MP’s… what are they thinking?
MP SurveyCitizen Engagement in Public Policy – A Survey of Canadian Members of Parliament
What does your MP think about online campaigning? Do they prefer hand-written letters over emails? Has a Facebook group ever changed their mind on an issue? Do they Twitter? These are some of the questions that will be asked in a new research project by Nanos Research, J. Thompson Communications and Five Stones New Media Consulting.
The survey will be administered throughout the spring 2009, with a final report appearing in The Hill Times at the end of April and online in various places (including right here!).
We have posted the draft questions on the Wiki for comment:
http://wiki.changecamp.ca/Change_Projects/MP_Survey
What do you think? Are we missing anything? Your suggestions and comments are greatly appreciated!
Participation Public of Spectrum
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The IAP2 present a very compelling, well constructed and well-adopted framework for public engagement. Something no doubt honed and developed over many years of successful public engagements and policy reform.
Only it’s wrong. The stages may be fine, but it is 100% wrong in that is is completely backwards.
What I’ve come to understand in exploring engagement from the point of view of passion and within the context of our present day world is that “business as usual” is over. There are some significant opportunities to enable and support deeper levels of engagement but it requires us to change our approach.
The need
You want to reach a group of people. You have something you wish to accomplish. The first step is to break down the underlying values and passions that are driving your initiative and then begin to identify who you are looking to engage with.
Stage 1: Empower
As Rahaf Harfoush might say, the first step is to pay attention to who among those you are trying to reach is already taking action and the tools they are using.
It is not about us. Repeat with me. It is not about us. It is about supporting these individuals and groups. It is about answering this question, “What can I actively bring to these people to help them accomplish the goals they are already committed to achieving?”
This takes time but it is quite straightforward to being to identify and find these passionate individuals. A topic for a later post.
Stage 2: Collaborate
You have connected with the most passionate and likely your view of the world has been lifted and changed as a result. And if you have done Stage 1 even moderately well, you have built relationships with real people.
This is critical. Unlike the traditional approach where you hope to have strong bonds of trust by the end, in stage 2 you should have a platform of trust built with the most active and passionate people you can find. This can now be leveraged to engage these people (and their networks) to work towards something larger or tangential but that aligns with their passions and actions to date.
This is about working together towards a common goal. This is about you being seen as someone who helps them to accomplish that which they believe in. A facilitator for their passions.
Stage 3: Involve
It can start with a simple invitation to a place or platform that can better harness or support a larger community of people united by common passions, values and/or beliefs. Or it can be shifting the spend on conferences to become a series of community engagements where you are supporting the communities to further their own interests.
This is the realm of co-creation. I’m reminded of a quote from Brains on Fire that remains one of my favorites.
“And believe us, it’s not about influence, because influencers can be MADE. But passion can’t. And it’s not about evangelizing your brand. It’s about your brand being the jumping off point that allows people to evangelize what’s important in their lives.”
Stage 4: Consult
The world of prototyping, participatory design and mass collaboration open up many opportunities to more actively consult those you value and trust to offer insight, manpower and feedback to what you are working to accomplish. Here they begin to work together with you to build your platform to support your goals, actions and passions.
Stage 5: Inform
This is my favorite. This is no longer about posting notices, or publicizing town halls or making sure your point of view or platform is up on some website. This stage is now about reaching out to all those who have been involved to date and showing them clearly what you have been able to build together with them. And also the launching off point to loop back into an earlier stage.
NOTE: In my conversations with Lina Srivastava and Aaron Dus it has been quickly raised by both that the terms (names of the stages) need to be updated and there is also the opportunity to grow and evolve this model. I’m very interested to see what both Lina and Aaron come back with.
Originally posted at: craphammer.ca
what’s the benefit of open?
image from flickr by Dunechaser used under CC license BY-NC-SA
when i read Sean’s post about Obama and his memo/manifesto for open government i couldn’t help but think about how big a challenge it’s going to be to make the very real changes that memo calls for.
a transparent, participatory, and collaborative government? not just at the political layer but penetrating all the way through the various organizations that perform the day to day business of government? this will be tough work.
while i don’t doubt his resolve, i wonder how even a determined leader like Obama can accomplish this. certainly he carries a big stick; he’s president, with a supportive democratic congress, in the midst of a serious crisis and with a significant mandate from the electorate. anybody within the bureaucracy should be wary of crossing him on one of his main campaign goals, but what about the carrots?
how will he sell skittish and habitually secretive organizations on the benefits of openness?
certainly he can talk about all the things he talks about in his memo;
“Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”
“Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. ”
“Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.”
but i don’t think that alone will be enough. it’s too vague and generalized to be effective levers for getting an organization to change it’s collective behaviour. each department or agency will be in a specific business, and for the most part set in their ways of getting that business done. there will be cost, both in terms of money spent and time and energy expended, in opening up each organization. how will organizations bear the cost of opening up? and more importantly what will the Obama administration offer them?
these are unsexy questions, but they need to be answered. if government is going to be truly open it can’t only be the result of top down drive, the bottom and the middle need to start to actively incorporate openness into standard operating procedures.
if the Obama team were asking you for advice, what would you tell them about the benefits of transparency, participation and collaboration, above all – openness – to a large public organization?
d_c
The Impact of ChangeCamp
As one of the instigators of ChangeCamp at MaRS in Toronto on January 24th, I have spent much of the past 10 days trying to process all the content, ideas, outcomes and possibilities that it generated. It’s been a little overwhelming. Clearly we tapped a rich vein of attention.
Wordle (Merkley, transcribed) by Suzanne Long
So what did we do together? Let’s do a quick rundown of the numbers:
- 140 participants (one person for every character in a Tweet!)
- 100 wiki pages
- 40 YouTube videos
- 450 Flickr photos
- Thousands of tweets, the #1 trending topic on Twitter in the world that day!
- 96 blog mentions from around the world
- one story in the Globe & Mail:
- one beautifully produced segment on CBC Radio’s Spark: (full unedited interview)
- one piece by Kris Reyes on CityNews
- one piece by Jamie Woo in Torontoist
- one Best of ChangeCamp piece by Matthew Hayles in BlogTO
- many new relationships
- several new projects initiated
- several existing projects accelerated
- VanChangeCamp organizing already underway
- and one great big meme propagating through the underbrush
That’s a lot of heat from our ChangeCamp fire! But how much light was there? How much change was made? What was the quality of the products of our co-creation?
To my mind, the jury is still out on this question. A lot will happen not at ChangeCamp, but in the weeks and months to come because of ChangeCamp. We need to hear, share and tell those stories. We need your help:
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- Please complete our Participant Survey
- Please leave your comments on this blog post. Don’t be shy, don’t be overly polite. We have thick skins.
- If you prefer to be discrete, send an email to changecamp@remarkk.com.
- Have more feedback? Write a post about what worked, what didn’t and ideas for the future, like this, this, this, this or this.
The organizers came to this event with modest goals: to ignite and accelerate a new conversation about the shifting ideas of government and citizenship in this “age of participation”, enabled by new tools and thanks to the web. Based on the buzz in online social media, traditional media and face-to-face conversations, I think we can safely say that we achieved that modest goal.
For people in other cities and countries that have been inspired by the ChangeCamp idea, it is important to understand all the preparatory ground work that made ChangeCamp a success in Toronto. An event of this kind is all about having the right mix of participants. Engaging that mix from government, technology, design, social innovation and media-making was key to our success.
Toronto is blessed by a dense cluster of some of the most talented designers, developers, creators and social innovators in the world. Toronto is also home to one of the most connected and innovative BarCamp and Twitter communities in the world, who have been using online tools together with face-to-face events to create change in areas of civic life outside the technology sector. We have leaders like Mark Surman of Mozilla Foundation who laid the groundwork within our City government, opening the door to open data. We had a recent “Web 2.0 Summit” event at City Hall where social media and open data in the context of government had centre stage in front of an influential audience both at the City and the Province. We have a Mayor who said:
When you open up the data, there’s no limit to what people can do. It engages the imagination of citizens in building the city.
What direction does ChangeCamp go next? That’s another post. We want to make sure that our emerging community has lots of opportunity to inform its future direction, to participate in it, to get involved in many new ways. We can’t do it all, we can’t do it alone, we can’t boil the ocean, but we can start with some small steps that in the long-run can enable major change.
Please read after the jump and give all the originators, organizers, contributors, sponsors and supporters some love. They deserve it. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of people, so raise your hand at changecamp@remarkk.com if I missed you!
