Public Outreach and Consensus Building Training Video
This is a federal Department of Energy training film designed for DOE project managers. Because its purpose is real-world training, it avoids sugarcoating most dimensions of a difficult process. As a result, it’s one of the best introductions to the overall principles of community involvement that I’ve found online.
Its main subject is the citizen planning [...]
The City of Santa Cruz Goes Online for Public Ideas
Video courtesy of Web 2.0 ExpoSF-’09 and O’Reilly Media.
Peter Koht of the City of Santa Cruz, CA, describes the city’s online method for gathering public ideas about how to handle a severe budget crisis. The platform is uservoice. Similar to the IdeaScale system used in the White House Open Government Initiative, it allows users to [...]
The Wisdom of Crowds, Collaborative Networks & Public Policy
Over the last few years, concepts like collaboration, the wisdom of crowds and collaborative networks have taken hold as innovative ways for involving large groups of people to help solve complicated public policy problems. However, the terms are often used so loosely that they’re in danger of being lumped together and, in effect, dismissed, especially [...]
Online Networks & the Future of Politics
Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum (PdF), gives an overview in this video of changes in politics and citizen engagement made possible by network technologies.
As described online, PdF is “an annual conference and community website about the intersection of politics and technology,” especially the way in which “[t]echnology and the Internet are [...]
