deliberative-democracy.net is the online home of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. The mission of the Consortium is to bring together practitioners and researchers to support and foster the nascent, broad-based movement to promote and institutionalize deliberative democracy at all levels of governance in the United States and around the world.

Good Jobs First is a national policy resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families. We provide timely, accurate information on best practices in state and local job subsidies, and on the many ties between smart growth and good jobs. Good Jobs First works with a very broad spectrum of organizations, providing research, training, communications and consulting assistance.

If you read the headlines, listen to the pundits and the president, you would think that we are about to enter into a manufacturing renaissance in this country. Suddenly, it has dawned on many companies that this country might actually be a pretty good place to make things after all.

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, or BALLE, is North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks in 30 U.S. states and Canadian provinces representing over 22,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada.

Welcome to the EDA Know Your Region project. Funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA), this research project explores regional and local approaches to economic innovation and competitiveness across the United States. The resources developed as part of the overall project curriculum, as well as the Know Your Region online clearinghouse, are intended to help local officials, economic development practitioners, community leaders and citizens assess local and regional assets, needs and visions in a global context, leading to long-term regional prosperity and sustainability.

The site, accessible at www.clustermapping.us, provides cluster initiatives and other economic development organizations an opportunity to register in a national database. The registry allows initiatives to showcase their activities and events to a wider public, search for appropriate partners across the nation, and learn from best practice examples of their peers. The site also provides free access to a rich database on the profile and performance of clusters and regional economies.

United We Serve is a nationwide service initiative that helps meet growing social needs resulting from the economic downturn. With the knowledge that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things when given the proper tools, President Obama is asking us to come together to help lay a new foundation for growth. This initiative aims to both expand the impact of existing organizations by engaging new volunteers in their work and encourage volunteers to develop their own "do-it-yourself" projects.

Welcome to our Social Impact Bond pages.

Social Finance is keen to support others to develop Social Impact Bonds. These Social Impact Bond pages are a place where commissioners, service providers and investors can collaborate, discuss and analyse Social Impact Bond structures and applications. The pages provide an open discussion platform, webinars to take you through our current thinking, technical guides and research that may be useful for developing Social Impact Bonds.

Social Finance is currently looking into new Social Impact Bonds in the fields of criminal justice, chaotic families, looked-after children, health and drug rehabilitation with support from the Big Lottery Fund. We have had considerable interest in the Social Impact Bonds from across the US, Canada, Middle East and Australia, and are keen to see other partners developing these.

At the heart of PolicyMic is our unique content: head-to-head debates, opinion pieces, original reporting, and multimedia showcasing multiple perspectives and produced by a new generation of voices. But, we don't want you to just passively read the news. The more you respond to articles, share your ideas, and accumulate 'mics' from others, the more you'll be able to do and say. As you accumulate enough mics to become a PolicyMic Pundit, you'll be given the chance to find your audience and debate your rivals.

Your Voice Counts Welcome to "Your Voice Counts" - the Boxer Updates feedback page. Here you can read what Californians are saying in response to my messages on issues facing Congress and the nation. If you would like to join the conversation, please click here.

Our Policy and Citizen Engagement Unit works to enhance the legislative process and its outcomes by promoting representative, transparent and accountable governance. By improving the interface between citizens and decision-makers we aim at increasing civil society's input in policy-making. Because Democracy is not only about votes, it's also about deliberation.

But I think there is a deeper explanation for the persistent misreadings of Jacobs. She was the first to apply a dawning new human understanding of the natural world to cities - an understanding that even now is slow to be grasped by built environment professions. It's an understanding of "organized complexity," as she called it - the dynamic inter-relationships of systems, of processes, of self-organization.

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) Code of Ethics for Public Participation Practitioners supports and reflects IAP2's Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation. The Core Values define the expectations and aspirations of the public participation process. The Code of Ethics speaks to the actions of practitioners.

CACS is the first organization in history to mine California's vast records and successfully construct an organizational mapping of the several thousand agencies, departments, councils, committees, branches, sections, divisions, and subdivisions-many of them redundant-within California's executive branch. This research base and user-friendly online map will enable CACS to create the clearest case for establishing better governance.

California Common Sense is a Stanford-based nonprofit using Silicon Valley technologies to open government finances to the public, engage citizens in data-driven discourse, and catalyze a grassroots movement for more effective and efficient governance.

The idea of a Complete Street is compelling in almost every way, but when the engineering profession begins to adopt it wholesale, we need to pause and look at the outcomes. Are we getting Complete Streets, or are we getting Complete Roads. The difference is tremendous and will impact the financial viability of an approach to building places that is long overdue.

To get a higher return on our public investments requires an understanding of what it takes to build great towns and neighborhoods. The following are principles of placemaking for Strong Towns.

Why should I get involved? Because you care about your community. PlaceSpeak transforms the way people interact with local decision-makers. For the first time, it will be possible to genuinely communicate based on where you live. What about my Privacy? Only you can see your profile. You alone control your public visibility settings. To others, you are a green dot on a map. When you connect with a topic, you confirm that you live within the relevant local area. PlaceSpeak is not funded by advertising and we will never sell or disclose your information.

I like to think that in Melbourne a debate like the Zunz lecture would be couched in different terms. At the very least, the proposition might be something like "great urban design makes great cities" or, preferably, "great urban design makes a better city". They both recognise that it's not individual buildings that make a difference but the overall feel of the city. The latter also acknowledges that the physical environment is only one factor that contributes to making a city great.