Reflecting on Public Participation in Our Time
At Vancouver Change Camp in June 2010 I hosted an open space discussion on the characteristics of quality online engagement. About 20 people from non-profit, government, business and other sectors participated. Here are the most important messages our group developed, starting with “Good quality online engagement has many of the same qualities of face to face participation”.
Susanna Haas Lyons brings together citizens and decision-makers to create better policy on issues that matter most to the public. For over eight years, she has worked on some of North America’s largest and most complex citizen engagement projects.
Deliberative theory is relatively isolated from the direct experience of deliberation practitioners. To address this problem, some heavy-weight academics spoke to facilitators of small-group deliberation on public issues to gather their ideas about deliberative norms. Here’s some nuggets from “Norms of Deliberation”.
I’ve been participating for a while now in listserves about public engagement for strong, healthy democracies. One topic that sparks my passion is the role of digital media in creating sites of civic participation. Here’s one of my recent contributions.