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...

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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...

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...