Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
From the category archives:
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 used [...]
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Earlier yesterday via Twitter, I came across this paper from the December 2006 issue of the Electronic Journal of e-Government (a bit less recent, yet still valid today): On the Road from Consultation Cynicism to Energising e-Consultation (PDF, 144KB) by authors Simon Stephens, Paul McCusker, David O’Donnell, David R. Newman and G. Honor Fagan.
Abstract: A major [...]
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Here’s one reason why I believe Google Wave (or whatever similar service will emerge in the future) holds a lot of potential for the world of e-participation:
As Bengt Feil outlined in his excellent interim summary of our e-participation wave, one potential application for using Wave are small-group online dialogues or deliberations. On the web, these [...]
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Following their recent informal survey, Lucas Cioffi just shared a comprehensive list of arguments why requiring citizens to register on government websites with their real names may not always be such a good idea: Protect Anonymous Comments Online
Here’s the comment I just left:
Nice list of arguments.
I wonder what opportunities there are to design systems that offer [...]
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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 plan for [...]
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may well be one of the leading government agencies in the world when it comes to public participation. Their public engagement site offers a plethora of useful information including tools, definitions, case studies and much more. Their Public Involvement Network News electronic newsletter is another great resource.
A feature article in the [...]
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I finally got my invite to Google Wave a few days ago. It’s definitely one of the more interesting things I’ve seen in a while.
Over the past few months, I’ve talked to a number of people who had expressed interest in trying out Google Wave for the purpose of e-participation.
To provide a space where some [...]
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As I noted last week, I see widespread confusion around some of the key terms in the conversation about government 2.0 in general and participation in particular: public participation, crowdsourcing and “the wisdom of the crowds” — unless I am terribly mistaken, the three don’t mean the same thing and hence should not be used [...]
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Probably the most memorable presentation at the 2007 Community Next conference in Stanford was “The Patent-Pending skinnyCorp Method for Creating Online Awesomeness and Other Cool Stuff” by Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of skinnyCorp, makers of Threadless and other entertaining projects large and small.
As Kalmikoff pointed out in one of the stories they shared (starts [...]
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Session notes and related resources from the “No Better Time” conference at the University of New Hampshire back in July are now available for download on their resources page.
Measuring and metrics was a hot topic that was discussed at the following learning exchanges:
Embedding Deliberative Practices in Local Democracy (session notes, PDF):
This would need some further digging into, but lots [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere
