Cross Collaborate

Some Rights Reserved by Web2Expo at Blip.tv Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, presented his idea of cognitive surplus a couple of years ago, but it seems especially relevant to the current push toward open government, most notably by the Obama Administration but also by public agencies at [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]