/non-profit and [...]
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In a blog post the other week, Code for America helped promote the White House’s most recent request for input, asking: How do you measure participation? The post approaches this question with an understanding of “participation in its broadest sense”. Not to be too nit-picky, but that’s probably not the focused area of exploration I believe the [...]
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Over on Google+, Popvox CEO Marci Harris points to an article on The Hill from Friday that shows where the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is apparently headed with regard to public participation: Sen. Baucus seeks deficit-cutting ideas — but only from Montanans Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), one of the 12 members of [...]
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Via @demsoc on Twitter, I found this gem in Local Government Lawyer, a UK-based legal publication that focuses on lawyers working for and advising local authorities: Judge quashes one of first selective licensing schemes over “perfunctory” consultation Apparently, a local government in the UK had decided to implement certain changes to their housing regulations that were negatively [...]
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On Wednesday, Umair Haque, well-known columnist and blogger for Harvard Business Review, shared a few thoughts on the then about-to-go-live Twitter town hall with President Barack Obama: AskObama Is a Meaningless Marketing Stunt His piece read roughly like this (selectively paraphrased for illustrative purposes): “… a tiny dose of digital dumbification… grumble grumble… a cynical [...]
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As part of the newly-launched Campaign to Cut Waste, the White House on Monday announced an initiative that aims to “get rid of at least half” of an estimated 24,000 federal websites. From a public participation perspective, here’s the part that’s interesting (emphasis mine): As one of the first steps of the Campaign to Cut Waste and as [...]
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As reported by Federal Computer Week last week, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently published a report for Congress that evaluates the first year of the Open Government Directive: The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress (PDF) From the summary: The 112th Congress may have interest in accessing information and documents from the [...]
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Over on the Common Sense California blog, Daniel Klein writes: Calgary Public Engagement raises some questions (it’s a short post, quoted here in full): The City of Calgary, Alberta is launching a public engagement process for Business Planning. Read more here. This is an example of the need for a common definition of public engagement. Is [...]
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We know there are a lot of (online) tools for participation available today, and we find out about more examples of how they are being used almost every day. About three weeks ago, someone asked me if I knew of any politicians strongly committed to voter participation who “have started to use these techniques sincerely [...]
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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, [...]
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I’ve been invited to be a panelist at the PACE conference in Peoria, AZ next month: A Conference on “Authentic Public Participation” There are over 4.5 million voices in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. They’re getting louder…Are you listening??? What is Civic Engagement? What is authentic public participation? How can you get involved in your community [...]
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Regular readers of this blog are probably well aware that when it comes to describing the process of bringing stakeholders into an organization’s decision-making process with the goal of making better, more sustainable decisions, we prefer the term public participation. I have previously shared what I consider to be meaningful and well-established definitions (here, here). And while it [...]
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In preparation for the upcoming series of NCDD 2010 Regional Events (including the one right here in the Bay Area, October 29), Sandy Heierbacher (Director, NCDD) has asked for input on a question I know has been on the minds of many in the NCDD community for the past few years: “How can we best meld/combine [...]
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I had the distinct pleasure to attend all five days of IAP2′s Certificate Training Course in Public Participation last month (check their training calendar for upcoming training opportunities in your area). As I mentioned at the time, it was time well spent! As per the training materials, here’s what the three training units encompass: Planning [...]
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This is the third part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation (part 1 dealt with Institutional Backing, part 2 with Advocacy and Leadership). Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis on e-participation. Establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance, such as e-participation processes (or public participation processes [...]
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It seems the topic of ethics and integrity in public participation is coming up more often these days (see my comments here, here). Just for the record, these are the rules by which we at Intellitics abide. First, we have IAP2′s Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation: Public participation is based on the belief [...]
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Shortly after the newly-elected coalition government in the UK took office this past May, they launched a website that invited the public to comment on their Programme for Government (their policy agenda for the next few years). The site went live on May 20, 2010 and stayed open for feedback for about three weeks, during [...]
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I had heard of the DAD acronym before (decide, announce, defend) but was unaware of SCID until it came up during training last week. Here’s what SCID stands for: Solicit (ask stakeholders for input) Consider Ignore Decide Obviously, this is not good practice as it violates a number of public participation principles (mainly, you don’t ask [...]
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This is the second part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation. Part 1 was on Institutional Backing. Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis research. Some e-participation projects originate from within (or from outside) public institutions, but are not decided at the top. Initiators of [...]
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