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"Around the country, people are grappling with how best to protect their communities and prevent future mass shootings. While it is necessary to develop a shared sense of how to proceed, some fear engaging in public deliberation about such hotly contested issues, especially at a time of such divisive political discourse. Will deliberating together under these circumstances only lead to greater conflict? "

"Designers need to understand and demonstrate how their work impacts the success of their business. Leaders outside of design also need to know how to use design more strategically. By open-sourcing rare case studies from both multi-billion dollar companies and early stage startups, we aim to help you use design as a strategic business partner at your company."

If you are trying to organise in a collaborative team, you may be asking yourself: ​ "How do we include people in decisions without spending so much time in meetings?"   "How do we set priorities, distribute tasks and stay aligned on shared goals?"   "If we don't have managers, how do we get feedback, resolve conflict and stay accountable?" ​ You are not alone! We've faced these dilemmas in our own decentralised organisations, and we can help you get unstuck.

HOW IT WORKS MUNICIPALITIES SUBMIT PROJECTS TO CITIZINVESTOR.COM. These are projects that have already been scored, department-approved and only lack one thing - funding. Projects range from building a new park to installing speed bumps or adding a few parking spaces to your neighborhood library. The list of these projects for any city is nearly endless. Currently, these projects sit on a long-list behind other budget priorities, especially now when local government budgets are tighter than ever before. CITIZENS INVEST IN THE PROJECTS THEY CARE ABOUT MOST. For the first time ever, we are giving citizens the opportunity to tell government exactly where they want their dollars spent. Citizens can find projects that their local government has posted on Citizinvestor.com and pledge to invest any amount they wish towards the project. Not only can citizens invest in projects from their local governments, but Citizinvestor also gives citizens the opportunity to petition for new projects that local government either hasn't thought of or hasn't approved. ONCE A PROJECT IS 100% FUNDED, THE PROJECT IS BUILT!

There is, however, one small problem with this. Governments cannot create community, no matter how hard they try, and they cannot build social capital. At best they can create policy environments which assist individuals and institutions in civil society to do these things, or at least, do not stifle their efforts or make their task more difficult. To acknowledge this is not to suggest that governments should simply sit back and hope social capital will grow before them. On the contrary, it is to advocate a radical re-invention of government and a wholesale move away from the old service delivery paradigm in the human services so as to remove some of the key governmental obstacles to civic engagement, responsibility and reciprocity at grass-roots levels of our society.

Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule." Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age. The Information Age challenges us to make participative democracy a liberating force in the world today. Research and proven methodology, aided by networked computing, has resolved at least one basic dilemma of democracy:   How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, make collective sense of them, and reach decisions and act on pressing issues? The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). The Agoras Institute convenes these dialogues as Co-Laboratories of Democracy. This process is a fusion of the theory of Generic Design Science and the consultative practice of Interactive Management, both developed over the last 30 years by Dr. John Warfield and our founder, Aleco Christakis.

Resilience.org aims to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these. We like to think of the site as a community library with space to read and think, but also as a vibrant café in which to meet people, discuss ideas and projects, and pick up and share tips on how to build the resilience of your community, your household, or yourself.

"We are working to become a carbon neutral council and combat climate change, making changes to how we work to reduce the greenhouse gases and carbon emissions that we produce. We also have a duty to consider social justice and make sure that Cornwall's residents are not worse off. In looking after the environment, we need to make sure that we do not disadvantage anyone. We have introduced a new tool to help us make decisions that combat climate change and do not disadvantage the people of Cornwall. The new tool, our decision-making wheel, is based on the Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics model"

Did you know your zip code can predict how long and how well you live? Learn why in the all-new multimedia exhibit "Health Happens Here." Discover what Californians are doing to build health in communities across the state in this interactive journey through all the places and all the ways health happens in California. Through a series of high-tech games and interactive stations, visitors explore key factors that affect health beyond traditional diet and exercise while earning points that can be donated to 1 of 10 charities to make health happen for all Californians. Engaging and educational fun for the entire family, "Health Happens Here" was developed in partnership with The California Endowment and is a national award-winning, ongoing signature exhibit -- only at The California Museum.

GreaterPlaces is a crowdsourced "How-To" manual for creating great communities - cities, suburbs and rural areas.   Think of a Pinterest or Houzz for community design. WHAT IS COMMUNITY DESIGN? Community design is about people, the places we live, and the spaces we share.  Community design is also about how we come together and make decisions that affect our communities and neighbors: from crossroads in the country to homeowners' associations in the suburbs to new apartments in the city.

"The reality is that leadership through large, complex and politically contested issues can be very tough on the people involved. It challenges our perception as to what is for the best, and how best to achieve it. And it challenges how we can find connection with all those who need to be involved."

MapLight is a nonpartisan research organization that reveals money's influence on politics. We research and compile data about the sources of campaign contributions in U.S. presidential, congressional, state, and local ballot and candidate elections. We provide journalists and citizens with transparency tools that connect data on campaign contributions, politicians, legislative votes, industries, companies, and more to show patterns of influence never before possible to see. These tools allow users to gain unique insights into how campaign contributions affect policy so they can draw their own conclusions about how money influences our political system. MapLight was founded in 2005 by Thomas Layton, Jaleh Bisharat, and Daniel G. Newman. Daniel, MapLight's President, was recognized as one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2010 for his work at MapLight.

Pathways to a People's Economy was developed by a team of New Economy Coalition member organizations to amplify the new economy policy wins happening on the ground and provide real examples of how to shift our economic conditions from the bottom up. It provides tools for communities and organizations to make concrete policy demands to advance a new economy - an economy for, by, and with the people.

For almost a decade, the Davenport Institute has been researching, training, and consulting with public officials to improve the ways in which governments involve their residents in making tough policy decisions. This work has taken us throughout California and across the country, learning about and teaching the latest techniques in effective participatory governance. We continue to hear from public leaders seeking to capture a "30,000-foot view" of their government's practices in this area. That is why we are launching "How are WE Doing?" to be that lens through which you can evaluate your municipality's public engagement processes.

Here's how the positive deviance approach is different: * Outsiders don't bring in ideas to change a community's culture. Instead, they ask the community to look for its own members who are having success. Those local ideas, by definition, are affordable and locally acceptable - at least to some people in the community. Since they spring from a community's DNA, the community is less likely to feel threatened by these ideas and more likely to adopt them. * The focus is not a community's problems, but its strengths.

"APPA can be applied in a variety of contexts and with a wide range of participants. Its primary value lies in its emphasis as a process of lasting engagement and dialogue among stakeholders. APPA combines the framework of Appreciative Inquiry and the tools of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA). Its objective is to find and emphasise the positive, successes and strengths as a means to empower communities, groups and organisations to plan and manage development and conservation. [It] uses the cycle of the 4D�s: Discovery, the act of appreciation: the best of what is and what gives life to the community, group or organisation; Dream, envisioning and impact: what might be, creating a positive image of a preferred future; Design, co-constructing the desired future: what should the ideal be, a process of dialogue, consensus and further inquiry; Delivery, sustaining: how to empower, learn, adjust and sustain." (Source: PPM&E Resource Portal)

We're innovators. We're curious. And we're dissatisfied with the status quo. We're dedicated to strengthening the field of practice that bridges health and communities. Bridging Health & Community aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond health care and public health to include fostering community agency. Based in Seattle, WA, with an office in London, UK, we do our field-building work through convening and coaching. We share the fruits of our work with a view to further describing and strengthening the field of practice that bridges the health sector and those that foster community agency. We met through the Creating Health Collaborative, an international group of innovators exploring health from the perspective of communities. By sharing our work through the Collaborative, we learned of the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama's administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

What interests me is how the lessons found in the article could be applied to real world community governance in relation to the public sector. Such communities are already in existence so cannot be created outside of the box to start with, however many of the other observations can be applied especially with the use of the Internet and application of direct democratic dialogue. It should be possible to create some new disruptive innovations which such an approach and resources to create some new community paradigms.

The mission of the Governors' Institute on Community Design is to assist governors and their cabinets and staffs as they seek to guide growth and development in their states. A central goal of the Institute is to give governors practical solutions to the issues they face and a better understanding of how community design can be used to increase the social and economic well being of their states and citizens.