Category: innovation
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Our "Tech-Savvy Citizenry" Session
As many of my friends know, I’ll be leading a session with Joe Peters of Ascentum at the upcoming “No Better Time” conference on participatory democracy. The session I’m a part of is called “Tech-Savvy Citizenry.” Here is the session description: A tech-savvy citizenry: New media for public participation, policy deliberation, and social change Facebook…
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Social Innovators: Why It's Time To Move On
If you’re reading this, you may well be in the same field I am in. It goes by various names: civic engagement, deliberative democracy, dialogue, citizen participation, and more. The basic idea is that ordinary people have a lot more to say about self-rule than we often give them credit for. There are many of…
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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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How To Promote Your Art In Today's World: Trent Reznor Of Nine Inch Nails Gets It
Here is a great example of what Andrea Jarrell calls asking better questions. Kevin Rose (Digg founder) had set up an interview with Trent Reznor, founder and frontman of Nine Inch Nails. Like the White House’s electronic town hall,the questions are raised and voted on ahead of time by the Digg community. You could see…
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Choosing Between The Inbox And The Stream
Like it or not, the stream has entered the workplace. While this may fill some with anxiety, and others with derision, on balance it is a good thing. Since its use exploded in the late 1990’s, the email Inbox had dominated and controlled most professional people’s lives. It is a never-ending to-do list, created by…
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The New Anti-Panopticon
My friend Lars Hasselblad Torres (who may have the coolest name I know) pointed out a really fascinating project. It’s “The Intellectuals Circle” — a circular bench designed to encourage “a clear form of verbal communication without visual cues or theatrics between participants.” As it has been a long time since I’ve been a to…
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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…
Brad Rourke 