Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
From the category archives:
Over the past few weeks, Melbourne, Australia-based Ron Lubensky has written an series of posts explaining the concept of a Citizens’ Assembly and defending it against unfounded criticism:
July 23, 2010: Open letter to Julia Gillard, Prime Minister
July 26, 2010: Assembled citizens make sense
July 26, 2010: Another good op-ed supporting Citizens’ Assembly about climate policy
July 26, [...]
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In preparation for the upcoming series of NCDD 2010 Regional Events (including the one right here in the Bay Area, October 29), Sandy Heierbacher (Director, NCDD) has asked for input on a question I know has been on the minds of many in the NCDD community for the past few years: “How can we best meld/combine [...]
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This is the third part of a series of discussion starters on contextual aspects of e-participation (part 1 dealt with Institutional Backing, part 2 with Advocacy and Leadership). Contributed by our student intern, they are inspired by his master thesis on e-participation.
Establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance, such as e-participation processes (or public participation processes in [...]
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The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) just put out a request for proposals to update their certificate program course materials and train-the-trainer program development.
The first of the two RFPs (Updating Course Materials, PDF) notes that the current training materials “are lacking in the area of social media techniques.”
Which brings up a few interesting questions:
What [...]
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I was just playing around with Freenode IRC (trying to set up a permanent #edem channel), when I came across their channel guidelines. We’re still drafting our community ground rules for Zilino, and I found these very applicable:
Channel Guidelines
IRC is a low-bandwidth method of communication, in comparison with physical presence. Many of the cues of [...]
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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 process.
As [...]
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As promised, I’ve been tracking the numbers from the ongoing Open Government discussions on a daily basis (follow the thread on GovLoop for details). We’re now almost three weeks into this initiative. Here’s a chart that shows how the numbers have developed since February 9 (a few days after launch):
Ideas: 993
Comments: 2,314
Votes: 13,747
Users: 3,898
Growth is [...]
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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 Consumer Focus [...]
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Following up on my list of ten things to monitor, I’ve started a thread on GovLoop: Monitoring and continuous evaluation of OpenGov forums
Here’s my initial post:
As part of my ongoing efforts to monitor the various feedback channels that have been launched as part of the Open Government Directive, I’ll be tracking some basic metrics. I [...]
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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 I noted [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere
