The Participation Company
I’ve previously written about the importance of expectation management as an essential piece to successful public participation. With Zilino, our goal is to support the project organizers in managing participants’ expectations from beginning to end. Specifically, we want conveners and facilitators to be very transparent about the level of influence participants can reasonably expect to have on the decision making [...]
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The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) today announced submissions for their 2010 Core Values Awards are now open. From the President’s email: I am looking forward to reading the innovations in the 2010 Core Values Awards submissions. These awards are an opportunity to showcase what is leading the practice so that others experience, learn [...]
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Via the Public Decisions blog (co-organizer of the Including the Excluded online conference we’ll be attending), I just found out about a new research effort by Involve, a UK-based not-for-profit offering public participation consulting and services: Quantifying the Value of Engagement: A call for case studies Dear Colleague, Involve are embarking on an ambitious project with [...]
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Now that a whole lot of agency.gov/open websites are live and many agencies have indeed set up a ”mechanism for the public to [...] [p]rovide input on the agency’s Open Government Plan” it’s time to figure out what to watch out for over the coming weeks and months in order to evaluate the success of these initiatives. As [...]
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Over at Sunlight Labs, they have some design suggestions today around how federal agencies should approach their new /open website sections with regard to data. Here’s the comment I just left (pretty much the same point I made on the OSTP blog a few weeks ago when they were seeking input on an Open Government [...]
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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 From the brochure (PDF, 588KB): Dear Fellow Global Citizen, We invite you to [...]
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Richard Fahey has a detailed post up about an interesting crowdsourcing idea that has been proposed by the Conservative Party in the UK: £1m prize for citizen participation platform Earlier this week the UK Conservative party promised to offer a £1m cash prize to a person or team that creates an online platform that can be [...]
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Being eagerly awaited by many in the field, the Open Government Directive was released this morning: Open Government Directive (PDF, 84 KB) Here’s a summary of snippets that deal with participation and engagement: Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that their government can make policies with the benefit of [...]
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The other day, I mentioned on Twitter how I sometimes wish there were a glossary of the key terms and definitions that guide our conversations around participation. With the Open Government Directive expected to be released within a few weeks, one challenge remains that people don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they discuss participation and [...]
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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 [...]
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As I noted last week, I see widespread confusion around some of the key terms in the conversation about government 2.0 in general and participation in particular: public participation, crowdsourcing and “the wisdom of the crowds” — unless I am terribly mistaken, the three don’t mean the same thing and hence should not be used [...]
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I just came across this project today (a sure sign I need to refactor my RSS reading habits). From their about page: Background Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry declaration. We feel the [...]
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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 [...]
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The White House Office of Public Engagement just shared in an email the agenda for the phase 2 discussion about citizen participation, which is scheduled to start Wednesday, June 10 over on the OSTP blog: As we wrap up the transparency conversation with a final posting about information access and the Freedom of Information Act tomorrow, [...]
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Back in February, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), along with a number of other established associations and organization in the field of dialogue, conflict resolution and public participation, launched a collaborative effort to craft a set of principles for public engagement that would inform the Open Government Directive currently being worked on by [...]
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44: The Obama Presidency, one of the Washington Post’s blogs, today came out with a new monthly feature where they’ll have a group of five experts (for today, that’s Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, Jon Henke, and David Weinberger) examine the new WhiteHouse.gov website: Grading WhiteHouse.gov Excerpt: For all the innovations of Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov — yesterday, officials [...]
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Over the past few weeks, there has been an interesting discussion over on the main NCDD discussion list about “pseudo-dialogue” and “pseudo-civic engagement” and the need for some sort of quality assurance guidelines for the public participation efforts that the new administration is bound to undertake. The discussion touches upon many principles and critical success factors [...]
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About a couple of weeks ago, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) — in collaboration with a few other organizations in this field — launched the Public Engagement Principles project, an effort to craft a recommendation for the Obama administration as they work on the Open Government Directive. From the NCDD website: Get [...]
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A few days after the launch of the new WhiteHouse.gov website, President Obama issued a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which announced that the new administration … is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public [...]
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Following a recent IAP2 Northern California chapter meeting, I came across this definition of public participation: What is Public Participation? Public participation is the process by which an organization consults with interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities before making a decision. Public participation is two-way communication and collaborative problem solving with the goal [...]
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