Visualizing change
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February 28th, 2005 by Alex
Friends Ben Banky and Linda Rae pointed me to a web site with amazing panoramas of Vancouver’s changing urban landscape, 1978 to 2003. It’s a terrific example of how somewhat abstract issues like urban planning can be given an immediate and apprehensible visual meaning.
It’s also a great example of the wealth of resources that can be used to enhance public consultation — if they’re effectively deployed. This set of images could be a great tool for stimulating public discussion of the city’s plans. And implicitly, that’s the goal: after all, they were put online by the city’s planning department. But all that’s offered as a feedback mechanism is an e-mail address at the bottom of the page — without any questions or context for giving feedback.
I’d love to see a resource like this one harnessed to a more concerted consultation effort. It could be a great catalyst for debate and discussion on the city’s future.
A quick view of e-consultation
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February 22nd, 2005 by Alex
I just came across a very succinct take on the advantages of online consultation. It’s from a 2003 paper Beyond Civil Society: Public Engagement Alternatives for Canadian Trade Policy (PDF) by Josh Lerner. Here’s how he summarizes the case for e-consultation:
Online public deliberation applies the principles of public deliberation workshops to the Internet. It uses interactive new technologies to facilitate open online discussion and deliberation. Online deliberation transcends e-government – rather than simply allowing government to deliver online services, it enables a two-way dialogue through which the public can help shape government policy. Likewise, online deliberation is distinct from online consultation – while the later aims mainly to collect public input, the former encourages the public to critically discuss different policy options and promotes “preference formation rather than simple preference assertion. Read more…
Is podcasting the death of discourse?
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February 19th, 2005 by AlexAt the Northern Voice blogging conference, Tod Maffin offered his vision of podcasting, (in brief: audio blogging). Tod sees podcasting as a way of letting people create “vertical” audio feeds; instead of listening to general interest radio shows like As It Happens, listeners can create their own personal streams of audio, based on their own particular interests.
This is just the kind of scenario that keeps Cass Sunstein up at night. Sunstein worries about the political consequences of a world of custom media — a world in which the public sphere of common news and common dialogue has disappeared.
Tod’s response to this concern is that ideally we will have a world in which people consume both custom and general streams. Fellow panelist Marc Canter argued that quality topical content almost necessarily corsses fields and engages people with new issues — because a good story weaves in related topics. We should have faith that people will not get stuck in information ghettos.
I’m not so surea that the issue will self-resolve. What makes us think that a majority — or even a critical mass — of readers (listeners, viewers) will pull content that isn’t of immediate, personal interest. Look what’s happened to network news, or daily newspapers. Far from being an ennobling force, consumer interests have pushed “hard” news off the front page and down below Charles & Camilla or Michael Jackson.
Then again, maybe that’s the best argument that can be made for podcasting and other enablers of niche media. In an era that’s seen most of the mass media turned some version of People magazine, what have we got to lose?
On Technorati at northernvoice
Wiki-love
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February 15th, 2005 by Alex…but the joy of Wiki is that I got to fix the misleading instruction myself, right away.
Down for maintenance
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February 15th, 2005 by AlexKudos to the team at Wordpress for their foolproof scheme for backing up Wordpress databases before upgrading.
Did I say foolproof? Let me be the fool to take that back. If you’re missing all the juicy e-engagement news that’s usually here — not to mention the usual look & feel — well you can thank the fact that the database backup turned out to be empty. Thanks to ecto all is probably not lost, but it will be a few days before I’m up and running again.