The Participation Company
When Give a Minute launched in Chicago back in November, I asked what impact participants would have. This recent article in Fast Company’s Co.Design seems to confirm my doubts: Looking for Bold Ideas to Fix the City, New York Turns to Crowd Sourcing In Chicago, the project, which ran from the end of November through [...]
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On Friday, the City of Calgary launched a large-scale citizen engagement project: Our City. Our Budget. Our Future. In February 2011, Council approved the engagement process for the facilitated review of core services and The City’s business planning and budget process. It is an extensive engagement process that will facilitate conversations with citizens, employees and [...]
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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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With barely three days left, the ExpertNet online consultation is quickly drawing to a close. Like many others, I’ve been reading along with great interest and even made the occasional contribution. There are a number of key parameters that I believe are critical to understanding what ExpertNet is trying to achieve and how. As I pointed out [...]
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Meine-Demokratie.de (German for my democracy) is a new directory of participation opportunities in Germany that launched a few days ago. The much-anticipated project describes itself as a central information hub for opportunities for political participation and allows users to find information about nearby projects and ways to participate. From the about page (translation mine): meine-demokratie.de [...]
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Someone just suggested a new Twitter hashtag for a certain participation-related topic. They are becoming so many, I thought it might be a good idea to list the ones that we’re trying to follow (some more than others): #edem — All things e-democracy and e-participation #epartizipation — German for e-participation #epart — E-participation #publicengmt — [...]
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This just in via the Open Government Directive Google group! The US General Services Administration (GSA) is looking for input on a proposed ExpertNet platform. Draft Concept for Government-Wide “ExpertNet” Platform and Process To Elicit Expert Public Participation in Response to Government Questions AGENCY: U.S. General Services Administration. ACTION: Notice; request for public comment. SUMMARY: [...]
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Since I last mentioned it in September, quite a bit of progress has been made towards starting up the new IAP2 USA: the application to become an IAP2 Affiliate was approved by the International Board in November, the blog has been seeing about ten posts per month and regular comments, and both individuals and organizations are beginning to [...]
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Give a Minute Chicago is a new web and mobile application that asks citizens in the greater Chicago area to submit ideas about what would encourage them to walk, bike or take public transportation more often. Here’s how CEOs for Cities, initiators behind this project, announced it on their website earlier this month: Give a Minute for [...]
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Over on Facebook, the Kettering Foundation asks with regard to the Times’ Budget Puzzle: What do you think: are budgeting exercises like these what we would call “deliberative choice work”? If not, how are they related? For a definition of what Kettering means by choice work, we turn to the ever-competent NCDD resource center and [...]
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The New York Times’ Budget Puzzle has been getting quite a bit of buzz over the past 48 hours. Here’s what I wrote in an email to the NCDD mailing list yesterday: What I find particularly interesting about this implementation is that it comes with a very large number of viable combinations that would all result [...]
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Update 11/14: For more background, see this accompanying NYTimes story: O.K., You Fix the Budget Yesterday, The New York Times launched Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget, an easy-to-use online budget simulator that challenges participants to balance the US federal budget both short and longer-term. From the website: Today, you’re in charge of the nation’s [...]
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The Institute for Local Government (ILG) today launched a new email newsletter that looks quite promising: Welcome to the inaugural issue of Perspectives on Public Engagement and Local Government, an electronic newsletter from the Institute for Local Government (ILG). We hope this occasional e-newsletter will be of interest to local officials as well as other [...]
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The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), in an effort to better cater to local member needs around the world, is currently making some changes to their governance model. Part of this process will see the emergence of a new national organization in the US (until now, there were only a dozen or so local [...]
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The other day, someone on Twitter passed along this announcement about a new budget consultation in Seattle, WA: I admit it doesn’t take a lot more to get me interested, so I clicked right through. Here’s a bit of a checklist I usually apply when I scan online consultations such as this one (listed in no particular [...]
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Three interesting threads to highlight this week: For the second time, NCDD ran a “featured member” post and attracted a few good questions and answers: Today’s Featured NCDD Member: Healthy Democracy Oregon Over on the NCDD Forum, Matt Leighninger asks (great discussion, to be continued): Better to convene, or to aggregate? (and how?) My own [...]
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Reading up on the Knight Foundation’s Technology for Engagement Inititative as they’ve just announced their first round of five projects to receive funding, I came across Boston, MA-based Engagement Game Lab. From their mission statement: The Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College is devoted to forging a place for games in urban civic life. The [...]
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Just a few threads to point to this week, a couple of which prompted me to highlight IAP2′s core values and code of ethics: Andrea di Maio covers a report by The Guardian on Programme for Government, I point out that this was not crowdsourcing and reiterate the list of possible reasons why this effort failed [...]
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Beth Offenbacker of Public Decisions just announced they will be hosting a weekly Twitter chat on public engagement, starting two weeks from now: Starting on Tuesday, August 17, PublicDecisions will begin hosting a weekly Twitter chat from 18:00-19:00 Eastern (New York) / 22:00-23:00 GMT on topics related to public engagement. (Check your respective time zone [...]
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Lathrop & Ruma (eds.): Open Government: Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in Practice. O’Reilly, 2010. Years from now, people will look back at the Open Government movement and attribute its beginnings to the release of this book. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The movement has been live and at large since well before [...]
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