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.

Welcome to the Participation Compass - your gateway to better participation. This tool provides practical information for those working to involve people. By registering you can add methods, cases, library resources, news and experts to our database.

The Workshop on Argumentation Technology for Policy Deliberations will present the results of the European FP7 IMPACT Project, along with invited talks by leading developers and users of argumentation tools for supporting public participation in policy deliberations on the World-Wide-Web.

A Tool for Civil Engagement

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.

If the goal is to accelerate societal learning, the interplay between scientists, policymakers and the wider public will be critical. However, the existing patterns of interaction leave much to be desired. First, the science-policy relationship is often difficult and dysfunctional. Second, the international governance infrastructure - the United Nations, World Bank, WTO and others - was designed to meet the needs of the post-WW2 era and is ill-adapted to the interconnected and transdisciplinary challenges it now faces. And finally, our main public communication channels seem better attuned to the linear and polarised narrative of crisis than to the nuanced, detailed, anticipatory work of crisis avoidance or minimisation.

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.

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.

Think together to act together: CivicEvolution helps citizens create community written and supported plans to solve community problems.

"Online game Foldit adds puzzle to investigate proteins to aid sepsis treatment... Gamers solving a previous Foldit puzzle remodeled an important reaction in organic synthesis in three weeks-a solution that evaded scientists for years."

"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

A new generation of Collective Intelligence (CI) technologies, adopted by public and private sector organizations, offers "the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation in order to create, innovate and invent".

The UK Government is improving the way it consults by adopting a more proportionate and targeted approach, so that the type and scale of engagement is proportional to the potential impacts of the proposal. The emphasis is on understanding the effects of a proposal and focussing on real engagement with key groups rather than following a set process.

Last night the ARG:dundee team conducted close argument analysis on a live 45 minute broadcast of an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze, using our Argument AnalysisWall. We aimed to make debates available on the Argument Web for all the different compatible online tools to access.

Democratizing Big Data and Complexity Science by weaving participatory CollectiveIntelligence into FuturICT.

Automatic analysis of news related to food security issues in French language media (national and local). Text-mining network analysis tools are used to identify the key themes discussed in the press at a given period.

Access, visualize, mashup and discover actionable insights hidden in Big Data & Extreme Information.

"An Evidence Hub is designed to help your members add their insights where they'll make the highest impact, and through the use of different visualizations/maps, helps answer questions such as the following: Who in my region is working on this problem? Are there any partnerships between projects in these two areas, on this theme?"

"...we have put together a selection of tools that we use the most and that we enjoy working with. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you're not into programming, you'll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code."

The Cyberinfrastructure Shell (CIShell) is an open source, community-driven platform for the integration, utilization and visualization of datasets, algorithms, tools, and computing resources. CIShell supports the plug-and-play of datasets and algorithms and their bundling into custom tools including Network Workbench, TexTrend, Sci² and EpiC.