The Participation Company
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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Announcing that this was going to be a weekly segment on the blog may have been a bit premature (some weeks are just too busy while others are too slow), but let’s get back to presenting some of the interesting conversations we’re getting into elsewhere around the web, shall we? Last week, David Eaves (whom [...]
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Late last week, a new consultation was announced in Europe: Digital Agenda: Commission launches consultation on net neutrality A consultation on key questions arising from the issue of net neutrality has been launched by the European Commission today. It covers such issues as whether internet providers should be allowed to adopt certain traffic management practices, prioritising [...]
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Update 07/06/2010: Apparently, the site isn’t new at all (new to me, though). My bad. Still… nice work! Once again, the UK leads the way and shows us what’s possible… The newly launched TellThemWhatYouThink.org is a website that promises to bring citizens a lot closer to the consultations that affect them. From the website: We collect government [...]
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Gütersloh, Germany-based Bertelsmann Stiftung, one of Germany’s largest foundations, just launched vitalizing-democracy.org, the theme site for their 2011 Reinhard Mohn Prize. From the welcome post: Welcome to our platform! On 23 June 2010, the Bertelsmann Stiftung launched this website in order to search for prize-worthy projects for the Reinhard Mohn Prize 2011. With the forthcoming prize in [...]
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And now for something fun: talking about participation — more often, with more people, and in ways that allow more people to tune in. That’s the idea behind This Week in Participation (TWiP), a new program we just launched. Here’s what it’s about: This Week in Participation (TWiP) is kind of like an internet radio [...]
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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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A few days ago, a new site was launched that helps track activity across the 23 federal agencies that are using IdeaScale for their consultations on Open Government: OpenGov Tracker This webpage makes use of the IdeaScale API to aggregate data for all agencies which are making use of that platform. USDA and Health and [...]
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As was already mentioned at last week’s Open Government Directive Workshop event in DC (see video, starts at around 1:14:20), the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced it will offer IdeaScale to federal agencies free of charge in order to help them comply with the tight deadlines presented in the Open Government Directive. From the press release: [...]
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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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Now that the Open Government Directive is finally out, it’s been interesting to sift through the reactions and read what people think about it. As several people have noted (here, here), the Open Government Directive’s immediate focus — at least quantitatively — seems to be much more on transparency than on the other two pillars, [...]
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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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Steven Clift points to this public notice by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Comment Sought On Moving Toward A Digital Democracy (PDF, 172 KB) From the introduction (emphasis mine): In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), Congress directed the Commission, in its development of a National Broadband Plan, to include “a [...]
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I just heard about two upcoming online consultations at the federal level that might be worth keeping an eye on. First, the Department of Defense (DoD) Web 2.0 Guidance Forum. From their site: The Department of Defense (DoD) Web 2.0 Guidance Forum is a new initiative to solicit input from the public that has been [...]
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