2010 Global Forum: The San Francisco Declaration on Direct Democracy

August 10, 2010

Last week, San Francisco saw the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, a five-day international event that included the two-day U.S. Conference on Initiative and Referendum.
Due to scheduling conflicts, I was only able to attend on two days and not for very long but made a few good connections nonetheless.
The San Francisco Declaration on [...]

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Reinventing Governance Conference: October 8-10, 2010 in Boulder, CO

August 8, 2010

Via the NCDD mailing list, I was just alerted to this upcoming conference. Looks interesting!
Reinventing Governance Conference
A conference to promote new forms of collaboration among community, business, and governmental leaders through engaged dialogue and case-study analysis.
University of Colorado and the Millennium Harvest House
Boulder, Colorado
October 8-10, 2010
Reinventing Governance will challenge people to learn from others, to share their [...]

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Programme for Government Consultation: What Was the Promise to the Public?

August 7, 2010

Following up on my earlier post, I was trying to find out how exactly the Programme for Government online consultation had been announced when it launched. When evaluating consultations, a lot depends on the commitment the sponsoring organization has made, their promise to the public.
I couldn’t find anything on the website (on a side note, it’s not [...]

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New Weekly Twitter Chat on Public Engagement

August 6, 2010

Beth Offenbacker of Public Decisions just announced they will be hosting a weekly Twitter chat on public engagement, starting two weeks from now:
Starting on Tuesday, August 17, PublicDecisions will begin hosting a weekly Twitter chat from 18:00-19:00 Eastern (New York) / 22:00-23:00 GMT on topics related to public engagement.  (Check your respective time zone at [...]

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The Ethics of Public Participation

August 5, 2010

It seems the topic of ethics and integrity in public participation is coming up more often these days (see my comments here, here).
Just for the record, these are the rules by which we at Intellitics abide.
First, we have IAP2’s Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation:

Public participation is based on the belief that those who [...]

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Programme for Government Online Consultation

August 4, 2010

Shortly after the newly-elected coalition government in the UK took office this past May, they launched a website that invited the public to comment on their Programme for Government (their policy agenda for the next few years). The site went live on May 20, 2010 and stayed open for feedback for about three weeks, during [...]

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Oldies But Goodies: A Comparison of Dialogue and Debate from 1993

July 27, 2010

The following comparison of dialogue and debate seems to have first appeared in the Winter 1993 edition of Focus on Study Circles: The Newsletter of the Study Circles Resource Center (now Everyday Democracy). Thanks to the Wayback Machine’s vast internet archives, a snapshot from 2002 (?) is still available today:
Comparison of Dialogue and Debate
Dialogue is collaborative: two or [...]

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Book Review: Open Government

July 26, 2010

Lathrop & Ruma (eds.): Open Government: Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in Practice. O’Reilly, 2010.
Years from now, people will look back at the Open Government movement and attribute its beginnings to the release of this book. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The movement has been live and at large since well before this [...]

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Conversations Elsewhere

July 23, 2010

Announcing that this was going to be a weekly segment on the blog may have been a bit premature (some weeks are just too busy while others are too slow), but let’s get back to presenting some of the interesting conversations we’re getting into elsewhere around the web, shall we?

Last week, David Eaves (whom I [...]

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What Is Public Participation?

July 22, 2010

We already have one very good definition of public participation in the archives, but for comparison’s sake, here’s the official IAP2 definition as per their training material:
IAP2 views public participation as any process that involves the public in problem solving or decision making and uses public input to make decisions.
Public participation includes all aspects of [...]

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