Participative eDemocracy is coming to Canterbury
I am working with Ron Kjestrup of Plains FM to launch an online public issues forum in Canterbury.
We’re going to use the approach taken by E-Democracy.Org and in the public issues forums in Minneapolis, St Paul and Roseville, Minnesota and in Newham and Brighton & Hove in the UK. OnlineGroups.Net has worked closely with Steven Clift and Tim Erickson from E-Democracy.Org as they have used GroupServer for all their online groups over the last few years.
The next step is to set up an independent and non-partisan steering team to support the forum. We are holding a public meeting for people who are interested in participative edemocracy, to introduce them to the public issues forum concept and to form a steering team.
If you are local, please support this initiative by publicising the meeting to people who are advocates for public participation in the democratic process. You can print and display this notice about the meeting (PDF, 37kb). And if you are interested in eDemocracy, please come along.
Although this project will help to build the profile of OnlineGroups.Net, it’s not commercially driven. I am doing it because I think it’s a good idea and I’d like to see it succeed.
November 9th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
We had ten people at the public meeting. Here’s a report on how the meeting went, and our plans from here.
December 25th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
I wish you the best of luck with the Canterbury issues forum and offer some advice from myself based on experience with the Newham issues forum and many years with other online communities.
If you don’t want to spend at least two years bumping along the bottom while building critical mass then I strongly suggest that you do NOT accept the advice from Minneapolis which will be to set the default reply to individual senders rather than to the group. This unnecessary obstacle has made persistent conversations few and far between in Newham, UK and you have a chance to get off to a better start than that by setting the norm as group conversations rather than announcements that rapidly fizzle out.