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Judgement Day. How does your government want to be evaluated for “Sunshine 2.0” or your support of democracy online?

The national League of Women Voters has commissioned me via E-Democracy.org to draft a guide titled “Sunshine 2.0.”

In short, local Leagues will use this guide to evaluate their local government online efforts based on their support of democracy. Government themselves, academics, and the media may also use the guide to see how they compare with other communities or against the ever increasing expectations of the public.

To help gather input for the draft, I’d love your comments here (or via our survey) on what you think should be measured or part of the guide. Unlike many e-service focused or general web measures, this guide is specifically focused on democracy online (transparency, participation, collaboration, etc.). It will be a what-to-do and not a how-to-do guide.

To get the conversation going, here are a few of my draft top 11 “indicator” measures:

  • 3. Government has a uniform calendar of all public meetings and provides all meeting agendas online. (Bonus: Agendas include links to all meeting documents and are placed online as soon as they are distributed to public body members.)
  • 4. Most public meetings are webcast live in video or audio and available on-demand for at least one year. (Bonus: All public meetings are digitally recorded and placed online.)
  • 5. There is an easy to understand “get involved” or democracy section available from the home page. It explains the governing process, how to participate, and how to contact/connect with elected officials if you seek to change how something works (versus channeling a service question or complaint to the right department.)

By indicator measures, I am trying to suss out items that differentiate government attention to democracy online versus 90 easy to accomplish items mixed with 10 more resource intensive expectations.

See our full blog post at E-Democracy.org for all 11 draft indicators and more context on the drafting process.

So what do you think should be measured? (Imagine waking up a reading a headline in your newspaper about how great or poorly your government ranks or measures up. What do you wish they had really looked at that really mattered?)

For updates feel free to follow @democracy and @edemo on Twitter.

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