Posts tagged as:

DO-Consult

Become an online engagement pro

This fall I’m teaching two e-engagement programs through Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. One of the programs is a TeleForum (a series of conference calls) so it’s accessible to participants anywhere in the world. Please let your colleagues and friends know about this chance to learn about online engagement and dialogue: Do you need to [...]

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About Alex

Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University. She writes about how social media is transforming our politics, our work and our personal lives. Her writing on technology issues has appeared in media outlets like the Toronto Star, CBC Radio, Business 2.0, and the Chronicle of Higher [...]

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Online engagement: strength in numbers

The Canadian Policy Research Network has released a new paper called “Democracy — Updating the Owner’s Manual” by Mary Pat MacKinnon, the Director of CPRN’s Public Involvement Network.

The paper provides a very useful introduction to citizen engagement, informed by CPRN’s own extensive experience in engaging over 2,000 Canadians in public dialogue. Mary Pat suggests [...]

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Tagging e-democracy

This week’s challenge: coming up with a common set of e-democracy tags for all of the e-democracy bloggers and bookmark collectors out there.

For those new to the tagging concept, here’s a brief intro: In the process of setting up Diablogue, I’ve been exploring the world of social bookmarking and tagging. Social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us, [...]

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Drupal and Civic Space

I’ve been checking out Drupal, a web-based content management system that could provide an interesting platform for online engagement projects (especially those with a limited budget — Drupal is open source).

For those who don’t know Drupal, it describes itself as a “dynamic web site platform which allows an individual or community of users to publish, [...]

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Web-based project management

As part of my ongoing love-in with 43 Things, I looked into its development environment, something called Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a programming language that claims to be easy for even a new programmer to learn. Rails is a web application framework for Ruby; it sounds like it may make the process of developing [...]

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E-consultation gets official nod

New DO-Consult subscriber Katherine Beavis points out that e-consultation has now been enshrined in the Canadian government’s official communications guidelines. The new (revised) Government of Canada communications policy was released today. One of the only changes was a new requirement to post public consultation sessions on the web. Are there other countries or governments that [...]

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Evaluating civic engagement projects

A recent discussion on DO-Consult turned to the question of how we can evaluate the success of electronic citizen engagement projects. One list member pointed out that the issues probably aren’t too different from the challenges of evaluating off-line engagement efforts, which inspired me to pull together some resources on how to evaluate citizen engagement. [...]

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