The CitizenTools Resources Search at right includes results — courtesy of Google Coop — from the following sites and pages.
Latest 70 Links
sort alphabetically- Full Circle Associates (Nancy White)Communications, planning, and connected solutions for a changing world
- Elluminate - eLearning & Collaboration Solutions ::Go beyond web conferencing with web, audio, video, and social networking solutions for 21st century education and training. Welcome to unified learning and collaboration.
- NCDD’s email discussion lists - LISTS.THATAWAY.ORGare open to everyone involved in dialogue and deliberation work (not just NCDD members). Our discussion lists foster networking, information-sharing and collaboration within the growing dialogue and deliberation community
- Public engagement in national decision-making offers support to government openness and transparency agenda and the Big SocietyWe have just published a Sciencewise-ERC insight paper by Involve looking at the public’s views on engagement in national decision-making. The paper suggests that inviting members of the public into structured spaces for holding dialogue on complex policy issues is an important contribution to the Government’s move towards a more transparent and open way of governing and the Big Society.
- Social Web StrategiesDavid Armistead is a consulting strategist and thought leader focused on the use of social media in business and community development. He has extensive consulting experience including work at Coopers & Lybrand, Laventhol & Horwath, and independent consulting, with past client work at firms such as First Chicago and Northern Trust banks, Fulbright & Jaworski law firm, Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor manufacturers, Tyson and Campbell Soup food processors, and government entities including the US Bankruptcy Court, the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin and Travis County Housing Authority.
- Tribuni Plebis... (Los Angeles)Tribuni Plebis comes from my work with planning activists since early 2003, when I visited neighborhood councils and learned how local leaders worked under the new Charter to improve their community. For years I've worked with the USC Civic Engagement Initiative to chart the evolution of the neighborhood council system.NPP team Many readers will recognize me as a regular at meetings and Saturday morning events for LANCC, PlanCheckNC and the Citywide Alliance of Neighborhood Councils. (I'm pictured at left with my fellow USC researchers.) I continue to learn how you and your neighbors make change. With Tribuni Plebis I draw on my experience in the field to help you share experiences and disseminate the knowledge that you've gained. Tribuni Plebis would not be possible without neighborhood leaders and stakeholders who share their experience with me.
- Living in the age of the Groundswell | Open Parenthesis
- More than $: Insights from the Case Foundation-White House gathering on prizes, challenges and open grantmaking
- Collaborative Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, now available under GPLA software companion to a 30+ year-old CIA research methodology, Open Source Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) will help you think objectively and logically about overwhelming amounts of data and hypotheses. It can also guide research teams toward more productive discussions by identifying the exact points of contention.
- Govts need well-defined social media strategy - Internet - News
- Reconciling Social Technographics and 90-9-1
- Find Your social media (for government)State and local governments: Showcase your social media adoption and see what your peers are doing. Government and elected officials: Promote your social media activities and increase your followers. Citizens: Get connected with your local government officials and activities.
- Fred StutzmanFred Stutzman is a Ph.D. candidate at UNC's School of Information and Library Science, where he studies social media. He is the co-founder of the identity management service ClaimID.com, and the designer of the productivity software Freedom and Anti-Social.
- LocalGov 2.0 - examples of social media and local government in UK and beyond
- Granicus - Streaming Media for GovernmentIt is the first software-as-a-service platform that helps local, state, and federal governments manage content and deliver rich-media to citizens, easily and at a low cost. Keep citizens engaged and informed by sharing meetings or events through a convenient web portal. It’s easy to use, fast to deploy, and can be managed from anywhere at anytime.
- POPVOX - constituent communicationsFor all of their promise, Web 2.0 tools have so far provided little upside for Congress. Unverified petitions, Facebook comments and Tweets from non-constituents (people outside the congressional district or a Senator’s state) are no improvement over stacks of form letters. Constituent communications are flooding and overwhelming Congressional offices at a rate of approximately 3,000 emails per day. The resulting logjam is not good for the public trying to express an opinion, and it’s increasingly inefficient for the advocacy groups and trade associations that work to get the attention of Congress to present their members’ positions. Popvox will verify, aggregate, and simplify communication with Congress on an open and trusted (and nonpartisan) common ground. Popvox is the first tool that starts with Congress, recognizing the distinct needs, incentives and institutional practices that affect the adoption of new technology.
- CivicEvolution - Transform your ideas into solutionsCivicEvolution helps you transform your ideas into solutions Whether you want to influence your community, your elected officials, or your club, you need more than a soundbite idea. Solution = Idea + Actionable Proposal + Community Support CivicEvolution's process of structured dialogue leads participants through the steps necessary to develop an actionable proposal, solicit public feedback, and build community support. Within each step participants engage in a process of dialogue, brainstorming, collaboration, and deliberation. Watch this video for more detail.
- A Basic Model for Forming a Network of Neighborhood Assemblies (SFO)
- CoLab Radio (MIT)MIT CoLab’s vision is for domestic and international communities to be democratically governed, provide the means for residents to generate decent livelihoods, and be clean, healthy, and environmentally sound. CoLab Radio describes how that vision happens step-by-step, story by story, in communities. It is a platform for the voices of those engaged in improving communities. You can see the list of places we currently chronicle in the right-hand column of this site. To talk with CoLab and the communities featured here, please post a comment on this blog, join us on Twitter, or seek direct contact by emailing colabradio@mit.edu. We want to hear your ideas.
- Unleash Your Inner Lobbyist: Annotate Bills Like a Pro - BusinessWeekEver have a yearning to mark up pending health-care legislation like one of those high-powered lobbyists or a duly elected representative of the people? Now’s your chance — and there may even be a real, live congressman at the other end, absorbing your advice.
- Craigslist creator tries to bring initiative out of the shadows - Nextgov
- ReJurnoThis blog’s been a long time coming. It’s all about solutions and looking forward. No more bemoaning the demise of the news industry. The Web provides so many more opportunities for journalists to better serve their communities and to do better storytelling that the focus in ReJurno is how people are making that happen, on small and large scales, and how to help more people to do that. ReJurno is organized into the daily (mostly) blog and the tabs across the top, which cover in depth the foundation of my approach to Webworld, formed by many hours of practice, discussion with many colleagues who are much smarter than I am about this, and my students.
- Learning how to lobby Congress | Planting LiberallyLobbying Congress from a position of strenght means we need to encourage Senators to vote for something, not against something. Lobbying with the benefit of online organizing means that we have the capability to include vast numbers of people in the lobbying process, in a way that is entirely unprecedented. Just as progressives learned how to massively expand the battleground and to engage lots and lots of people in an electoral campaign using web-based technology, I think progressives need to learn how to massively expand the conversation around important pieces of legislation, and to engage lots and lots of people in the effort to lobby Congress.
- The Root, Branches, and Fruit of Government as an Open Platform | OpenPlans
- BBC News - Should we trust the wisdom of crowds?
- Web 2.0 Programs in Local and State Government (Public Technology Institute)PTI is embarking on a year-long research project to develop best practices in the field of Web 2.0 and civic/social networking and citizen engagement in local and state government.
- Interagency Collaboration Practices | IBM Center for the Business of GovernmentDevelop and implement overarching, integrated strategies to achieve common objectives. Formalize coordination mechanisms to overcome organizational differences Develop a well-trained workforce Share and integrate information across participating agencies.
- Beth S OffenbackerThe research website of Beth S. Offenbacker, Ph.D. She is a public engagement researcher, educator and practitioner.
- More Budget Consultation, Budget Dialogues and Participatory Budgeting! | Delib Blog
- So What Difference Does it Make? Mapping the Outcomes of Citizen Engagement. (Research for Development)This paper is based on the work of the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, and presents the results from a meta-case study analysis of a non-randomised sample of 100 research studies of citizen engagement in 20 countries. The full report, and a 4-page Executive Summary, are attached. Key findings and practical implications from the study are outlined. The findings provide important and new evidence of the contributions that citizen engagement can make to development and state-building, filling an important gap in the literature. By mapping over 800 observable effects of citizen participation through a close reading of this pool of case studies, the authors create a typology of four democratic and developmental outcomes, including the: • construction of citizenship; • strengthening of practices of participation; • strengthening of responsive and accountable states; • development of inclusive and cohesive societies.
- Deloitte Review | Geeks, Tweets and Cash - A conversation with Riley Crane of MIT Media Lab
- Tracking the tech that will make government better - O'Reilly RadarWill crowdsourcing and next-generation data mining tools enable the federal government to find innovative solutions to grand challenges and reduce fraud? Last week, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security held a hearing on "Transforming Government Through Innovative Tools and Technology" that looked at the potential for technology to improve government transparency and accountability. The first part of the hearing featured testimony from Daniel Werfel, controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management within the Office of Management and Budget, and Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). You can view their written testimony and archived webcast at Senate.gov.
- A starter for mobile phone services ...The enthusiasm for mobile phones is great, but it seems that a breakthrough and massive adoption of mobile services is yet to come. Nevertheless, in comparison with personal computers, mobile phones will still make a big difference, particularly in developing countries. Why is this?
- CivSource (The Source For Civic Leaders)CivSource is dedicated to providing timely, actionable coverage of the state and local landscape. At CivSource we bring you the latest news from around the country on state and local politics, management and business. We aim to provide state and local insights to a broader audience, across levels of government, the private sector, media and everyday readers. State and local is the engine driving politics, business and everyday lives. Our coverage will span a broad array of areas and we hope our readers find value in the diversity of our content. CivSource will focus much of its attention on the issues facing public CIOs. Information technology case studies, procurement news and best practices for state, city and county government will be explored at a glance and in depth. We’ll also profile the movers and shakers of state and local government IT – from innovative leaders in the public sector to prominent system integrators in the private sector.
- Santa Cruz • Community Suggestions for Fixing the Budget Crisis in Santa Cruz
- Trusted Advisor Associates LLCinterested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime?
- Gamepocalypse NowAdvances in technology will soon make all of life a game. Or has it happened already?
- Engaging Emergence | Peggy HolmanWhat does it take to face disruptions and invite others to join you to realize new possibilities? If you are seeking effective principles and practices for working with change and the unexpected, then you’ve come to the right place! With so many organizations, communities, and fields of endeavor facing unprecedented change, it helps to have some support for finding a promising pathway through change.
- Portland City Council adopts Public Involvement Principles
- poblishpoblish is a non-partisan service that aggregates and links political blogs, wikis, and debate maps, to create a searchable, real-time political knowledge base - to inform crowdsourced policy exercises, and policymaking in general. Poblish provides political intelligence, as the biggest cross-party aggregator in the UK by far, and the only one to apply the latest sentiment analysis to all articles. Its assertion flagging facility will also encourage readers to scrutinise the writings of journalists and elected representatives.
- Shaping Network Society (Philipp S. Mueller)Philipp S. Mueller is visiting professor for public policy at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the Erfurt University, tenured associate professor at the Graduate School for Public Administration and Public Policy of Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico (EGAP – Tec de Monterrey) and adjunct professor at the Salzburg School of Management. Until July 2007 he was director of the Master’s in Public Administration and Public Policy (MAP) and before 2003, senior research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. In his research, he focuses on policy making in network society. He has published the monograph, Unearthing the Politics of Globalization (LIT 2004), the edited volume, Criticizing Global Governance (Palgrave MacMillan 2005), and articles in major peer-reviewed academic journals.
- NCDD Resource Center » Best-of-the-Best ResourcesNCDD director Sandy Heierbacher’s biased opinion on what are some of the best books, guides and tools out there about dialogue, deliberation and public engagement. This list is kept intentionally short, but we encourage you to add your favorites below!
- NASCIO Awards 2010Successful information technology initiatives in state government deserve to be highlighted and shared in order to promote innovation, foster better government, and engage citizens. For the twenty-second consecutive year, NASCIO honors outstanding information technology achievements in the public sector through its Recognition Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Information Technology. Emphasis is placed on recognizing those information technology initiatives which exemplify best practices, support the public policy goals of state leaders, assist government officials to innovatively execute their duties, and provide cost-effective service to citizens.
- Social networking goes off the 'net'
- CityCamp: Gov 2.0 goes localCityCamp is an unconference focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. As an unconference, content for CityCamp is not programmed for a passive audience of participants. Instead, content is created and organized by participants and coordinated by facilitators. Participants are expected to play an active role in sessions. This provides an excellent format for creative, open exchange geared toward action.
- Enterprise Social Software Blog | Socialtext
- BookBlog - Adina Levin's weblog. For conversation about books I've been reading, social software, and other stuff too.This is Adina Levin’s weblog. Places to find me: Socialtext. Co-Founder, Product Management. Drive Less Challenge SxDSalon: a group blog on social interaction design
- Federal Agency Social Media Hubs | IBM Center for the Business of GovernmentAs federal agencies become more involved in the Web 2.0 world, they are creating “hubs” for their social media connections. Some provide access to specific media links, such as agency bloggers, others provide links to policy and training. The one that caught my attention was the new Social Media Hub created by Defense to help provide internal-to-Defense education, policy, and the ability for groups in Defense to "register" their social media initiatives in a central location. I looked at what other agencies were doing and about half of the major agencies seems to have some sort of landing page for social media. In some cases, these pages are for agency employees (like Defense), but in other cases they are targeted to their external customers (like EPA). Here's a starter list, with a focus on the largest agencies. Please feel free to offer corrections or additions:
- Public Participation in Health Policy in High Income Countries (Social Sciences - Elsevier)
- GetUp! - Action For Australia - www.getup.org.auGetUp.org.au is an independent political movement to build a progressive Australia. GetUp! brings together like-minded people who want to bring participation back into our democracy.
- OpenMeetings.org (Blog)OpenMeetings.org is a audio/video transcription and annotation platform built from entirely free and open source software. Launched in June 2009 and inspired by MetaVid (metavid.org), the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, OpenMeetings.org hosts and welcomes submission of conference recordings and formal proceedings. Project goals are to increase availability, discoverability, and liberty to comment on archived meetings as to improve the degree of informed civil discourse across a broad range of social issues.
- TheCityFix DC | Sustainable Mobility in the District of Columbia. Produced by EMBARQ - The WRI Center for Sustainable TransportTheCityFix.com is an online resource for sustainable transport news, advocacy and “best practice” solutions from around the world. It boasts a global network of writers and transport specialists, including engineers, entrepreneurs, urban planners and researchers, who explore environmentally and socially responsible ways to make cities better places to live.
- Sustainable Online Community Engagement - CommunitywebsCommunitywebs is part of a larger project Sustainable Online Community Engagement. These are a joint venture between The University of South Australia and the South Australian Government, through the Office for Volunteers. Communitywebs has been running since late 2001 and provides community organisations, which may have neither the skills nor resources, with a web presence by matching them with students who have the necessary skills and access to resources. Students communicate with community group members primarily through email to create a web site for the group, which can then be given to the group or hosted on www.communitywebs.org In 2006 this expanded to become Sustainable Online Community Engagement and include a wider range of activities and products. An important aim in this is that community groups develop the skills to maintain and update their new product.
- SOCIAL BY SOCIAL: Using social technologies for social impactSocial by Social is a project in eating our own dog food, and sharing that dog food, too! What does that mean? What we are doing: Mapping the terrain in the use of communication technologies for social change and collecting inspirational case studies of innovative good practices. Between 12 November 2008 and 19 January 2009, we are collecting, learning, sharing, tagging, discussing and aggregating stories (successful or not) of social change projects leveraging social technologies. We will use this space for sharing thoughts, ideas and learning; posting stories and videos; asking for help, opinions and insight; and otherwise connecting with you! All of our work is taking place using social media tools. So, not only are we scouring for case studies and lessons learned to help you out, we are a case study ourselves!
- Zanby: The evolution of community
- The town meeting meets the national dialogue -- Federal Computer WeekAmericaSpeaks is staging a national conversation about the U.S. economy that combines small-group discussions with video link-ups
- 4 strategies for nurturing a Web community -- Federal Computer WeekWeb 2.0 technologies can facilitate it, but fostering citizen engagement still depends on people skills
- Zanby.comZanby is enterprise, white-label, social software built around the idea that groups of people are the building block of communities. A chapter is a group in an association. A department is a group in a company. A neighborhood is a group in a city. Zanby Group Families provide associations, cities and companies – and other Group Families – a way to build, design and manage the exact working network they need. Based completely on the groups that form the whole.
- The City as Community-Building Platform « Foglio's Field Notes
- Useful games: Q and A about The Regeneration Game
- Designing for Civil Society: Regeneration game reaches China
- Healthy Democracy OregonHealthy Democracy Oregon is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization committed to strengthening citizen ownership of, and integrity to, the ballot initiative process. The organization is promoting the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR), an innovative reform to provide voters with clear, useful, and trustworthy evaluations of statewide ballot measures. Healthy Democracy Oregon was formed in early 2007 by Tyrone Reitman and Elliot Shuford - colleagues from the University of Oregon's Public Policy Master's Program. While in graduate school in 2003, Reitman and Shuford's studies focused on methods of citizen deliberation and democratic reform policies. Reitman and Shuford debated the merits of different reform ideas, including the Citizens' Initiative Review—an idea Shuford had recently learned about.
- Watch the new initiatives experiment at conference center | statesmanjournal.com | Statesman Journal
- Introducing Crowdmap – The Ushahidi BlogWhen the Ushahidi platform was written as an open source project in 2008, the vision was to have a platform that any individual or organization could easily deploy in any situation. While providing the software for free to anyone to install on their own servers has worked well so far, we have realized that there was a need to rapidly deploy Ushahidi without any required technical acumen in the shortest amount of time possible. The answer to this challenge has been Crowdmap. Crowdmap is a service provided by Ushahidi with all the benefits of Ushahidi out of the box but with nothing to install. It takes all of five minutes to get a vanilla deployment up and running on crowdmap.com subdomain. You will have full administrative access to your deployment, just as you would if you installed it yourself. You will have the ability to choose themes, edit categories, solicit reports, just as you would if you had a server administrator get your deployment up and running. Crowdmap will even accept
- CommunityMatters 2010A four-day conference of novel tools and solutions, instructive discussions and hands-on experiences for citizens and community builders. more Stay tuned for announcements on CommunityMatters'10® conference sessions, keynote speakers, networking opportunities, registration deadlines, special events and more.
- GSA official: Government transparency still faces hurdles - Nextgov
- Two Mideast States Say They Will Block BlackBerry - NYTimes.com
- San Francisco Community Congress's BlogThis blog contains our framing documents and “provocative papers” for the Economic Development Summit of the New Deal for the City Community Congress. It is your opportunity to read in advance what the working group has been developing, to comment on proposals, and to record the process of developing a progressive platform for San Francisco.
- Dig Up Political Influence | Poligraft (Sunlight Foundation)Poligraft is a website and utility that creates an enhanced view of the people, organizations and relationships described within political news stories, blog posts and press releases. To search the underlying records or download the data in bulk, see our companion site Transparency Data. Poligraft uses Calais for identifying and tagging the people and organizations in all searches performed.
- eGovMon - eGovernment MonitorA massive digitalization of public services is underway. The main challenge in this development is to ensure that the new online services effectively address the real needs of the citizens, businesses and governmental agencies. A system to monitor this development can give a better understanding of how to build good online service for citizens and enterprises. The eGovMon project is developing methodology and software for quality evaluation of web services, in particular eGovernment services, concerning four areas: * Accessibility * Transparency * Efficiency * Impact Additionally eGovMon will provide a policy design tool based on simulation models.
A list of all sites and pages searched is stored at Del.icio.us. Please send me your suggestions.