The Participation Company
In the second chapter from his upcoming book, Tom Atlee picks up the topic of learning in deliberation, something he has written about previously. It’s a thorny issue and generally applies to public participation as well. One problem, as I see it, is that quality deliberation requires informed participants, but properly framing the issue and creating the [...]
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The Collaboration Project, an initiative by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), just released a new resource: Tools for Online Idea Generation: A Comparison of Technology Platforms for Public Managers The document is a follow-up to their previous introduction to online group brainstorming, which I thought was a nicely done primer for anyone just getting started with [...]
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Now that the new year is already well under way, we wanted to take a brief moment to look back on 2010. Here on this blog, we’ve written extensively about public participation, examined its relation to crowdsourcing, and have monitored and reviewed a number of noteworthy Open Government efforts. With well over one hundred entries, [...]
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This year’s Future Democracy ’10 will address the issue of crowdsourcing in policy making, among other things. From the latest bulletin: The question of whether ‘crowdsourcing’ techniques – inviting open online comment from the public – are a meaningful way to develop government policy is one of the main topics of debate at this year’s [...]
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From an otherwise interesting post on Govfresh last week about the use of contests in citizen engagement: Collaborative innovation in open government: Is there an app for that? Could contests help us realize the vision of participatory democracy outlined by Thomas Jefferson, where citizens collaborate with government to solve the nation’s most difficult problems? The White [...]
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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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In what is turning out to be a truly fun excercise, This Week in Participation (our new little internet radio show) has meanwhile cranked out a couple more episodes: TWiP 2: Crowdstorming TWiP 3: Crowdsourcing in Urban Planning Both sessions came in at under 20 minutes each and together make for a nice follow-up to [...]
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This post is not a deep dive into the definition of crowdsourcing but rather a quick mental note for myself. Jeff Howe, who coined the term crowdsourcing back in 2006, offers this “white paper version” of a definition in the sidebar of his blog: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a [...]
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Richard Fahey has a detailed post up about an interesting crowdsourcing idea that has been proposed by the Conservative Party in the UK: £1m prize for citizen participation platform Earlier this week the UK Conservative party promised to offer a £1m cash prize to a person or team that creates an online platform that can be [...]
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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 [...]
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