The Participation Company
Last week, I attended a conference call hosted by the Public Health Agency of Canada as part of the ongoing D&D Evaluation Project by the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2). On their resources page, C2D2 states: The C2D2 community asks, “How do we know – what is the evidence to demonstrate – that using dialogue [...]
{ 3 comments }
I had a great time today attending the first annual PACE conference in Peoria, AZ. Below are my slides from the closing panel discussion about the role of social media in civic engagement. Thanks to my co-panelist, Nina Simmons, for the pleasant collaboration. The Role of Social Media in Public Participation View more presentations from [...]
{ 3 comments }
Regular readers of this blog are probably well aware that when it comes to describing the process of bringing stakeholders into an organization’s decision-making process with the goal of making better, more sustainable decisions, we prefer the term public participation. I have previously shared what I consider to be meaningful and well-established definitions (here, here). And while it [...]
{ 11 comments }
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 [...]
{ 1 comment }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 11 comments }
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 [...]
{ 1 comment }
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 [...]
{ 7 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 7 comments }
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: [...]
{ 1 comment }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 3 comments }
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 [...]
{ 13 comments }
Following up on my recent post about Quora’s approach to anonymous postings, here’s an example of a related feature. Peak Democracy is a “non-partisan company whose mission is to broaden civic engagement and build public trust in government.” Their Open City Hall™ service is a monitored online public comment process that promises “order and decorum [...]
{ 3 comments }
Caroline Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and Francesca Polletta, Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at UC, Irvine, have just released the results of a survey they did in September/October 2009 and which garnered responses from more than 400 practitioners: The 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey: [...]
{ 0 comments }
As I suggested a few weeks ago, there might be a lot to gain if e-participation systems offered “more flexible ways of dealing with identity” than the one-size-fits-all approach that’s currently predominant: By giving participants better overall control of how much information they want to reveal about themselves (vis-a-vis the application as well as other [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 10 comments }
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 [...]
{ 0 comments }
Conversations Elsewhere