Local Civic Challenge #1: Learn More About Your Local Gov

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Keiva Hummel

As a fantastic way to help folks further strengthen civic muscles, our friends at The Jefferson Center – an NCDD member org recently began offering a Local Civic Challenge. Every week they have a mini challenge for becoming more engaged with your local government and we will be lifting them up here on the NCDD blog. The first challenge is to get familiar with your local gov! Let us know in the comments below if you have additional great tips for getting familiar with our own city governments. We encourage you to flex those civic skills by checking out the post below, which you can find the original on the JC site here, and sign up to get it delivered to your email!

Local Civic Challenge #1: Get Familiar With Your Local Gov

To kick off the first week of the Local Civic Challenge, we want you to learn more about the ins and outs of your city government! That includes how it operates, who’s involved, and ways you can give feedback. Once you’re done, you’ll be more familiar with how the system works, and you might even have some ideas on the ways things could be improved.

Do you want the Local Civic Challenges delivered directly to your inbox? Sign up here.

1. Locate your city’s charter

In the United States, city charters usually define the organization, power, functions, and procedures of local government. Not all states allow local governments to create their own charters, so double check this list before your search.

2. Find out if your mayor is strong or weak

This isn’t a comment on your mayor’s effectiveness (that’s a different conversation), but their level of authority on local issues. In a “strong mayor” system, mayors are directly elected, and can make appointments and veto legislation. Meanwhile, most “weak mayors” are elected from within the city council, and do not have veto powers or executive authority on most matters. Yours may not be entirely one or the other, either!

3. Give some feedback

What’s one thing you think your local government is doing well? What could they improve on, and do you have any suggestions for them? Make a list, then head to your city’s website to find who to contact. Most have phone numbers and email addresses for different departments, from parks & rec to public works, so you can reach out to the right people.

4. Save the dates

If you don’t want to miss upcoming upcoming public meetings, see if your city has an upcoming events calendar or schedule published online.

5. Follow and like

Does your city or county use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? If you follow them, you can just catch important projects updates and events as you scroll! Plus, you can easily give feedback by messaging, liking, or commenting.

6. Get familiar with the voting system

Local elections in the US vary widely, but the most common are first-past-the-post voting and instant-runoff voting (often called ranked-choice voting). In first-past-the-post, the candidate with the most votes wins the election. In instant-runoff, voters rank the candidates in order of preference rather than voting for a single candidate. Ballots are counted and each voter’s top choice is recorded, and losing candidates (those with the lowest votes) are eliminated, and their ballots are redistributed until one candidate remains as the top choice of the majority of voters.

Was it difficult to find information about your city? Could your local government be more accessible? Let us know in the comments below!

Next week, we’ll explore how to join local offices, committees, and boards.

You can find the original version of this article on The Jefferson Center site at www.jefferson-center.org/local-civic-challenge-1-get-familiar-with-your-local-gov/.

Digital Engagement Census Deadline Extended to Mon. 2/26

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Keiva Hummel

Shared with us by NCDD member, Tim Bonnemann on our Main Discussion listserv, the ParticipateDB 2018 Digital Engagement Census deadline has been extended until this coming Monday, February 26th. The survey, hosted by several international partner organizations, seeks to identify the digital engagement tools that people have been using and for folks to provide feedback on their experience using the tools. You can read more about the survey in the post below or find the original on ParticipateDB’s site here.

ParticipateDB 2018 Digital Engagement Census

Today, after extensive prep work since we first floated the idea back in 2016, we are excited to launch the ParticipateDB 2018 Digital Engagement Census, a global practitioner survey aimed at improving our understanding of how technology is shaping community engagement today.

Over the next ten days, we hope to hear from people working in community engagement and public participation in places all around the world to answer two basic questions:

Which digital engagement tools or services have you used in your work lately?
What were your experiences and lessons learned?

Respondents who leave us their contact information will:

be among first to get their hands on the interim report (to be issued later this month),
receive an invitation to our exclusive follow-up event, and
receive an electronic copy of the final report free of charge (to be issued later in March).

We are exceptionally pleased to be partnering with a group of renowned international organizations and practitioner networks in this field. This project wouldn’t be possible without their support and guidance. Thank you!

Please head to the project page for more details. When you get a chance, please take a few minutes to complete the online survey and share it with your colleagues near and far: ParticipateDB 2018 Digital Engagement Census

You can find the original version of this article at http://blog.participatedb.com/2018/02/09/welcome-to-the-participatedb-2018-digital-engagement-census/.

Learn from Iceland’s Deliberative Constitutional Change

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Roshan Bliss

We want to encourage our NCDD network, especially those in California, to consider registering to attend an intriguing event this June 3 at UC Berkeley called A Congress on Iceland’s Democracy. This international gathering aims to explore new approaches to democracy inspired by the deliberative process that Iceland used to create its new constitution through a mock legislative process, and we’re sure many NCDDers would take a great deal of inspiration from participating.
You can learn more about the gathering in the invitation letter below sent to the NCDD network from our friends at Wilma’s Wish Productions, whose Blueberry Soup documentary on Iceland’s constitutional transformation we previously posted about on the blog, or learn more at www.law.berkeley.edu/iceland.

A Congress on Iceland’s Democracy

We are writing to extend an invitation to an event we believe would interest you. On June 3rd, 2017, we are hosting a citizen’s gathering at the University of California, Berkeley.

This event will translate participatory discussion into concrete action proposals by organizing as a mock legislative body to develop, debate, and decide on proposals for moving forward with Iceland’s constitutional change process. The event’s structure takes inspiration from the 2010 Icelandic National Assembly and Robert’s Rules of Order.

This powerful summit will revolve around discussions on how to address the current political and social climate in the United States, using Iceland’s constitutional reform process as an example. Iceland’s new constitution was written in perhaps the most democratic way possible and we want to model this methodology and learn how it can be applied in communities across the United States and the world. Our goal is to create a non-partisan environment that will foster new approaches to democracy and a shared vocabulary.

Many prominent political figures from Iceland will be in attendance as well as many of the authors of the new constitution. Furthermore, academics, activists, startups, and journalists from all over the United States and Europe are also coming to participate in this “Icelandic National Assembly” style event.

This gathering of citizens has piqued the interest of people from all around the globe – a mass exodus of Icelanders and Europeans are flying in just to sit at these tables because they know real change is possible through dialogic methodologies. We hope this historic gathering will shape the way Americans think about democracy with a focus on the impact that dialogue can have on the democratic process on a local as well as global scale.

This conference aims to achieve exactly what many of you have dedicated your life to – reimagining democracy and the way we converse with one another about tough issues. Your passion for dialogue and democracy in addition to your excellent facilitation skills makes me believe you would be a valuable asset to this event and an excellent voice for others to engage with.

We want a broad range of perspectives present at this event, so we invite you to register to attend this citizens gathering and participate in history as it is being made.

You can learn more about the Congress on Iceland’s Democracy at www.law.berkeley.edu/iceland.

2017 Frontiers of Democracy Conference Call for Proposals

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Roshan Bliss

We are happy to announce that once again, the Frontiers of Democracy conference organizers at Tufts University are accepting session proposals for their annual gathering. The 2017 conference will take place, as always, at the Tufts University downtown campus in Boston, this time from June 22nd – 24th.

The annual Frontiers of Democracy conference is a key gathering for our field that brings together leading deliberative democracy thinkers, public participation practitioners, and civic educators to explore ideas at the forefront of advancing democracy. NCDD’s leadership attends almost every year, and many of our members are staples of the conference, so mark you calendars to join us!

This year, the Frontiers gathering’s framing statement highlights the global rise in authoritarianism and the challenge it poses for continuing to expand democracy:

In 2017, the frontiers of democracy are threatened around the world. Leaders and movements that have popular support – yet are charged with being undemocratic, xenophobic, and illiberal – are influential or dominant in the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, South Africa, France, Britain, and the United States, among other countries. Meanwhile, many peoples continue to face deep and sustained repression. Social movements and networks are confronting this global turn to authoritarianism. Please join us for a discussion of what we must do to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy.

If this theme speaks to work you do or conversations you are eager to have, consider applying to host workshops or learning exchanges of your own! You can find the form to submit proposals by clicking here.

More details about the 2017 gathering are forthcoming, so make sure to check back frequently to the Frontiers of Democracy conference website at http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/civic-studies/frontiers for news and updates. We look forward to seeing many of you there!

Missed Our “Democracy Machine” Confab Call? Hear it Now!

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

NCDD hosted another one of our Confab Calls last week, and it was one of our most engaging calls yet! We hosted a conversation with the dynamic duo behind the concept of the “Democracy Machine” and had a very lively discussion with nearly 40 participants about the possibilities and practicalities of building a massive, integrated, deliberative online commons. You really missed out if you weren’t there!

Our presenters were John Gastil and Luke Hohmann, who have been working together to outline the technical, organizational, and collaborative process that would be needed to begin to link and integrate the many existing online D&D tools and platforms to create a functioning digital public commons that could facilitate sustained deliberative engagement and send ongoing feedback to both government and citizens to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. It’s hard to understate the enormity of this undertaking, but the Confab Call presentation and discussion with John and Luke was a great opportunity to wrap our heads around the idea and discuss its pros, cons, and potentials.

If you missed out on the call but still want to see and hear the presentation and conversation, then we encourage you to watch the recording of this Confab Call by clicking here. This Confab Call also had one of the most active discussions we’ve had in the accompanying chat box, and the great back and forth is also worth reading along with the presentation, so you can find discussion from the Confab Call’s chat by clicking here.

NCDD is proud to have supported John and Luke in taking another step in making the Democracy Machine a reality by hosting this first broader conversation on our Confab Call. As you can hear in the call recording, there is still a lot more work to do to make the idea feasible. But the next step that John and Luke have planned is to use their interactive session on building the democracy machine during our NCDD 2016 conference in Boston this October 14th-16th. They’ll be using the session to collect more feedback and ideas from leaders in the field and also to enlist collaborators for the future, so if you’re interested in being involved in their project, be sure to register for the conference today so that you can continue the conversation in person!

Source: Challenges to Democracy blog

If you are looking for a bit more background on the idea of a “democracy machine,” we encourage you to read about the basic concept in John’s recent post on the Challenges to Democracy blog or read his full essay, “Building a Democracy Machine: Toward an Integrated and Empowered Form of Democracy,” by clicking here.

Thanks again to John and Luke for relying on NCDD to help advance their ideas and for collaborating on this Confab Call! To learn more about NCDD’s Tech Tuesday series and hear recordings of past calls, please visit www.ncdd.org/confabs.

Democracy by Design

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The 8-page article, Democracy by Design (2014), by Nancy Thomas was published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 10: Iss. 1. Thomas puts forth, Democracy by Design, which offers the framework for evolving democracy into one that is more robust and truer to the core tenets of the concept of democracy. This framework has four major foundations in order to have a better democracy: active and deliberative public participation; freedom, justice, and equal opportunity; an educated and informed citizenry, and; effective government structures. It was co-created by Thomas, the Democracy Imperative, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, the Campaign for Stronger Democracy, the Kettering Foundation, Everyday Democracy, CIRCLE, and the New England Resource Center for Higher Education.

Below is an excerpt from the article and you can find the PDF available for download from the Journal of Public Deliberation site here.

From the article…

American democracy works better when all citizens (referring to residency, not legal status) possess the knowledge, skills, social networks, and inclination, and have the opportunity, to address difficult public problems together.

In this essay, I make the case for connecting the kind of public engagement reviewed in this Special Issue with a broader reform agenda, what I will call Democracy by Design. It is a pragmatic and relatively simple framework for a robust democracy, consisting of four foundations: active and deliberative public participation; freedom, justice, and equal opportunity; an educated and informed citizenry, and; effective government structures. The language “by design” suggests a framework for democracy, not just disconnected mechanics, intentionally crafted and integrated for positive social consequences. I developed this concept, captured in the graphic below, as a road map for undergraduate education for democracy. Exploiting Thomas Huxley’s adage “learn something about everything and everything about something,” I propose that college students (and all Americans) should learn this framework or a version of it to fulfill their obligation to know “something” about how democracy works. And by the time they graduate, college students should know “everything” about at least one dimension of one of the four foundations (one “small box”).1 Democracy by Design is a work-in-progress, open to discussion, critique, and improvement.

Active and Deliberative Public Participation
Much has been written about the so-called crisis in civic life and the decline of social capital, of associations, trust, and norms that enable public problem solving. Robert Putnam’s compelling image of Americans “bowling alone” rather than in leagues captured concerns over declining engagement in faith communities, nonprofits, PTAs, labor unions, and the like. He and many others rallied civic leaders, policy makers, and educators and arguably spurred an industry concerned with measuring and improving civic life. Emerging around the more localized civic renewal efforts, grass-roots problem solving, such as the healthy communities movement and local crime prevention efforts. Old organizations (e.g., fraternal orders and women’s leagues) were replaced with issue-driven coalitions (e.g., child advocates and immigration organizations). Alongside these efforts and deeply embedded in the best of them has been deliberative democracy—informed citizens with diverse life experiences and perspectives coming together, exchanging viewpoints, deliberating choices, and collaboratively implementing fair solutions, with and without government involvement.
…
The challenge may be in knowing when to employ more deliberative versus more active approaches, or, stated another way, when to remain neutral. On this point, I would argue that advocates of public participation should never be neutral about the foundations of a robust democracy.

Freedom, Justice, and Equal Opportunity
Freedom to prosper and freedom from an overly intrusive government seem well-understood in American society, but I question whether the same holds true for other core American principles of justice and equal opportunity.
…
Power dynamics may persist because the dominant culture has projected its particular way of seeing social and political norms and systems so successfully that that view has become the natural order, even by those disempowered by it (Tong, 1989). This problem is stickier than overt oppression, individual bigotry, or discrimination. As a result, well-meaning people maintain the status quo, usually unconsciously, by going about their business without realizing the implications (Adams, et. al. 1997, 11).

We can’t be neutral about giving people an equal opportunity to participate in and shape the social, political, and economic systems that affect their lives. Advocates for active and deliberative engagement need to be attentive to power dynamics, structural inequality, and unconscious privilege. If we don’t, we risk becoming those well-meaning people who unconsciously perpetuate the status quo.

An Educated and Informed Citizenry
Few people question the value of quality public education, liberal and civic learning, free speech, an impartial press, and an attentive citizenry able to examine and critique information. Unfortunately, our public education system is not educating for citizenship.
…
Deliberation advocates lament their inability to get to scale, to make active and deliberative public participation the norm in American society. Imagine how much easier that task would be if students at all levels learned through discussion. Discussing controversial issues emerged in CIRCLE’s research as a high impact practice in civic learning at the K-12 level (Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2013). And studies show that students learn better through inquiry and discussion (McKeachie, 1994; Hess, 2009, 18). Everyday citizens without expert knowledge are capable of public reasoning. The task of engaging citizens would be easier if Americans developed the habits of active and deliberative citizens while in school and college.

Effective Government Structures

We need to change the way campaigns are financed, restore transparency and accountability to government, and flip power back to American citizens. At a conference in June 2014, Bob Brandon of the Fair Elections Legal Network lamented, “We have a system in which politicians select their voters rather than voters selecting their politicians.” Gerrymandering, long lines, registration problems, poorly formatted ballots, suppression efforts, and money in politics persist despite the tireless efforts of reform advocates. Only about half of eligible voters actually vote in federal elections (roughly 60% in presidential elections and 40% in mid-term elections).

Download the full article from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.

About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.

Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem

Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA

Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol10/iss1/art17/

Innovations in Am. Government Award Accepting Applicants

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We want to make sure that our members are aware of a great opportunity for recognition in public participation from Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation – one of our NCDD member organizations.

The Ash Center operates the Innovations in American Government (IAG) Awards Program and the Bright Ideas Initiative, both of which are aimed at recognizing creative and effective governance models and disseminating ideas about promising government practices or programs. We are positive that many of the programs and initiatives that our NCDD members work on every day would make great candidates for these honors, so we encourage you to nominate a program you know about or apply yourself!

The winners of the IAG Award are eligible for a $100,000 grant, and even the finalists are eligible for a grant of $10,000, so what do you have to lose? The deadline to apply is April 15th, so make sure you get started soon!

Both of these prestigious awards have a long history of recognizing leading innovations in governance. Here’s how the Ash Center describes the Innovations in American Government Award:

Since its inception in 1985, Innovations in American Government Awards has identified and celebrated outstanding examples of creative problem solving at the state, city, town, county, tribal, and territorial government level. In 1995, the Innovations Awards were expanded to incorporate innovations in the federal government. The Awards program accepts applications in all policy areas; from training employees to juvenile justice, recycling to adult education, parks to the management of debt, public health to e-governance, Innovations applicants reflect the full scope of government activity.

And here is how they describe the Bright Ideas Initiative:

…[I]n 2010 the Innovations Program launched a recognition initiative called Bright Ideas that serves to further highlight and promote creative government initiatives and partnerships so that government leaders, public servants, and other individuals can learn about noteworthy ideas and can adopt those initiatives that can work in their own communities.

Beginning with these Bright Ideas, the Innovations Program seeks to create an open collection of innovations in order to create an online community where innovative ideas can be proposed, shared, and disseminated.

For more details on eligibility requirements, selection criteria, or to apply for these awards, visit https://innovationsaward.harvard.edu/IAGAwards.cfm.

Good luck to all the applicants!

Good Engagement Can Be “Preventative Civic Health Care”

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

Long-time NCDD supporting member Larry Schooler penned a wonderful piece for the Challenges to Democracy blog run by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance & Innovation – an NCDD member organization – and it was too good not to share. In it, he points to the opportunity presented in the President’s recent call for more engagement and aptly compares our work to preventative health care for our democracy. We encourage you to read Larry’s piece below or find the original here.

Is The President’s Call For More Public Participation Within Reach?

This is America. We want to make it easier for people to participate.

Beyond the partisan divides around some of President Obama’s policy proposals lies a compelling thought: regardless of the policy outcome, give ordinary people safer access to the process. That is an achievable goal – as demonstrated by the many governments who have made it so.

For too long, government has made unrealistic demands of citizens when it comes to their participation. Initially, whole segments of the population could not vote or faced significant obstacles to registration – still an issue in some states. Meanwhile, the only choice many citizens had was to speak for no more than three minutes at a podium – often on live television, after hours of waiting, minutes before a vote.

At one city council meeting in Texas, a speaker at a public hearing asked (in a nearly empty chamber at 11 o’clock at night), “Will there be an opportunity to weigh in on this issue? “I believe you’re doing so now,” replied the mayor. “With any power?” she asked, to applause from fellow citizens and befuddlement from her elected officials.

At work, we don’t limit input to those who can make a speech right before we make a decision, and we shouldn’t impose that limit on the American people, either; that helps “the most extreme voices get all the attention,” as the President put it.

What do we expect when we ask citizens to sit as they would in church, court, or a college lecture, listening to elected officials opine from a dais on high? Only the bravest would openly and brazenly challenge a pastor, a judge, or a professor in those settings.

The changes in attitude the President describes may be hard for government to achieve, but that doesn’t prevent changes in process that would help produce rational, constructive debates, enabling us to listen to more than those who agree with us, and to give the average person more of a say. We should strive to ensure, after all, that those affected by a public policy decision can affect that decision. That’s not the case now in much of our country.

A multi-organizational coalition that included the American Bar Association, the National League of Cities, and the International City County Managers Association produced a set of tools to help make the President’s Dream a reality. Called Making Public Participation Legal, it sought to replace archaic regulations that drive governments to host public hearings rather than facilitate dialogue.

In cities across the country, governments have either replaced or complemented hearings with conversations.

Neutral facilitators help smaller groups of citizens with differing points of view talk to each other respectfully, with discussion guidelines that encourage people to respect points of view other than one’s own, focus on understanding rather than persuasion, and suspend judgment. Moderators even manage to get thousands of people into civil dialogue online through forums set up by local governments to discuss policy challenges.

Some communities even empower ordinary citizens to be the change they want to see in our process – by training them to host dialogue. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, citizen hosts from Portsmouth Listens held small conversations in people’s homes and resolved major political conflicts through constructive and structured dialogue.

Rather than expecting elected officials both to hold a point of view and to stay neutral among competing interests, many cities have empowered teams of citizen volunteers to facilitate policy discussions at cafes, schools, and houses of worship.

Perhaps most importantly, governments where these changes in public participation have taken hold have laid a solid foundation for change through guiding principles and, in many cases, dedicated personnel. Several organizations, including the International Association for Public Participation, have given governments templates for public participation principles, and more and more cities have community engagement coordinators, offices of neighborhood engagement, and the like.

Ultimately, this paradigm shift can yield more than just warmer feelings among Americans. Governments often spend millions dealing with the consequences of poor public participation – holding off-cycle recall elections, defending against lawsuits filed by aggrieved policy opponents, or even policing protestors.

In an age when we are trying to focus on preventive, ongoing health care rather than the much more expensive emergency room, shouldn’t we do the same for our politics?

Perhaps when Americans demand that their elected officials, from Congress to city council, give them chances to converse, rather than contend, we will achieve the President’s vision. Our civic health is ailing; most Americans don’t vote, let alone stay active in public life away from the ballot box, and many young adults are not leaving home with a firm understanding of civics or with the tools needed to engage in meaningful civic dialogue.

The cure will require all of us – and is well within our reach.

You can find the original version of this piece on the Challenges to Democracy blog at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/is-the-presidents-call-for-more-public-participation-within-reach/#sthash.jWbgAiMZ.dpuf.

Davenport Launches Tool for Evaluating Gov’t Engagement

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We were excited to hear the news last week that the team at the Davenport Institute – one of our NCDD member organizations – is launching a powerful new platform for government agencies to evaluate their own public engagement efforts and compare them to other cities or agencies. We commend the Davenport team on creating this needed tool. You can learn more about the tool’s launch in the press release below that we found on Business Wire, or read the original here.

The Davenport Institute Launches New Public Engagement Evaluation Platform

The Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy is pleased to announce the launch of a new tool to help cities and other local public agencies evaluate their public engagement efforts, the “How are WE Doing? Public Engagement Evaluation Platform.”

In a 2012 survey of California public sector officials regarding their views of public engagement, 85 percent of respondents said their “views on public engagement have changed since their careers began,” and 77 percent were “interested in hearing more about public engagement practices that have worked in other places.”

For almost a decade, The Davenport Institute has been researching, training, and consulting with public officials to improve the ways in which governments involve their residents in making tough policy decisions. This work has taken Institute leadership throughout California and across the country, learning about and teaching the latest techniques in effective participatory governance.

With a growing awareness of what constitutes effective public engagement, we continue to hear from many public leaders seeking a way to take a “30,000 foot view” of their government’s practices in this area. The “How are WE Doing? Public Engagement Evaluation Platform” is the product of these conversations, and of the committed participation of an esteemed group of California leaders.

It is designed to offer governments a lens through which they can evaluate their agencies public processes, and to give them the opportunity to apply for recognition of successful engagement. Cities, counties, special districts, agencies, and departments can apply for recognition at one of three levels of engagement:

Silver Engagement – the government is making genuine efforts to improve its engagement with residents and successfully meets at least 12 of the 20 criteria listed.
Gold Engagement – the government has successfully institutionalized resident engagement as part of its operational culture, meeting at least 15 of the 20 criteria listed.
Platinum Engagement – the government is a leader in the engagement field, earning this designation by meeting at least 17 of the criteria listed.

“How are WE Doing?” also offers a way of gathering data on how governments across the state, and eventually around the country, are doing collectively in their attempts to involve residents, data the Institute will make available to all participants in the platform.

The Davenport Institute would like to thank the following Advisory Council members who devoted their time and expertise to developing this platform:

Artie Fields, City Manager, City of Inglewood
Rod Gould, City Manager, City of Santa Monica
Ken Hampian, City Manager, City of San Luis Obispo
Dennis Donohue, former Mayor, City of Salinas.

To learn more about “How are WE Doing? Public Engagement Evaluation Platform” visit the homepage here or view the platform here.

For more information about The Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University, visit http://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/davenport-institute.

You can see the original version of this announcement on Business Wire at www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160215005664/en/Davenport-Institute-Launches-Public-Engagement-Evaluation-Platform.

Adding Finesse to Online Engagement Transitions in Gov’t

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We encourage our members to check out this post from NCDD organizational member the Davenport Institute and their Gov 2.0 Watch blog on the ongoing transitions that local governments are making toward more online and responsive engagement – an important trend for our field to keep tabs on. Read more below or find the original post here.

Gov 2.0: Still A Head Scratcher

Eric Gordon of Governing’s City Accelerator lays out the challenge and opportunity that technology presents for public engagement:

This gradually building expectation that government should be responsive to residents is connected to much larger social trends: increased distrust in public institutions, a culture of connectivity prompted by the social Web, and increased expectations of social and responsive systems (think of all those apps in your pocket). In short, technology is motivating new expectations in customer service, and government is being called upon to meet those expectations.

Recalling the journey newspapers like the New York Times made into Web-world in the late 1990s, he compares governments’ situation vis-à-vis technology today:

The big problems of e-government or Gov 2.0, despite not being fully realized, are relatively straightforward – take what is done offline and shovel it online so it can reach a baseline of efficiency. There is huge value in this, just as there was value for newspapers in initially moving content online. But the challenge now is getting beyond the shovel, and being able to recognize and confront that underlying mutation. We need to understand anew what people’s expectations are, what networks they exist within, and where and how people are empowered to take action. As the call to “do engagement” grows ever more intense, it is imperative that we not automatically reach for the shovel, but instead reach for the tool that’s right for the job (which may in some cases include a shovel).

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