Get ready for November 17 – A great day to contribute to democracy and building your community online!

Starting at 8 a.m. Central US on Nov. 17, 2009 for 24 hours ALL donations via the new GiveMN.org site will be matched**. (World times below)

Donations via credit card from anywhere in the world are accepted.

Any amount, even very small amounts are encouraged. We’d love to win the bonus prize for the largest number of donors.

Why donate if you are an …

Issues Forum Participant

• You value your local forum and want it to be strong and independent
• You believe in the value of reading diverse opinions. You’ve used the forum to reach people with your announcements, ideas, and opinions.
• You support increasing outreach to new voices across your community.
• You want to thank your local volunteers who receive shared support from E-Democracy.org, which makes their role possible.You want to continue the 24 x 7 participant technical support that we must pay for through all of 2010.
  
• Donations are tax deductible in the U.S. and potential other countries depending upon your tax laws.

Supporter of E-Democracy.org

• You’ve watched us for years and benefited from our open sharing of lessons around the world.
  
• You want to help us gain additional major funder support for new progams by demonstrating your support. (If those who think we matter do not contribute, why would a major donor invest in efforts to support more communities and pursue next generation online civic engagement activities?)
  
• Governments simply are NOT investing in online participation models that actually give people a real voice based on the issues that matter to them. We do.
  
• The media is NOT investing in two-way models of public engagement that promote agenda-setting, civility, and accountability. We do. They seem intent on empowering the loudest and most abusive voices through anonymous online news comments that divide local communities.
• You are excited about what is next (announcement coming soon!

If you can’t afford to donate (or can), help us reach more people by …

• Becoming a “Follower” of E-Democracy on the GiveMN site to show your support (you may login easily with Facebook Connect)
• Becoming an E-Democracy.org Fan on Facebook – Check our our videos too
  
• Following E-Democracy.org on Twitter @edemo and our Executive Director, Steven Clift @democracy
  
• Pass this message on and encourage others to sign up for our free e-mail newsletter

Mark your calendar now.

Donation Period – 24 Hours

• US – Tue Nov 17 – 9am Eastern/8 Central/7 Mountain/6 Pacific – For 24 Hours
  
• Europe – Tue Nov 17 – 2pm UK/3 W. Europe/4 C. Europe – Until Wed Nov 18 same time
  
• Pacific – Wed Nov 18 – Daytime/Evening in New Zealand/Australia/Japan/Korea until at least 11pm
  

** Asking for donations is new for E-Democracy.org. Only Minnesota-based non-profits – which we are – receive the match so now is the time for us to finally ask. For years our volunteers and expansion projects subsidized our ongoing costs, but now that we are suddenly five times bigger than three years ago, the time for people to contribute is now. We estimate that 90% of our “costs” are covered by volunteers, but 10% of the cost requires real money.

Ideally, through donations, sponsorship, advertising, government fees (UK) and other means we’d raise $10 US/year per participant or currently about $60,000 a year to fully support our exciting and dynamic Issues Forum network. This will make it viable for us to support new communities. While foundations are interested in supporting our “next generation” projects and helping us reach lower income/diverse communities with Issues Forums, the time for greater community self-reliance is here.

The established effective Issues Forum model must generate income to covers it relatively low, but actual costs. The alternative is to freeze service newly interested communities and reduce technical support for existing forums. With some savings from earned revenue projects, we have time to transition the network away from its current full subsidy, so let’s get started. By the end of 2009, simply raising $1 per participant would be a great start.

November 17 is Give to the Max Day

A day intended to inspire unprecedented levels of charitable giving in the state of Minnesota!

Give to the Max Day will feature:

* Zero transaction costs. Transaction costs for gifts made on Give to the Max Day at GiveMN will be covered, so 100 percent of gifts will go straight to nonprofits.

* The perfect match. Every donation made on Give to the Max Day at GiveMN will receive a portion of a $500,000 match*.

* A little friendly competition. Grants will be awarded to the three nonprofits that have the largest number of individuals who make donations during Give to the Max Day at GiveMN.

Maximize your contribution.
Maximize your impact.
Maximize the power of online giving.

Give to the Max Day begins at 8 a.m. Central on November 17 and ends at 8 a.m. Central on November 18. To be eligible for Give to the Max Day incentives, all donations must be made to Minnesota nonprofits through GiveMN.

To review the full guidelines for Give to the Max Day, please visit http://GiveMN.org

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*The exact amount matched per dollar donated will be determined after Give to the Max Day concludes, and the $500,000 in matching funds will be divided by the total donation amount raised over the 24-hour period.

No matter the civic-spirited code you write or open source projects you contribute to, this will be a chance to meet other programmers in Minnesota interested in online government transparency, the reuse of government data, online civic engagement etc.

Add your name and links to any affiliations, code you contribute toward, etc. via the Sunlight Labs listing for this event.

Then send your e-mail address with “MN Hackathon” in the subject to:

We will also use the Minnesota Voices e-mail list to share updates about, so join that e-list if you are interested receiving announcements on this event’s exact times and location as they are determined but not ready to RSVP.

In conjunction with the Northeast Beat social network on Ning, volunteer Dan Haugen is leading an effort to create our first large multi-neighborhood Issues Forum – NE Minneapolis Neighbors Forum. While our first set of neighborhood forums serve smaller one or two “official” city neighborhood areas, this area covers at least 13 neighborhoods. (Although, the area probably has a similar population as our Highland Park and Frogtown forums in St. Paul because the cities defined neighborhood or districts in their own way – Minneapolis has 81 neighborhoods and under 70 neighborhoods associations while St. Paul has 17 District Planning Councils.)

We’ve found that local identity is crucial to a successful forum. People who live in NE Minneapolis have a strong sense of identity. We also are open to what our volunteers actually want to do. There is no one right way to connect neighbors online, just lots of wrong paths to avoid.

I’ll add the public tell a friend e-invite below when it is available to share.

A few notable things to watch – we will set it up so new topics will generate Tweets for people who prefer to follow the forum that way instead of by e-mail, e-mail digest, the web, or web feed. We will also add the tag #nempls to those tweets to make the forum accessible to the organically forming local Twitter community in that part of the city.

One of the synergies we hope to explore is how our catch-all multi-topic e-mail-based/web accessible online public space will complement the Ning-based social network. Northeast Beat now includes headlines from our forum (by using the forum’s web feed). Commercial hosting services like Ning need web visitors in order to generate ad revenues, while we know from experience that giving people the ability to publish by simply pushing “reply to all” via e-mail can double or triple your participation rate.  Now neighbors in NE Minneapolis can have the best of both worlds and not be cleaved off into isolated online spaces by technology formats such that none of them have a critical mass of local people for sustained participation.

On that note, I should mention that our Participation 3.0 discussion draft suggests we should further develop our basic social networking features to add location aware connections with e-block clubs and other “friendly” features that encourage more organic neighbor to neighbor civic interaction before the audience required to successfully open more public neighborhood Issues Forums is gathered.

Participation 3.0 – Big Ideas for Engaging Citizens in Public Participation

Last month, I asked if you’ve exchanged e-mail addresses with your neighbors. I fundamentally believe that building democracy online starts locally – that’s why we’ve invested so much time in growing local Issues Forums.

In the past year, we have significantly expanded the communities and neighborhoods we serve. And the best part of this effort is that it truly starts locally – with individuals from a local community coming together to create a civic forum that addresses the unique needs of that community.

What this shows us is that our Issues Forum model is highly transferable – any community can take the framework we’ve developed and make it their own. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen when a small group of community members commit to the effort.

So what’s next?

With our fundamentally two-way and interactive, user-generated content, we have been part of the “Web 2.0″ movement since we created the world’s first election information site in 1994 that accidentally lived on past election day because we allowed participation by design. (We jokingly call ourselves Internet 1.0 before the one-way Web 1.0 messed everything up.) Now after the 2008 election the rest of the “e” world has caught our participation bug, and projects and ideas on how to use the Internet for citizen engagement and government transparency between elections are spreading like wild fire. Most will fail to build an audience before they have a chance to make a difference. But some will succeed, and we want to help the best ideas and project “go deep” and go local.

How does that connect to Issues Forums?

One Minneapolis neighborhood today has 10 percent of households, over 400 participants, interacting every day on a local issues forum.  Every day. Wow.

Is this a success? What we do know is that the majority of online projects seeking to engage people in governance and community fail due to the lack of participants. Where our projects make in-roads, they come through effective outreach and recruitment. The nut we’ve seemed to crack is how to generate real and increasingly diverse participation (see emerging lessons from Frogtown, Cedar Riverside, and Cass Lake). Our recent outreach in the predominantly immigrant neighborhoods gives us a glimpse of what needs to be next. And in the majority Native American area covered by our Cass Lake Leech Lake forum, Patty Smith in a YouTube interview says their local forum has led her to interact more with non-Natives now than at any time since she’s lived on the reservation. Humbling and important work that is making a difference.

So imagine the power of largest base of e-participants as a percent of the local population gathered in an onilne civic engagement project anywhere in the world. Neighbors are starting to knock on our door asking for Issues Forums. That local momentum, combined with your donations, grants, online sponsorship — and perhaps even some ads — to support diverse community outreach, we can reach 10% of households across Minneapolis and St. Paul or 30,000 everyday participants. With time, resources, and partnerships, that is what we can do here and everywhere across our 15 community network together.

Participation 3.0
From this base real participants we’re hoping to blow this whole e-democracy concept wide open with the new Participation 3.0 initiative we’re proposing. In simple terms, the concept involves taking the E-Democracy.Org tools for everyday online citizen participation and combine this audience with emerging, “next generation” online civic engagement features.

We’d like to develop these features in an open, agenda-setting manner that influences opportunities for local online government transparency, media accountability and civic engagement everywhere. Everywhere.

We’re open to using free services that can be “mashed-up” – leveraging third-party tools like Twitter or YouTube as it makes sense – and moving thousands of local people into greater participation that solves public problems and increases public engagement in communities and governance.

We propose to start in Minnesota, where we have the greatest established presence, with future plans to extend our work “locally everywhere” as well as open source our lessons so people in other communities can take our lessons, technology, and “democracy” data we generate/gather and do their own thing if they prefer.

But we can’t get there without you.

We’ve been working to generate interest among foundations to help us deepen our Issues Forums experience with greater outreach and volunteer role development and to fund our new Participation 3.0 effort. But the reality of our depressed economy is that there are social needs which most locally-oriented foundations have deemed more pressing at this time. You can’t blame them. While our “new” project ideas are generating interest from national funders, existing Issues Forums have basic costs that need to be covered. Luckily, our local volunteers cover 90% of the estimated “cost” to bring this network to life. This leaves 10% in real costs that require cash for our technology, participant technical support, basic outreach and forum manager support. With existing Issues Forum grant funded projects coming to a close, in 2010 we need to be a lot more creative in generating revenue that keeps things moving along. We also need to make sure Issues Forums have the dedicated support required to hold their own as we unleash new grant-funded Participation 3.0 projects.

If our Issues Forum participants and general supporters donated at least $10US (6 GBP, $13.50NZ) we’d have at least $60,000 US which with to thrive each year. Even if we average $2 a participant, we can cover our absolute minimal costs next year.

We know everyone can’t afford to donate and regardless of whether people donate, in a “democracy” project everyone must be treated equally. Thankfully, in the UK where we have been told many times that people expect that their taxes have already paid for this kind of activity, the Local Councils in Oxford and Bristol have agreed to a small fee covering part of their forum hosting costs. So initially we will be focusing on the most established U.S. Issues Forums with fund raising. We will actively ask for donations. We may experiment with sponsorship and advertising.

Ultimately, you the participants have the power. You get to “right size” the services E-Democracy.Org provides first to our volunteers who in turn serve your communities with their time. You get to determine the speed of participant technical support, the resources available to support inclusive outreach to raise new voices, and whether together as a network with shared technology and mutual support we are stronger working together than in isolation.

In the coming weeks, we will be responding to foundation interest in our Participation 3.0 draft and we’re interested in your ideas, as well. We propose to collaboratively generate open and detailed specifications so next generation features, inspired or influenced by you can be tested, improved, and then shared. We know local participants have the greatest passion for these tools.  Not only can your support help further direct our efforts, but your insights and donations can make our case to foundations that much stronger.

To be local everywhere, you need to be local somewhere first. By building a deeply participatory and diverse base of “e-citizens,” then new local e-democracy features have a chance.

Upcoming Events

Nov. 19-20, 2009

Malmo09 – The first popular European e-government conference

Malmo, Sweden

Event coincides with EU e-government event in Malmo at the same time.

http://malmo09.org
 

May 6-7, 2010

eDem10 – 4^th International Conference on eDemocracy

http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/en/department/gpa/telematik/veranstaltungen/id/13823/index.php

Danube University in Krems, Austria

July 14, 2010

ICDGS 20110: International Conference on e-Democracy, e-Government and e-Society

http://www.waset.org/conferences/2010/london/icdgs/

London, United Kingdom

July 14, 2010

These are part of our final evaluation for our Blandin Foundation Rural Voices initiative to help interested greater Minnesota communities start Issues Forums. We led off efforts with a citizen media online outreach tour (webinar version) which also connects to the Minnesota Voices online community and April’s Unconference.

I first sat down with Jeff Ueland in Bemidji and then Dan LeClaire (pictured above on right) with our Cass Lake Leech Lake forum. I discovered how difficult it is to edit a MP4 HD video over 1GB in size on the web, so for now here are the audio files in easy to use MP3 audio. This is the list of questions I used in my interview (thanks for the feedback).

• Jeff Ueland, Bemidji Interview – 21 Minutes – MP3

• Dan LeClaire, Cass Lake Leech Lake Interview – 24 Minutes – MP3

Civic Engagement 101: Issues Forums

Part 2 of 5 – Building Participation

Editor’s Note: Over the next several months, we’ll be including a short article highlighting all the different aspects of starting and running local issues forum. Have a question you’d like us to address? Email us at .

It’s an old cliché: if you build it, they will come.

But nothing is that simple. If they don’t know you built it, how can they find it?

Building participation in a local issues forum is the second greatest challenge in the process of establishing the forum. And it’s really important to consider how you will build participation and membership before you build the forum.

In part, it’s those same participants who will provide the momentum that ultimately keeps the forum going, so they should be involved in the beginning stages of the effort.

It’s also important to know three key things:

• Be patient – it may take some time to recruit enough participants to get the forum started.
• You need to demonstrate value to participants – you’re competing with blogs, news sites, and other venues for participation. What separates your forum? Be able to convey quickly why your forum is attractive to participants.
• Building membership and participation is more than increasing the forum’s following and numbers. It’s about increasing participants – those who actively post and respond to posts on the forum – which theoretically will increase the depth and diversity of participation in your local issues forum.

Here’s one way issues forums separate themselves – they offer local, many-to-many discussions. And they are available anytime and anywhere the participant chooses. E-Democracy.Org forums allow participation by email, and by the Web. In addition, you don’t have to show up at 7 p.m. every night to weigh in – you are welcome to read posts and share your insights whenever it’s most convenient for you, and from the comfort of your own home if you choose.

The only gatekeeper in an issues forum is the forum manager – a role designed to assure civility and focus to the conversation. There’s no pre-approval of posting, and your posts will remain available for all the world to see.

Conversations are also inherently two-way – no one individual is the “host” of the conversation, and each participant has an equal ability to post and respond.

So where do you begin? Start with people you know, co-workers, neighbors, family members. You can also attend in-person gatherings to meet people, gauge their interest in an online forum, and sign up new members. In addition, here are four tips to consider, which assist with recruitment, as well as assuring diversity of backgrounds and opinions:

The four-legged stool of recruitment

1. Citizens: your neighbors, other average folks in your community.
2. Media: local journalists often write articles inspired by discussions, which may attract other participants.
3. Elected officials: if an official makes a decision based on his or her participation in the forum, it may attract additional attention from the public. It may also encourage other officials to pay attention to conversations on the forum, for ideas.
4. Bureaucracy: consider recruiting people who work for government to join the forum. They typically are already civically engaged, and often have invaluable knowledge about how government works. They will also be interested in assuring good information, rather than rumor and incomplete information, are feeding the conversation.

Meet with individuals who represent each of these groups – participation presents various values to each one – from the ability to gauge public sentiment on an issue, to story tips, to finding a voice on local issues.  Set a goal to recruit 100 or more people before your forum begins. And send reminders to the forum membership on a periodic basis (once a week, once a month) that participants can forward to others they know.

One of the most effective tools we have for recruitment is the paper sign-up sheet. Adapt the template and circulate at various community meetings and events. Another tool is a simple flyer for coffee shops and other public locations with a short web address people can pull-off (instead of the typical telephone number. We’ve found these techniques are essential to reach beyond those easiest to recruit online.

Around the Forums – September 2009

Several new forums have started or are getting set to and the forums have been busy the past month. Want to join in the fun? If you are interested in starting a forum in your community, contact us at .

Click on the links below to read more conversations from the E-Democracy.Org forums.

• New Zealand – Canterbury

Hot Topic: Ecan leadership change (multiple topics)

• United Kingdom – Brighton and Hove

Hot Topic: Overpackaging

• United Kingdom – Bristol-Burlington

Hot Topic: Broomhill Road Post Office Closure – Impact

• United Kingdom – Bristol-Bedminster

Hot Topic: 20 mph proposals

• United Kingdom – Newham

Hot Topic: Muslim community and Newham politicians

• United Kingdom – Oxford-Central, South, and West

Hot Topic: Tram tunnel under high street

• United Kingdom – Oxford-Cowley
• United Kingdom – Oxford-Headington and Marston

Hot Topic: Redevelopment proposal (Carryover from April)

• United States – U.S. Politics

Hot Topic: Capitalism/Socialism

• United States – Las Vegas, NM

Hot Topic: Animal Safety and Care

• United States – Minnesota-Politics

Hot Topic: TCF Bank Stadium
Hot Topic: Gov. Pawlenty and health care (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Rural Voices

Hot Topic: Social media policies/uses (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Bemidji

Hot Topic: Chickens in the city (various topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Cass Lake, Leech Lake

Hot Topic: Pipe ceremony (several topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Cook County

Hot Topic: Broadband questions

• United States – Minnesota -Grand Rapids

Hot Topic: Itasca County transportation system

• United States – Minnesota-Minneapolis

Hot Topic: Rezoning in south Minneapolis (several topics)

• United States – Minneapolis-Cedar Riverside

Hot Topic: Pub crawl

• United States – Minneapolis-Powderhorn

Hot Topic: Trash/Area cleanup (several topics)

• United States – Minneapolis-Seward

Hot Topic: Development along river road

• United States – Minneapolis-Standish Ericsson

Hot Topic: Break-ins and recommended service professionals (several topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Roseville

Hot Topic: Development (several topics)

• United States – Minnesota-St. Paul

Hot Topic: Instant Runoff Voting (several topics)

• United States –St. Paul-Frogtown

Hot Topic: Introductions

• United States –St. Paul-Highland Park

Hot Topic: Affordable housing (several topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Winona

Volunteer of the Month: David Brauer

For David Brauer, the Minneapolis Issues Forum promised a less partisan space to discuss local issues. When he founded the forum with E-Democracy.Org Executive Director Steve Clift in 1998, he had been discussing issues on the Minnesota Politics forum for three or four years and had grown weary of the contentious nature of discussions.

But he agreed the platform works.

“Email (and later the Web) is great for letting people debate when it’s convenient for them,” Brauer says.

After 11 years of managing the Minneapolis Issues Forum, Brauer is leaving the post. A new volunteer forum manager, Matt Perry stepped forward this month.

Brauer’s day job is as a journalist, most notably blogging about the media and filing dispatches for the Daily Glean at Minnpost.com. Brauer said he was also interested in creating an online space where citizens could inform each other and provide story tips for journalists.

A cornerstone principle of local issues forums is that they focus on local issues. For better or for worse, it’s the forum manager’s job to assure posters stay on topic and stay civil.

Brauer has developed a reputation for even-handedness in managing the forum. That ability to enforce rules of participation, without regard to ideology, is key to building a sustainable culture for online discussion, according to Brauer.

When Brauer posted that the forum was looking for a new manager, several participants responded with thanks and appreciation for his efforts.

“Whenever I point to a thread to friends in other parts of the country, they are always amazed at how civil the discussion is,” said forum member Bill Dooley.

Said Clift, “he helped set me off on a path to bring these types of forums to more and more local communities. Because we’ve learned through experience how important real civility and an honest local focus are for sustained relevancy, we now serve 15 communities across three countries.”

Though Brauer noted that there are fewer politicians participating on the forum – Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak announced a run for office on the forum in 2001 – he said it’s still a good place for the public to pose concerns that members of the media can bring to those in positions of power.

Brauer’s advice to the next forum manager: don’t be afraid to enforce the rules, even if it stirs up a little dust on the forum. “Most people off-list will support you, and over time, your consistency will build up a functioning on-list culture to the point you’ll need to do a lot less enforcing,” he said.

We all owe a lot to Brauer’s contributions. Best wishes in your future endeavors, David. Go Gophers!

For more backgr0und on the history of this 1000+ member forum, read Brauer’s in-depth article, “The well-built online forum: How Minneapolis boosted civic involvement and social change.“

Hot Topics: October 2009

Editor’s Choice: 50 most influential Britons in technology

The Telegraph recently published a two-part series on the most influential Britons in the technology realm. It’s an eclectic and interesting mix of movers and shakers in large organizations and a handful of innovators in the e-democracy world.

Number one is a slam dunk:  Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who developed HTML and the World Wide Web in 1990. He still oversees the World Wide Web Consortium, which sets standards for the Web.

But the rest of the list includes several members of parliament, other government officials, and a few notable innovators, including Tom Steinberg, who has created mysociety.org and whatdotheyknow.com (see item below); Iain Dodsworth, creator of Tweetdeck (my personal favorite Twitter aggregator); Tanya Byron, psychologist and government advisor; Kevin Marks, who was an engineer for Technorati; and Pete Cashmore, creator and blogger at Mashable.

The list also contains interesting insight (particularly for the non-Brit like me) into the political dynamics and potential positions of power some on the list might be placed in.

Check out part 1 and part 2 of the list.

EU to define e-government priorities

The European Union (EU) ministerial conference will define the main priorities for e-government activities over the next three years on Nov. 19-20, 2009.

Several sites have posted about the EU’s public call for public input on the delivery of public services online, including the Pan-European Participation Network’s post.

For more information on the EU conference, visit the meeting website.

An easier to use Federal Register?

Thanks to Steve Clift for posting this item that identifies some new features about the Federal Register, the official legal publication for the Executive Branch of government in the United States.

The range of items is quite broad – each year 80,000 pages of presidential disaster declarations, poverty-limit designations, agency rules, notices of public meetings, etc. are published. Anyone who does business with the government relies on the Federal Register for these pieces of information, as well as advertisements for proposals to provide government services under contract.

Ed O’Keefe from the Washington Post writes about an effort to take archived versions of the register back to 2000 and store them in XML, which allows that information to be displayed by other Web sites. Think widgets and mashups.

Report on e-government services

Thanks to Steve Clift for posting about the French Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on e-government services.

Essentially, the report  looks at efforts of governments within the OECD (30 member countries in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America) to expand their e-government services. Many went into it with an organizational focus to reduce costs and improve services. However, the report shows low use. The report shows the evolution of e-government services to a more user-centric  experience.

Defining E-Democracy

Members of British Parliament are inviting voters in Great Britain to send them information on how e-democracy should work.

The Committee on House of Commons Reform has issued the formal call for evidence on issues it should continue, particularly regarding its methods for enabling the public to become more involved in debates and proceedings.

Specifically, members of parliament are considering an e-petition system of some kind.

Read the full Computing article.

Flashmobs target Merkel

During the final days of the German election campaign, incumbent German Chancellor Angela Merkel was being confronted with a modern era method of quickly organizing groups of people – flashmobs.

Flashmobs are groups of people summoned over the Internet to gather at a place and time. In Germany, these groups were waving flags and banners, and heckling Merkel.

Typically, these gatherings tend to be informal, non-serious gatherings more for fun than for a specific cause. However, at least one blogger, quoted by Reuters, noted that more serious and substantive motivations are behind these impromptu gatherings.

Read the Reuters article describing the phenomenon.

Public data in Australia

The New South Wales government in Australia is beginning a process to catalog all the sets of public data it collects and has also committed to making that information available to the public.

The portal, data.nsw.gov.au, includes information on what’s currently available and when the remaining information will be.

The impetus was a recent event held by parliamentary officials to identify a long-term roadmap for Government 2.0 strategies.

Read the full article on IT Wire.

Freedom of Information made easy

If you haven’t yet discovered www.whatdotheyknow.com, it’s definitely worth a look, even if you don’t live in the UK.

The site organizes previous Freedom of Information requests from units of government in the UK – you can simply search for the BBC or the Department of Health, and see all the requests submitted, with links to the data requested.

You can also submit your own request for information to an organization right through the site. An easy-to-understand form pops up and the site include handy tips about what to include, how to focus requests, and what to avoid.

So when will someone in the US come up with a site like this? Is there one out there already?

@2.gov – mass tweet distribution

Thanks to E-Democracy.Org Executive Director Steve Clift for including an item on this service on his newswire. This innovative new service allows individuals, via their Twitter posts, to communicate their views on important issues to all their government representatives.

The site allows you to use your existing Twitter account to forward your posts to public officials in your area (determined by your zip code). Simply mention @2gov in your posts.

If you’re a registered voter, the service can validate that your message is coming from a real voter in the official’s area. The official will get formatted reports even if they’re not on Twitter.

How much Democracy 2.0 in US?

British Blogger Simon Collister has been keeping a careful eye on the Obama Administration’s aspirations for using the Web to engage more Americans in discussion of policy issues. Obama’s promises of openness in government have undoubtedly piqued the interest of both technologists and democracy advocates, but for the most part we’re all still waiting to see what this actually means.

Collister points to a post about this very issue – and while those watching this issue say the Obama administration’s response is more “muted” than some perhaps expected, a few key advancements have been moving forward, including efforts to put more public data on the Web and the ability to submit comments on pending federal legislation.

Read the full post from Delib.

Best of the Web honors announced

The Center for Digital Government in the U.S. recently released its annual Best of the Web Awards, which judges public Websites on a range of categories, including accessibility, innovation, and ease of use.

Utah snagged the first place award for a State Portal, followed by California, Arkansas, Maine and Colorado. Virginia Beach, Va., ranked number one for a City Portal and was joined by neighbor Fairfax County, Va., the number one County Portal.

Government Technology has a nice article breaking down the reasons these sites were honored.

World eDemocracy Forum announces 2009 award finalists

The World eDemocracy Forum has announced finalists for the 2009 e-Democracy Awards. The group solicits nominations for three categories – International, European and French. Among the nominees are Twitter, Obama’s new media team, Iran’s protestors, the Democracy Center, and e-participation.net.

The group will choose the winners at an assembly in the French National Assembly on Thursday, Oct. 22, in partnership with PoliticsOnline, the Politech Institute of Europe and Blog Territorial.

Read more about the nominees and the forum’s website.

To e-mail or to tweet?

Steve Clift points to an interesting Pew Center study on the Internet and Civic Engagement, which finds that e-mail still beats online social networking sites for group communication within civic groups, and the numbers are pretty overwhelming – 57 percent to 24 percent.

Steve suggests this means you need to continue investing in more “traditional” online communications, as well as the emerging ones. I’d agree – adding only that it’s important to provide a broad range of options for participation and communication – and people are going to use what they’re most comfortable with. You don’t want to lose a key constituency by being too far on the cutting edge.

Read the full Pew report and see Steve’s full DO Wire post.

Learning from the UK experience

Edward Andersson of Involve UK wrote an interesting post about how the UK’s experience in online civic engagement can provide valuable lessons for the US as it dives in, albeit a few years behind other nations.

He provides a list of five helpful principles, including some wise advice about keeping the engagement citizen-focused while still providing institutional support. He also suggests the US needs to be ready to partner with private businesses on some efforts, which also means navigating legal obligations in that relationship,

The post embraces the spirit of information sharing and collaboration – the US can learn a lot from what the UK has gone through, and hopefully avoid some of the less positive experiences.

Read more at the Involve site, including Andersson’s follow-up post.