Category: civic engagement
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The New White House Office Of Public Engagement
President Obama made big news among the community engagement field when yesterday he announced the creation of the White House Office of Public Engagement. This is actually a re-tasking of the already-existing Office of Public Liaison, augmenting and building its role. The idea is to have a dedicated office at the highest level of government…
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Do Organizations Get A Failing Grade For Civic Engagement?
My good friend John Creighton has been working on an idea that outlines how civic life has changed fundamentally. Whereas we used to define civic engagement in terms of how citizens relate to institutions, there’s been a power shift away from that. The action is all happening as individuals relate to one another. That seems…
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Online Engagement Takes The Same Rules As Offline
Many local organizations are trying hard to engage their publics — whether to become more relevant, to improve a project, or to listen better and so improve overall operations. My good friend and colleague Dave Moore, has written a piece that outlines his “Six steps to Community Engagement and Action.” It’s a great list. As…
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What Theater Can Teach Us About Interactive Meetings
I enjoyed linking in to President Obama’s “Open For Questions” online town hall last Thursday. The format has much to recommend it, especially the fact that over 100,000 people cast over 3.5 million votes to pick the most relevant and useful questions. But, as I outline in this boring video, my immediate reaction was that…
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Using New, Widely Available Tools At The White House
The White House is experimenting with using a freely-available, “crowd-sourced” tool as part of the backend to the “electronic town hall” it announced earlier this week. You can go here to see it in action. The Town Hall is set for this morning. Here’s the White House blog post about it. The system is using…
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White House Meeting On Transparency
As some of my readers know, I am a peripheral part of the NCDD network. That’s the National Coaltion for Dialogue and Deliberation, a network run by Sandy Heierbacher. Sandy is one of the most impressive civic entrepreneurs I know, having bootstrapped NCDD into the pre-eminent collection of people doing work in this “field.” Sandy…
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Same Words, Different Meaning
My good friend Dave Moore has been working with schools and communities for many years, engaging the one with the other. He recently wrote an important article that is a meditation on all the different things people mean when they bring up “parental involvement” — you know, as in, We need more parental involvement.” He…
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My Remarks On Transparency, Openness, And Civic Participation
This afternoon, I am giving a talk to a number of visiting diplomats from francophone African nations. The theme of their trip is “transparency and openness.” I’ve been asked to kick off their stay here. Following is a slightly edited version of my notes. (I tried to make it readable.) Transparency And Civic Participation Talk…
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Millenials: Looking To The Left
My friend Peter Levine, who is one of the deepest and most engaging thinkers I know on trends involving youth and civic participation, is coauthor of an important new paper that was released on Wednesday at a New America Foundation event. I had the opportunity to attend and found it well worth my time. Titled…
Brad Rourke 