In Search of the Perfect Participant Briefing

May 15, 2010

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 process.
As [...]

Read the full article →

IAP2 Core Values Awards 2010 Call for Submissions

May 10, 2010

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) today announced submissions for their 2010 Core Values Awards are now open.  From the President’s email:

I am looking forward to reading the innovations in the 2010 Core Values Awards submissions. These awards are an opportunity to showcase what is leading the practice so that others experience, learn and [...]

Read the full article →

We’re Launching Zilino in Alpha

April 30, 2010

It took us a while, but we’re finally in the process of launching the first alpha release of Zilino, our new web application for online consultations. Zilino allows organizations (private, non-profit, government etc.) to engage their people (members, citizens, residents, other constituents etc.) in problem solving and decision making.
The prototype went live earlier in April and [...]

Read the full article →

ParticipateDB in GSA’s Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter

April 30, 2010

I was recently invited to write a short article about ParticipateDB for the Spring edition of GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications’ Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (PDF, 3.4 MB).
Here’s a quote that describes one of the challenges ParticipateDB tries to address:
The Challenge
While public participation is at the core of our democracy, e-participation, as it is commonly referred [...]

Read the full article →

Open Gov West San Francisco Meetup: April 12 in San Francisco, CA

April 3, 2010

Towards the end of last week’s Open Gov West conference/unconference in Seattle, WA a series of follow-up meetings on the West Coast was announced, the first of which is scheduled to happen in San Francisco, CA the week after next:
San Francisco OGW Meetup: April 12th 6-8 PM
We’re continuing the conversations from the Open Gov West [...]

Read the full article →

Open Gov West Revisited

March 31, 2010

The two-day Open Gov West conference (and un-conference) in Seattle this past weekend, organized by Knowledge as Power, brought together a diverse crowd of open government thinkers and practitioners. A number of private sector innovators, academics and non-profit leaders joined public administrators and officials from the Seattle area as well as those visiting from British [...]

Read the full article →

Let’s Tape Open Gov West!

March 24, 2010

As we’re gearing up for our trip to Seattle, WA to attend Open Gov West this Friday and Saturday, I saw Travis Kriplean on Twitter ask whether sessions will be recorded.
Here’s my plea:
I encourage every attendee to bring their audio, photo and video gear and help record as many sessions as possible. I find that [...]

Read the full article →

Review: Beginning With the End in Mind

March 23, 2010

This is a short review of “Beginning with the End in Mind: A Call for Goal-driven Deliberative Practice” by Martín Carcasson, PhD (CAPE Occasional Paper / No 2 / 2009 — PDF)
Carcasson’s essay on deliberative practice presents, in his words, “a conceptual framework to help practitioners more systematically consider both the short-term and long-term [...]

Read the full article →

Big Think Interview with Nicole Lazzaro on Emotion and Fun in Games

March 19, 2010

Well worth watching, another video on games and gaming (and fun, and emotion, and motivation etc.): Big Think Interview with Nicole Lazzaro: A conversation with the founder and president of XEODesign
Nicole is a leading expert on emotion and fun in games. Her job over the past 20 years has been “to make games more fun” [...]

Read the full article →

Introductions

March 18, 2010

In August 2009, our team from the Brandt School advised the City of Erfurt on their participatory budgeting project. The city had asked their citizens earlier in a survey which areas they find important, and the administration wanted to use the results of the survey as the basis for an internet-based [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →