Group items tagged

The purpose of the project is to create and convene an interdisciplinary network of thinkers and doers that could help with making the transition from closed-and-centralized to open-and-collaborative institutions of governance.

The Work Shop is a Lambeth Council project designed so we can talk more directly about how residents, the council, and its partners might work together in new ways. It is based on the high street, to be accessible within people's daily activities, and will host various activities designed to offer a real world experience of Coop Council and what it could become; we will map, question, talk, explore, and share plenty of cups of tea. We also hope that these honest, small-scale conversations will lead to some fresh ideas about how we overcome the challenges of collaboration.

As today's policy challenges become more complex, it has become clear that American media - online news, television, radio, newspapers, and magazines - are not up to the task of explaining the problems underlying them or providing citizens with all the information they need to engage in public conversations about them. Democracy cannot function properly without those conversations. But one new medium - videogames - may well fill the gap. By their very nature, videogames can engage players in ways that enable players to make their way through the intricacies of policy problems. As players begin to understand them in all their complexity, games may well help their governments forge solutions.

A collaborative model and open standard for civic issue tracking.

ManaBalss.lv is a web-based tool for citizen involvement in legislative change in Latvia. 15% of Latvians are reported to have used the tool and two new laws have been passed as a result.

Summary visualization of various open, demograpic data sets about the inhabitants of Rennes Métropolis.

An anthology of essays from the McKinsey Center for Government (written by political leaders, civil servants, economists and policy experts) exploring the approaches that governments around the world are taking to common, emerging problems.

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIt's affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Debatepedia is the Wikipedia of debates - an encyclopedia of pro and con arguments and quotes on critical issues. A project of the 501c3 non-profit International Debate Education Association (IDEA), Debatepedia utilizes the same wiki technology powering Wikipedia to centralize arguments and quotes found in editorials, op-eds, political statements, and books into comprehensive pro/con articles. This helps citizens and decision-makers better deliberate on the world's most important questions. Debatepedia is endorsed by the National Forensic League.

The White House Recently asked citizens to post suggestions on how to improve regulations.gov, data.gov, and the Federal web strategy. This is part two of a multi-part series on how to and more importantly, why we should consider changing the way these, (potentially) game-changing efforts could be improved. Here, we present some comments for regulations.gov and some suggestions on how changes could help improve the federal rulemaking process.

Topics of this book include principles, uses for transparency and civic engagement, a brief legal history, data quality, civic hacking, and paradoxes in transparency.

Austria , Germany , Greece , Switzerland , United Kingdom Type of initiative Project or service Case Abstract NOMAD aims to introduce the experience of setting a political agenda in a non-moderated, crowd sourcing way, by providing decision-makers with automated solutions for content search, acquisition, analysis and visualisation, while gathering online information from social media, blogs, news feeds and the web, following upon complex sets of issues.

PING is an online game made for secondary schools, forming a starting point to discuss the subject 'poverty' and what it means to be poor. Ping is aimed at the students of the secondary and third degree. The students become the main characters in the game. They can choose between Jim or Sofia, who, due to certain circumstances, end up on the street and need to find their own path. PING shows that games can help to introduce complex social subjects like poverty in the class room. The partners of the PING project want to contribute to the social debate encouraging the use of games at school as a tool to open the difficult discussion about poverty

"I have a brain cancer. Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors. Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life. I cracked them. I opened them and converted the contents into open formats, so that I could share them with everyone. Just today I have been able to share the data about my health condition (about my brain cancer) with 3 doctors. 2 of them already replied."

Update here: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/25/opinion/iaconesi-cure-open-source/index.html