The Participation Company
Possibly not of global relevance (yet), but since it is my home town I thought I’d give it a quick shout-out: Earlier today, Offenes Köln (Open Cologne) was officially announced. It’s a grassroots project by Marian Steinbach in Cologne, Germany that aims to make information, documents and data related to local government available (and accessible) to [...]
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Steven Clift just alerted me to a new report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government: A Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation (PDF), authored by Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University. I admit I haven’t fully read it yet, but a couple of issues jumped out that I wanted to point out really quick. 1) Terminology [...]
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As an IAP2 USA Board member, I would like to take a short moment to plug the membership drive we kicked off in October and which will end tomorrow, January 31, at midnight: IAP2 USA Fall Membership Campaign: $99 Deal, Good for 99 Days! I don’t have the latest numbers handy, but it looks like we’re getting [...]
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In the second chapter from his upcoming book, Tom Atlee picks up the topic of learning in deliberation, something he has written about previously. It’s a thorny issue and generally applies to public participation as well. One problem, as I see it, is that quality deliberation requires informed participants, but properly framing the issue and creating the [...]
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As has been discussed intensively elsewhere on the web for the past several weeks and months, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act currently before Congress are ill conceived and, if passed, would have terrible consequences for the internet as we know it. At the heart of the matter is the question how [...]
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Over at Human Transit, public transportation planner Jarrett Walker points to yet another online budget puzzle, this one from Portland, OR and still ongoing: portland: balance the budget yourself Portland’s Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they’ve come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services [...]
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I’m probably the last person to see this, but the Canadian Government provides a comprehensive directory of consultations from various departments and agencies. From the English language version homepage: Welcome to the Consulting With Canadians site! The Government of Canada is committed to finding new and innovative ways to consult with, and engage Canadians. Consulting [...]
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Via Alex Moll on Twitter, I just came across OpenGov.gr, the website for the Greek Open Government Initiative. From the English language version: Opengov.gr has been designed to serve the principles of transparency, deliberation, collaboration and accountability and includes three initiatives: Οpen calls for the recruitment of public administration officials. Top level and mid-level openings [...]
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Last April, Stephen Buckley started OpenGov Metrics, a Google group about “the adoption and use of standard metrics for measuring progress in ‘Open Government’ efforts, i.e, to make government more ‘transparent, participatory, and collaborative’.” In light of the recent White House request for input regarding best practices and metrics, the group is currently being relaunched. If [...]
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Following their very successful 2010 budget puzzle (see our coverage here, here and here), the New York Times today has released another exercise, this time asking participants to identify their preferred approach to cuts to the U.S. defense budget. From their site: The Future Military: Your Budget Strategy The Pentagon has committed to $450 billion [...]
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Tom Atlee is working on a new book (due out this Summer). From an email he sent this morning: My new book – “Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics” – has gone through two rounds of editorial review. It is scheduled for publication in early August 2012. The publisher – North Atlantic [...]
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Reading Clay Johnson’s response to the White House’s request for input, I came across Roundtable, a new take on building an online environment for “meaningful conversations” currently under development. From their blog: At Roundtable we’re all about empowering meaningful conversations – between thought leaders, between friends, and between curated communities of strangers. There is little [...]
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Over the weekend, I came across you+me+politics, a new online dialogue research project coming out of New York University. From their about page: For our midterm assignment, our class was tasked with creating a conversational space centered on a specific piece of content. Our group decided to focus our work around something controversial. So often, online conversations [...]
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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 [...]
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Late last month, a new online community launched in Germany for people and organizations that “want to advance citizen participation in political decision making and shape the future of public participation” (translation mine). From the website (in German): Die Partizipation der Bürgerinnen und Bürger an gesellschaftlichen und politischen Entscheidungsprozessen ist ein elementarer Grundpfeiler der Demokratie: [...]
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Someone on Google+ shared this very cool feature the New York Times is offering on their website today. It’s a graphic interface for a poll asking readers to indicate their position in the current debate about the US debt ceiling: The Debt Crisis: What Should Congress Do? The instructions are given as follows: Congress must raise the debt ceiling by Tuesday [...]
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There’s an interesting new book project launching in Europe, scheduled to come out next year: Sustainable eParticipation Here’s the introduction: In the past 5-10 years, eParticipation emerged as a novel theoretical and practical domain, and it will further characterise the policy agendas of most industrialised and developing countries in the near future. By eParticipation, we mean [...]
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The Open Government Research and Development Summit is being held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington DC today and tomorrow. According to early reports on Twitter (here, here, here), the US Government is still actively pursuing the idea of creating an ExpertNet. Shelley Metzenbaum (OMB) is quoted saying that they hope to begin [...]
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Over the weekend, I learned about LexPop, a new wiki-based site that invites participants to collaboratively craft public policy on any issue (see their current project: Policy Drive: MA Net Neutrality). From the about page (emphasis theirs): Just as pamphlets were once the most efficient and effective means for distributing ideas, so too was this type [...]
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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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Conversations Elsewhere