The Participation Company
The Christian Science Monitor last week featured an article from guest blogger Greg Michener, a Canadian currently based in Brazil, that explores how the Open Government Partnership “could provide the US another means to promote democracy and free trade”: The Open Government Partnership – a new direction for US foreign policy? (note: the article first appeared [...]
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On Wednesday, Umair Haque, well-known columnist and blogger for Harvard Business Review, shared a few thoughts on the then about-to-go-live Twitter town hall with President Barack Obama: AskObama Is a Meaningless Marketing Stunt His piece read roughly like this (selectively paraphrased for illustrative purposes): “… a tiny dose of digital dumbification… grumble grumble… a cynical [...]
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As part of the newly-launched Campaign to Cut Waste, the White House on Monday announced an initiative that aims to “get rid of at least half” of an estimated 24,000 federal websites. From a public participation perspective, here’s the part that’s interesting (emphasis mine): As one of the first steps of the Campaign to Cut Waste and as [...]
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I had a great time co-instigating the first CityCampSF last year, and wanted to give a shout-out to the upcoming sequel: CityCampSF Saturday, June 18, 2011 from 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM San Francisco Department of Technology Atrium 1 So. Van Ness Second Floor San Francisco CA RSVP: http://ccsf2011.eventbrite.com From the event description: CityCampSF is municipal employees, journalists, [...]
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Earlier today, a new UK government site launched which I’m sure will be very much worth watching. From the about page: What is Alpha.gov.uk? Alpha.gov.uk is an experimental prototype of a new, single website for UK Government, developed in line with the recommendations of Martha Lane-Fox’s Review. The site is a demonstration, and whilst it’s [...]
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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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Open Government through Participation: Designing Successful Online Consultations View more presentations from Intellitics, Inc. I had a lot of fun this morning presenting at the SXSW Future 15 session on Government and Technology. Thanks again to Julie Germany for the invitation. Ten minutes is not a lot of time to get into much detail though [...]
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As reported by Federal Computer Week last week, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently published a report for Congress that evaluates the first year of the Open Government Directive: The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress (PDF) From the summary: The 112th Congress may have interest in accessing information and documents from the [...]
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Lucas Cioffi (Co-founder and CEO, Online Townhalls) is leading an effort to organize a global series of Local Open Government Innovation Summits in May. From the wiki: Welcome Note These summits will take place between May 14-22, 2011. Organizing teams, led by people who want to improve their own community, have already formed to hold [...]
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Hordes of people are set to descend on Austin, TX for SXSW Interactive next month, and it appears quite a few of them are interested in government and technology, Open Government, Government 2.0 etc. So, why not arrange for a casual get-together? Please head over to Govloop and leave a comment to help us finalize [...]
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It took a couple of attempts (see here, here), but now it looks like web-based public participation will finally get some exposure at SXSW this year. Here’s the announcement: Future15 Lineup for 2011: Shorter is Better At the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival, we launched a series of short-form panel content called Future15s. These fast-paced sessions proved [...]
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With barely three days left, the ExpertNet online consultation is quickly drawing to a close. Like many others, I’ve been reading along with great interest and even made the occasional contribution. There are a number of key parameters that I believe are critical to understanding what ExpertNet is trying to achieve and how. As I pointed out [...]
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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 is one of those posts that’s more of a mental note to myself than anything else. Don’t expect to learn anything new if you’re following these conversations already. Over on GovLoop, the difference between Government 2.0 and Open Government is being discussed (probably not for the first, much less for the last time). I [...]
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Update 12/21: It appears that OpenEtherpad’s .com domain has expired. Please use the .org domain instead to RSVP for this event: http://openetherpad.org/opengovcgn When it comes to e-participation, Europe really has it going on. It seems hardly a week goes by that doesn’t see some kind of workshop or conference or other activity in that area. [...]
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Regular readers of this blog are probably well aware that when it comes to describing the process of bringing stakeholders into an organization’s decision-making process with the goal of making better, more sustainable decisions, we prefer the term public participation. I have previously shared what I consider to be meaningful and well-established definitions (here, here). And while it [...]
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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 [...]
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The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) just announced a series of regional one-day events for later this Fall. The Bay Area event is scheduled for Friday, October 29, 2010 at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. From the website: The events will build on what we learned in the past year and a [...]
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Update 07/06/2010: Apparently, the site isn’t new at all (new to me, though). My bad. Still… nice work! Once again, the UK leads the way and shows us what’s possible… The newly launched TellThemWhatYouThink.org is a website that promises to bring citizens a lot closer to the consultations that affect them. From the website: We collect government [...]
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