Tag Archive for 'Community'

What Is Community?

Published by Tim on September 17, 2009 in Dictionary. 0 Comments Tags: , .

If there was an award for most-overused term, I’m sure community would be a contender.

For future reference, here is one of the best definitions I’ve come across so far. It’s somewhat hidden in a blog post by Canada-based Myriam Laberge from a while back: Collaboration As A Living Emergent Co-Creative Process

A ‘community’ is created over time around shared purpose, language and meaning, and the development of shared values, reciprocity and mutual trust in the longer term from being and doing together.

Community doesn’t happen overnight. And it certainly doesn’t come out of the box with any online tool you might install.

An interesting relationship to point out is the one between community and participation. In my view:

  • Participation often happens within or across existing communities
  • Participation done right can have strong community-building effects
  • Participation without the slightests levels of (a pre-existing) community fabric is difficult to imagine
  • Especially for online participation, a lot of moderation and facilitation activities are often required that are commonly referred to as community management

Myriam will be in San Diego for the 2009 IAP2 annual conference next week, and I hope to get a chance to talk to her in more detail about this important interrelation.

Quality Participation Doesn’t Waste Participants’ Time!

Published by Tim on June 2, 2009 in Community, E-participation and Events. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Over the past few days, the site that’s hosting the Open Government Brainstorm has been overrun with off-topic ideas and spam (most noticeably, there has been an avalanche of requests to “release President Obama’s birth certificate in order to prove his US citizenship”). See this snapshot of the tag cloud I took yesterday:

Open Government Brainstorm: Obama birth certificate spam attack

Steven Clift just posted an idea that suggests a tried-and-true way of how to better deal with this situation:

Move Off-Topic Submissions – Add an Out-of-Scope button to move off-topic posts to their own space

Since a few people seek to dominate any public space hosted by government regardless of the topic, re-establish some equity by allowing participants to flag submissions as “off-topic.” With 10 off-topic votes, instead of deleting such posts, simply move them to a proper tab for all *who wish to see* can view them. An online consultation should make engagement more efficient. The online consultation manager should be able to freeze this feature should a minority of users attempt to game the system by flagging clearly on topic posts as off-topic.

Why Is This Idea Important?

When government spends tax dollars (or lends their support to partners like NAPA) to host structured sessions to gather online input, it is a waste of resources if relatively few individuals seek to hijack the public space for their pet issue which is clearly off-topic from the promised theme or agenda. Such submissions should be channeled rather than deleted (which would be a potential violation of the first amendment in what appears to be a legally public forum).

Here’s the comment I left:

Leaving off-topic ideas and spam unmoderated also forces those participants who come to this site with a sincere intention to contribute to dig through layers and layers of unrelated material. This makes participating more cumbersome and a lot less productive (and less fun). Any convener of e-participation effort of this kind would be well advised to being more mindful of their participants’ precious time. In that sense, moderation and community management become a courtesy.

Aside from off-topic discussions and spam, I’ve also noticed an increased use of foul language, general rudeness, and name calling.

I’d argue that taking a hands-off approach to managing an e-participation effort such as the Open Government Brainstorm (especially in light of these spam attacks) is a violation of a couple of rules laid out in the Core Principles for Participation that were released a few weeks ago (see the  expanded text for reference). For example, the third principle advises to avoid “hostile, disrespectful or stilted conversations,” (which, of course, doesn’t usually happen on its own without any management).

In my view, it is the convener’s responsibility to design and manage a process, online or offline, that maximizes each participant’s chance of having an impact, and there’s a cost involved in not doing so: By tolerating abusive behavior and by allowing the quality of the conversation to degrade, a large portion of the participants’ overall time and effort (which in large-scale efforts such as this one can easily exceed tens if not hundreds of person months) will be spent on low-quality, low-impact activities (e.g. browsing duplicate entries) when the real opportunity lies in enabling participants to share the best they got.

14 Facebook groups for the dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government and e-democracy community

Published by Tim on May 9, 2008 in Community and Resources. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

The following are a few Facebook groups we watch that deal with various aspects of dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government or e-democracy (membership numbers as of today):

  • C2D2 – Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (18 members)
    Community of interest on dialogue and deliberation. Conference held every two years.
  • Conversation Cafe (308 members)
    Conversation Cafes promote community, democracy and wisdom world-wide through generating millions of open, respectful public conversations.
  • e-democracy (346 members)
    For those interested in e-democracy, especially the efforts of E-Democracy.Org.
  • E-Demokratie.org (in German, 12 members)
    E-Government oder E-Verwaltung beschreiben die Darstellung von Regierungs- und Verwaltungshandeln. E-Government wird aber auch häufig synonym mit dem Begriff E-Demokratie (eDemocracy) verwendet. Im Detail muss dabei jedoch stark differenziert werden: so geht es bei E-Demokratie nicht nur um elektronisch gestütztes Regieren. Es geht um viel mehr, es geht um Legitimation, Partizipation und Öffentlichkeit.
  • ePractice.eu (97 members)
    epractice.eu is a good practice exchange scheme with a web portal, weekly newsletter, country factsheets, online library, practitioner profiles, events calendar and monthly workshops created by the European Commission for the professional community in eGovernment, e-Inclusion and eHealth. epractice.eu involves practitioners from all 27 Member States, EU-member candidate states and EFTA countries but others are welcome to join. The portal combines online activities with frequent offline exchanges: workshops, face-to-face meetings and public presentations. A large knowledge base of real-life case studies submitted by portal members is freely available. The Facebook extension is provided in order to bridge the gap between Facebook’s social and epractice.eu’s professional touch.
  • Everyday Democracy (53 members)
    Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center) is a national organization that helps local communities find ways for all kinds of people to think, talk and work together to solve problems. We work with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states, helping them pay particular attention to how racism and ethnic differences affect the problems they address.
  • Government 2.0 (205 members)
    A new governance construct is possible… Create it
  • I support participatory democracy! (395 members)
    This group is for people who believe that democracy only becomes meaningful when it involves its people in participatory decisionmaking processes.
  • ICT4Democracy (192 members)
    Gathering of citizens from across the world believing that Information and Communication Technologies can help in providing us with more and better democracy and are willing to do something about it … in their lifetime …
  • International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) (20 members)
    IAP2 is an association of members who seek to promote and improve the practice of public participation in relation to individuals, governments, institutions, and other entities that affect the public interest in nations throughout the world.
  • National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) (348 members)
    A group for those dedicated to solving tough problems with honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action. Join us if you agree with Einstein, that the problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
  • Participatory Budgeting (158 members)
    Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation of resources to more modest initiatives that confer voice during the development of the budget. This is a group for exchange of information among those interested in practices of participatory budgeting.
  • POLITECH INSTITUTE (European Center of Political Technologies) (112 members)
    POLITECH INSTITUTE is a not-for-profit international association (AISBL) and a European Center of Political Technologies located in Brussels, Capital of Europe, bridging public institutions, international institutions, governments, regional and local authorities, universities, research centers, think tanks, civil society and political leaders with technology actors for a better use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards the advancement of modern public governance and democracy.
  • The World Cafe (249 members)
    A group for practitioners of/people interested in the TWC.

Needless to say, most of these organizations maintain resource-heavy websites of their own.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but should give you a head start if you want to connect with people in this community via Facebook. If you happen to know of any additional Facebook groups in this area, feel free to leave a comment.

What is Public Participation?

Published by Tim on March 24, 2008 in About, Dictionary, Public Participation and Research. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Following a recent IAP2 Northern California chapter meeting, I came across this definition of public participation:

What is Public Participation?

Public participation is the process by which an organization consults with interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities before making a decision. Public participation is two-way communication and collaborative problem solving with the goal of achieving better and more acceptable decisions. Public participation prevents or minimizes disputes by creating a process for resolving issues before they become polarized. Other terms sometimes used are “public involvement,” “community involvement,” or “stakeholder involvement.”

We are currently working on our first product, a web-based software application for problem solving and decision making in large groups. To some degree, what we have in mind is a public participation engine (at least for those parts of an engagement project that can feasibly be run online).