Tim Bonnemann's Blog (82)

This post was originally published on the Intellitics blog.

Just a quick note this morning to let everyone know that Intellitics is now officially open for business.

We're starting out focusing on two major areas:

• We're building …

ParticipateDB (http://participateDB.com) is a collaborative catalogue for online participation tools and one of the world's most comprehensive resources of its kind.

We finally got around to putting it under a Creative Commons license. Read yesterday's announcement here:

Creative Commons…

We're hosting a meetup next Friday in downtown Los Angeles for friends and colleagues in the area to show where we are with Zilino, our online participation app. We'll give a short demo, discuss the roadmap and hope to explore opportunities for collaboration:

Zilino Road Show Los Angeles,…

Over on the PEP-NET blog, they just announced a series of webinars for the week after next:

Get involved in the latest developments of eParticipation tools!

Policy analysts, decision makers as well as civil society stakeholders and other people interested in policy-making all have to cope with numerous arguments brought forward in…

The latest issue of Journal of Information Technology & Politics (Volume 9, Issue 3, 2012, pages 279-297) features an interesting article by Travis Kriplean and others: Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide (requires registration/payment).

Abstract:

Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its…

As I’m starting to prepare for my session on public participation ROI at the IAP2 North America 2012 Conference, I came across Standards of Public Participation, a guidebook developed by the Austrian government and officially adopted in 2008 in an effort to “help administrative staff of the federal government in…

Via this post by Anthony Zacharzewski over at The Democratic Society blog , I found the UK Government Code of Practice on Consultation (PDF), which I admit I wasn’t aware of.

The documents lists the following seven consultation criteria (page 4):

• Criterion 1 When to consult…
  
  

Cupertino, CA-based Apple is asking the public for feedback on its planned Campus 2 development project. 9to5 Mac has the story: Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer sends brochure to Cupertino neighbors inviting feedback on new ‘Campus 2′

Apple is currently…

Below are our three most popular posts in April:

• What Is Government 2.0?
• What Is Public Participation?
• New Research Paper Presents 30…

Also announced today was HelpMeConsult, another online resource for online consultations.

From the blog post:

The second lanch is a solo project. It’s called ‘HelpMeConsult‘ and is an independent guide to (formal) eConsultation. It contains details of the various solutions, legal matters and tips/tactics. So, just another data push? Wrong! We’re adding a premium content…

Simon Burall had a nice post last week, in which he asks what are “the two things you need to know about public engagement”. He quotes from a earlier article in The Guardian that gives a few examples (e.g. the two things to know about economics: 1. Incentives matter, 2. There’s no such…

I’ll be talking about “e-democracy: New Trends in On-line Public Deliberation” at City Forum in Austin this week:

City Forum is a planning and urban issues speaker series hosted by the Community and Regional Planning Student Organization (CRPSO) and the Community and Regional Planning Program (CRP) at the University of Texas at Austin. The bi-weekly speakers series is intended to broaden the curriculum in the CRP…

The nice thing about finally having a comprehensive event calendar in place is that now you can know in advance which conferences to follow each month. Here’s what’s coming up in March:

• ASPA 2012 Annual Conference (March 2–6, 2012 in Las Vegas, NV)…

For those interested in multi-lingual online dialogue, check out Free Speech Debate, a new project led by Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies at Oxford University.

The one-pager explains the project in-depth. In short, the site…

This just in via the IAP2 Canada newsletter:

IAP2 North America Conference 2012 – Call for Proposals

Welcome to the 2012 North American IAP2 Conference! We are extremely excited to be working with our partner organization IAP2 USA to bring you this event and hope you can join us September 30 – October 2, 2012 in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

You’re Invited

This call for proposals is for…

Thanks to a tweet by Evgeny Morozov I came across this new research paper by W. Ben Towne and James D. Herbsleb, published in the current edition of Journal of Information Technology & Politics (Volume 9, Issue 1, 2012, pages 97-115): Design Considerations for Online Deliberation Systems (subscription…

These were our three most popular posts in January:

• Response to White House Request for Input: What Are the Most Effective Web Tools for Public Participation?
• 2012 Event and Conference Radar…

Possibly not of global relevance (yet), but since it is my home town I thought I’d give it a quick shout-out:

Earlier today, Offenes Köln (Open Cologne) was officially announced. It’s a grassroots project by Marian Steinbach in Cologne, Germany that aims to make information, documents and data related to local government available (and accessible) to the general public by way of aggregating, enhancing and…

Steven Clift just alerted me to a new report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government: A Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation (PDF), authored by Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University.

I admit I haven’t fully read it yet, but a couple of issues jumped out that I…

As has been discussed intensively elsewhere on the web for the past several weeks and months, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act currently before Congress are ill conceived and, if passed, would have terrible consequences for the internet as we know it.

At the heart of the matter is the question how society should best balance the conflicting needs of copyright holders…