Conference on Social Capital & ICTs

The European Social Capital, Quality of Life & Information Society Technologies project (SOCQUIT) is holding a 2-day conference in Paris (!) this September. The conference will reviw the results of SOQUIT’s research into the impact of IT on social capital, which focuses particularly on work and employment, aging population, local initiatives and migrants. For […]

Tag blogging @ tagsonomy.com

As of today I’m moving some of my tag-related musings to You’re It, a blog on tagging that includes such venerable folksonomists as Jon Lebkowsky, Clay Shirky and Dave Weinberger. Rob hopes that this new outlet means that I’ll finally stop talking...

Introduction for Alexandra Samuel

I’m Alexandra Samuel. I run Dialogue Networks, a consulting practice that specializes in online dialogue and public engagement. This work has spurred my tagging explorations in a few ways. It began as a practical challenge of managing bookmaks across multiple machines and platforms. But it didn’t take long to jump from personal value to […]

BC Goes DC

The BC Citizens’ Assembly is taking its experience on the road. The New America Foundation is hosting a discussion next week titled Can the U.S. Take Lessons from a Canadian Experiment in Democracy?. It will be held Tuesday, June 7 at 3:30 PM at the New America Foundation, 1630 Connecticut Ave, 7th Floor, Washington DC. […]

e-Engagement Tools That Fit

Organizations have tremendous cultural variations that need to be considered when designing an e-engagement plan or selecting e-engagement tools. E-engagement will be most successful when it’s based on tools that fit with the way an organization approaches technology and with the way it approaches engagement. Since organizations may approach internal (employee) engagement differently […]

A living experiment in online collaboration

The blogiverse is having fun with Just Letters, a little flash game that is a great living experiment in online collaboration. All you need is your browser, so go check it out!

Just Letters is an interesting window on how people can work together when the demands of collaboration are low enough, even if the apparent […]

Stakeholder communications go online

Thanks to Kristan Boudreau of BC Hydro for pointing me to a paper by Carol Adams and Geoffrey Frost on “Stakeholder Engagement Strategies: Possibilities for the Internet.”(PDF) The authors undertook a comparative study of how companies in Australia, Germany and the UK use web sites as a tool for communicating with stakeholders, based on more […]

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 […]

Blogging for Social Capital

Elizabeth Albrycht’s latest article at Blogging Planet, Collaboration Requires Contribution, provides a nice exploration of how blogging might enhance social capital. Her article includes a number of specific pieces of advice for how companies can use blogs to build community, and draws the connection between active participation in online content creation, and the development of […]

Impasse as opportunity: upcoming Vancouver workshop

The Wosk Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver is hosting a February workshop on “Impasse as Opportunity”. The workshop addresses: Why are some conflicts seemingly impervious to resolution? When conflicts get stuck in repeating, negative patterns, what can be...