Online tools and Citizen Engagement

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.

In a recent post on the AIR-L (air-l@listserv.aoir.org), Christopher D. Sessums asked about online technologies being used for public participation. Christopher is a doctoral associate in educational technology working in the School of Teaching & Learning in the College of Education at the University of Florida.

Here’s what I wrote to Christopher:

There’s a proliferation of online tools for public engagement, with still limited knowledge about what really works. The most often used tool for top-down public engagement, since the Obama Administration came to office, has been crowdstorming or ideation, tools like:

• http://uservoice.com/
• http://ideascale.com/
• http://sites.force.com/ideaexchange

Two collaboratively developed resources that are quite useful on this topic are:

• http://participatedb.com/ – including case studies
• and an engagement practitioners list of tools they use for this purpose

Finally, here’s just a smattering of examples of a variety of online public engagement:

• Minneapolis Seward Neighbors Forum Home
• The City of Vancouver’s Talk Green To Us
• The White House Live on Facebook
• Energy Choices: Speak Up for Change on Facebook
• The Maryland Budget Game
• Budget Puzzle:You Fix The Budget from the New York Times
• The Queensland Government’s Future Growth Challenge

[For what it's worth], I teach a workshop on this subject at Simon Fraser University, DLOG752 http://www.sfu.ca/dialog/study+practice/certificate.html

I’ll be using this space, at engaging.ly, to further explore deliberative democracy, digital media, and civic capacity building. I hope you’ll join me in this exploration.