The Participation Company
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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For the past three years (ever since attending “The Underlying Dynamics of Conversations that Matter”, a most excellent pre-conference workshop with Tom Atlee and Peggy Holman at NCDD 2008 in Austin, TX), I’ve been following the Group Pattern Language Project, a very exciting endeavor led by Tree Bressen, Sue Woehrlin and Dave Pollard and involving dozens of contributors from a [...]
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This morning, I was alerted to the relaunch of Participedia, an online resource that documents organizations, methods and projects in the area of participatory democracy. From the about page: Participedia harnesses the power of collaboration to respond to a recent global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance [...]
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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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Earlier this summer, I happened to come across an excellent new article on online deliberation design. Now that it’s out of draft mode, I can finally share it here. Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence (PDF, final working version) by Todd Davies and Reid Chandler is currently in press and will appear as chapter 6 in [...]
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Peter Levine points to an interesting research effort: OWS research [...] Thus I am very interested in Occupy Research, a wiki page that includes a research agenda, a survey instrument, a semi-structured protocol for qualitative interviews, guides for researchers, and even a sample release form. Doing this in a “wiki” style, so that anyone is [...]
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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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I’ll be heading out to Dayton, OH tomorrow to attend the Kettering Foundation’s Deliberative Democracy Exchange 2011: [...] This collaborative event is the Kettering Foundation’s annual opportunity to share our research and to get acquainted with people who have just learned about our work and are looking to learn even more. These research exchanges are also [...]
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Catching up on tons of good stuff in my feed reader, I just came across a publication by the Knight Foundation that was released earlier this month: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks In the full report, I found an interesting tidbit about the recent Give A Minute Chicago project (emphasis mine): “An [...]
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Another project worth mentioning that’s very much related to the ROI discussions that are happening elsewhere is the Making the Case campaign by the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2). It must have launched shortly after I last wrote about their efforts back in November of last year. From the site: Dialogue and deliberation (D&D) [...]
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It’s great to see the IAP2 Affiliates form in the US and Canada. IAP2 USA, where I serve on the Board, is making great progress, and Canada is only a few weeks behind us it seems. Anyway, I would love to go up to Vancouver for this one: IAP2 BC Chapter Spring Symposium May 19, [...]
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Last week, Dave Briggs, a long-time commentator at the intersection of government and technology and recently the founder of UK-based Kind of Digital, kicked off what has turned out to be a very productive discussion: The need for micro-participation (that’s the original blog post, though the majority of comments seem to have come in via Govloop). From [...]
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The Collaboration Project, an initiative by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), just released a new resource: Tools for Online Idea Generation: A Comparison of Technology Platforms for Public Managers The document is a follow-up to their previous introduction to online group brainstorming, which I thought was a nicely done primer for anyone just getting started with [...]
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This week saw an unexpected focus on wiki-based dialogue and deliberation. To round out the series, here’s a list of shortcomings or challenges I observed back in 2007/2008 when I was reviewing the examples listed yesterday. With regard to Politicopia (January 2007): One challenge I see with a pure wiki approach in this context is the fact that [...]
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Stephen Whitehead, researcher at London, UK-based New Economics Foundation (nef), recently alerted me to a new paper of theirs: Connected Conversations Reflecting on nef’s decade of experience in democracy and participation, this pamphlet argues that tackling the biggest issues, from climate change to social inequality, needs to start with small conversations between friends and neighbours. [...]
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In my previous post, I mentioned that wiki-based policy crafting has been tried before. Well, I thought what better opportunity to reach deep into the archives and dig up a few related examples from around 2007/2008 (including some that tried to tackle slightly different problems, such as issue or debate mapping, but still all fairly [...]
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About a week after I put out an open research request to help collect a list of participatory politicians, I remembered a post of mine from way back when that provides a great example of the kind of activity I’m looking for. This came up during the June 2005 ODDC face-to-face meeting on “Deepening Online Deliberation”, [...]
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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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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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