The Participation Company
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, [...]
{ 4 comments }
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 [...]
{ 6 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 9 comments }
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 [...]
{ 13 comments }
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 [...]
{ 4 comments }
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 [...]
{ 0 comments }
A number of organizations (listed below) are doing a survey to capture participant feedback from the recent Open Government Dialogue. From the survey introduction: On his first day in office, President Obama issued a memorandum to leaders of executive departments and government agencies calling for the development of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, that [...]
{ 0 comments }
I’ll be taking the red-eye to Boston tonight on my way to what looks like a great conference: No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners The conference is hosted by The Democracy Imperative and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. From their website: What are the conference’s objectives? Deliberative democracy has reached [...]
{ 4 comments }
On Monday night, the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Northern California chapter hosted a Mini-Symposium on “The Future of Public Participation” in San Francisco, CA. I had been asked to give a brief talk about social media in public participation. Having recently spent a considerable amount of time and effort monitoring and tracking various e-participation [...]
{ 2 comments }
While working on the previous post, I couldn’t help but think how valuable it would be for participants, researchers and everyone else interested if these high-level participation metrics were readily available in real-time on the site that hosts the discussion, rather than having to dig them up manually and deal with incomplete information, assumptions and more or [...]
{ 14 comments }
Phase 2 of the Open Government Dialogue has been under way for almost a week now. Following the brainstorm phase, which ran from May 22 through May 28 (see our coverage here, here and here), this discusson phase was launched June 3 and is being hosted by the Office for Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). The tool [...]
{ 3 comments }
As mentioned a few days ago, the past week saw the first round of the Open Government Dialogue, a three-phased e-participation initiative launched by the White House that aims to gather public input for the crafting of the Open Government Directive. From their May 21 announcement: Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for [...]
{ 5 comments }
About a couple of weeks ago, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) — in collaboration with a few other organizations in this field — launched the Public Engagement Principles project, an effort to craft a recommendation for the Obama administration as they work on the Open Government Directive. From the NCDD website: Get [...]
{ 8 comments }
I stumbled across New York Law School’s Do Tank today (via via via). From their about us page: About the Do Tank and the Democracy Design Workshop The Do Tank strives to strengthen the ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing software and legal code to promote collaboration. [...]
{ 0 comments }
Those who’ve been following this blog over the past few weeks have probably figured out by now that we’re working on something in the area of e-consultation, something that supports input gathering from large groups of participants. One idea we’re pursuing is to allow the creation of a digest layer during and on top of a general [...]
{ 0 comments }
There is, without a doubt, a plethora of online tools out there today which are commonly used for e-participation projects of all kinds and sizes — from the off-the-shelf discussion forum to the custom-tailored e-consultation solution, from the simple wiki to complex argument mapping (to name just a few). I have been tracking this space [...]
{ 4 comments }
While I was assembling my off-the-cuff analysis of input types on Change.gov, I felt compelled to revisit two existing facilitation techniques that help guide participation by adding to the process the kind of structure that I believe could work very well for large-scale efforts. First, Dynamic Facilitation, a method I first learned about at the 2006 National Conference on [...]
{ 7 comments }
Conversations Elsewhere