New EPA Rulemaking Gateway: Building a Public Participation Calendar

Published by Tim on February 19, 2010 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

For some time, I’ve been suggesting the creation of a national public participation calendar and project directory as a key component of the Open Government Directive:

Based on this post on NextGov, it looks like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving in that direction: EPA Web site paving the way to transparency

As more agencies deploy online score cards that publicly chart the progress of specific missions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Web site for tracking rulemaking could be a model, some government transparency activists say.
EPA launched its site, the Rulemaking Gateway, on Thursday to inform the public of the status of high-priority regulatory actions, such as proposals to control greenhouse gas emissions in heavy-duty vehicles and revise vehicle fuel economy labels.
[...]
EPA has committed to releasing rulemaking plans earlier than in the past. As soon as an agency regulatory policy officer determines it is appropriate to start developing a rule, information will be posted on the gateway, officials said. A regulation could appear on the site months or even years before a file is created on the governmentwide rule-tracking site Regulations.gov.
[...]
The gateway is tightly tied to Regulations.gov to increase public participation in the rulemaking process, said Madia, a federal regulatory policy analyst at the group.
[...]
The EPA Web site will show updated proposals monthly, as decisions are made. Time-sensitive information, such as announcements about public meetings, will be refreshed daily.

You can check out EPA’s new Rulemaking Gateway here.

Things are starting to look really interesting…

Including the Excluded, March 2-4, 2010

Published by Tim on February 18, 2010 in Events. 2 Comments Tags: .
Following some peer recommendations (here, here), I just signed up for Including the Excluded – The 2010 Stakeholder Engagement Online Conference, March 2-4, 2010:
About This Conference
Conference Theme: Equity, Accessibility and Social Inclusion
Effectively engaging diverse people or groups can be challenging; what works well for the majority may not work as well for some individuals or groups. This may especially be the case when we seek to engage people who have traditionally been excluded (for example, those subject to racial or ethnic discrimination), individuals with physical or mental disabilities, or persons who are socially excluded for a variety of reasons (such as people who are homeless or in a country illegally).
Because of history, social norms or other reasons, we may need different or distinct ways of approaching – and practicing – engagement with these individuals or groups in order to achieve success.
The Stakeholder Engagement 2010 Conference will focus on this critical area of engagement practice. Conference sessions will feature ‘lessons learned’ from around the globe focused on engagement for:
  • Social / Environmental Justice that engages historically excluded or underserved groups
  • Accessibility of people with physical or mental disabilities
  • Social Inclusion of individuals who are socially excluded by geography, personal habits and appearance, class structure, income, education or religion
Four kinds of conference activities will be offered
  1. Conference sessions (case studies, panel discussions, research presentations or field trips in Second Life)
  2. Conference networking events (incl. networking roundtables via audio/phone)
  3. Field trips in Second Life
  4. Conference community website

See the conference program (PDF) for details.

The conference is presented by PublicDecisions, a provider of online, “live” training, professional development events and conferences on stakeholder engagement.

Should be interesting both because of the topics and speakers as well as the virtual nature of the conference format.

NCDD members qualify for a discount. Use discount code “NCDDSpecial” when you sign up.

OpenGov Tracker

Published by Tim on February 15, 2010 in Metrics and Radar. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A few days ago, a new site was launched that helps track activity across the 23 federal agencies that are using IdeaScale for their consultations on Open Government: OpenGov Tracker

This webpage makes use of the IdeaScale API to aggregate data for all agencies which are making use of that platform. USDA and Health and Human Services also have public feedback sites; however they are not using IdeaScale and so unfortunately, are not included here. We encourage you to visit their sites, too!

Totals reflect all ideas including those submitted to the “Site Feedback” category. The “Top Ideas Across Government” section only highlights ideas in the categories of Transparency, Participation, Collaboration, and Innovation– eg., those related to the Open Government Plans themselves.

The site was created by Robbie Schingler and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, who both work at NASA.

This is a most excellent example of how participation tools can expose some of the quantitative information about an ongoing consultation (IdeaScale itself does some of the basics, though does not offer a convenient view across all 23 projects).

It’s especially nice to see how metrics are being made actionable. The section “Needs Some Love” lists those agencies that haven’t received a lot of input yet along with the call to action: “They need some love. Please help!”

This metrics dashboard is a nice addition to my tracking thread on GovLoop where we also try to keep an eye on qualitative data.

There is of course a lot more that the perfect dashboard could include but this is definitely a refreshing step forward.

Please leave a comment below if you know of any tools that offer this kind of eye candy out of the box.

Los Angeles Budget Challenge: Feedback from the Mayor’s Office

Published by Tim on February 9, 2010 in Participatory Budgeting. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .
A number of people commented on last month’s post about the Los Angeles Budget Challenge (both online and offline), and most seemed to share my concerns regarding the survey design.
Shortly after publishing the post, I reached out to the City of Los Angeles via the email address given on the site. I figured many readers might be interested in hearing their take on things, so with their generous permission, I’m sharing the reply below.
First, my email from January 7, 2010 (typos and all):
Hi,
I came across your e-consultation “Los Angeles Budget Challenge” via Twitter today:
http://labudgetchallenge.lacity.org/budgetchallenge/sim/budget_master.html
I have a couple of research questions:
1.  Is the site supported by any tools?
Does the site use any off-the-shelf tools (e.g. a service or software) to run the survey?  It looks like it’s custom-built using Adobe Flash but maybe you could confirm.
We recently launched ParticipateDB, a directory of online tools for participation.  I’ve added your project here: http://participatedb.com/projects/106
2.  Project duration and results
When did this consultation launch?  What is its scheduled end date?  And do you plan to share the results?
3.  Pre-defined outcome one question #12
WIth regard to the last item of the survey (Public Private Partnerships for Parking Structures/Meters), I noticed that it is impossible to balance the budget unless a participant chooses option 2 (”Yes. The City should pursue a P3 agreement for City parking structures only.”) or option 3 (”Yes. The City should pursue a P3 agreement for CIty parking structures and City parking meters.”).  Yet option 1 (“No. The City should not pursue any P3 initiatives.”) is still on the table.
Was this a deliberate design decision?  Or an oversight?  ;-)
Thanks,
Tim
Their response from yesterday, February 8, 2010:
Hi Tim,
We apologize that we didn’t get back to you more quickly.
To answer your questions:
1) The Mayor’s Office licensed the survey tool from the non-partisan non-profit organization Next 10, who in 2005 released the California Budget Challenge.  A handful of other municipalities and agencies have used the Challenge software to create budget survey type tools similar to ours.
http://www.nextten.org/
2) The Mayor’s Office launched the LA Budget Challenge on December 28th.  We will be analyzing all the results that come in by February 28th (2 month survey duration) but will most likely keep a version of the LA Budget Challenge up and running with modifications.  The results generated during the two month duration will be compiled, simplified, separated by planning region, and presented at a community meeting in early March.
3) We do understand that a respondent isn’t able to solve the entire $400 million deficit without choosing one of the P3 options that generates revenue.  The goal of the Challenge is to balance the budget, but a respondent isn’t required to solve the entire deficit in order to provide our office with feedback.
Moreover, this on-line exercise attempts to provide the public with information regarding a handful of real life budget decisions that the Mayor and City Council are faced with in the development of next year’s budget.  This tool obviously does not include all possible ways to balance the City’s budget.
That said, the Mayor does believe that a long-term concession agreement for the operation of 10 City parking structures is a viable means of generated significant one-time revenue for the City’s General Fund.  Similarly, the Mayor believes that a P3 agreement for parking meters needs to be thoroughly evaluated and may prove to be a feasible revenue generating strategy as well.
The Mayor’s Office simply wants input from the public on these P3 initiatives.  We understand that some respondents will not agree that these initiatives should be pursued and we welcome any feedback we receive.  Many respondents did not eliminate the entire deficit but have shared valuable feedback on the issues presented and on other budget related topics.
To date, we have received about 14,000 hits with about 3,600 full responses.
We appreciate your interest and questions.  Your comments will help shape the next iteration of this on-line survey tool.  We view the Challenge as a flexible input vehicle that will change and improve over time.
Please let us know if you have additional question.
Office of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa
Finance and Performance Management Unit
LABudget@lacity.org

Fair enough. In general, I think it’s great to see municipalities embrace these kinds of online feedback gathering mechanisms. And yes, there is still a lot of room for improvement both in terms of the technology used and the processes that are being applied.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Share Your OpenGov Forum Tracking Data on GovLoop

Published by Tim on February 9, 2010 in E-participation and Research. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

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 thought I’d share the raw data here on a regular basis so people can chime in and add any other insights they’ve come across.

23 agencies are using IdeaScale, which exposes the following in real-time:

  • Number of ideas
  • Number of comments
  • Number of votes
  • Number of registered users

So that’s nice. I’ll check in on the other two forums occasionally as well (here, here).

Aside from cold, hard numbers, I will be looking for examples that illustrate how various agencies are doing in terms of the other nine items on my list. Here it is again in short form:

  • Expectation management
  • Community ground rules
  • Level of convener involvement/participation
  • Quality of moderation
  • Quantity of participation over time
  • Outreach and diversity of participants
  • Conclusion and impact
  • Tech support
  • Project communications
  • Mood

I’m using this RSS feed for easy scanning but don’t expect to catch everything. Please share your impressions in the comments.

A set of screenshots will be available on Flickr.

I hope this will attract enough metrics junkies so that we’ll end up with a fairly complete picture in the end. It would certainly be great to see not only a breadth of data points but also to have a discussion about what should be measured and how. After all, the participation piece of the upcoming dashboard still hasn’t been designed in detail yet. Maybe this little exercise will create a few valuable insights.

No Better Time Conference Report Available

Published by Tim on February 8, 2010 in Events. 1 Comment Tags: .

The report from last year’s No Better Time conference is now available: No Better Time: A 2010 Report on Opportunities and Challenges for Deliberative Democracy (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Executive summary

In July 2009, more than 250 campus and community leaders came together at the University of New Hampshire to talk about the “deliberative democracy” field, the tide of civic change on campuses and in communities, and what those changes mean for the practice and teaching of democracy. No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners (NBT) was hosted by the Democracy Imperative (TDI) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), two organizations that work to promote best practices, research, and teaching for a strong democracy.

A number of factors made this conference timely: an historic election, increasing use of dialogue and deliberation in communities across the country, record-setting youth political engagement, a presidential administration that is experimenting with e-democracy to increase transparency and public participation, and a growing interest on campuses (without distinct ownership in any one academic department or administrative office) in teaching democratic principles and practices.

All of these developments seemed to highlight the need for more just, comprehensive, democratic systems and the need to educate and prepare citizens to be more effective participants in those systems. People working in these areas were asking questions about how to “embed” democratic principles and practices in the daily routine of campuses and communities.

The conference gave people a chance to make progress on these challenges as a field. The discussions seemed to coalesce around eight priorities for “embedding” democracy, and conference participants generated a number of plans, proposals, and new activities for moving forward in each area. For each of these priorities, we will give the context preceding No Better Time, summarize the conversation at the conference, and describe what has happened since.

Priority #1 – Rethinking what we call this work (see p. 7)

Priority #2 – Connecting deliberative democracy, advocacy and organizing, and social justice (p. 8)

Priority #3 – Preparing students more comprehensively for citizenship and leadership in a democracy (p. 9)

Priority #4 – Restoring higher education’s role as an agent for democracy and social change (p. 10)

Priority #5 – Fostering international exchanges and initiatives to advance global democracy (p. 12)

Priority #6 – Routinizing and democratizing evaluation and measurement (p. 12)

Priority #7 – Understanding and incorporating online tools for democracy and participation (p. 13)

Priority #8 – Working with the Obama Administration (p. 14)

From the email the conference organizers sent out this morning:

In response to the survey, many people expressed an interest in hosting a local conference like NBT.  So we created a “Step-by-Step Guide” that describes how No Better Time was organized. All of our work product is included, like those witty FAQs and clear instructions on leading a learning exchange.  This is available on line, at http://www.unh.edu/democracy/guidebook.html.
I’m starting to think we really need an appropriate event on the West Coast this year.