Let me know if you’d like to help advise E-Democracy.Org local Issues Forums
efforts in the UK. We hope to gather representatives from our four local
communities - Oxford, Bristol, Brighton, and Newham in Oxford on October 2 along
with supporters of our volunteer-driven, citizen-based approach.

RSVP to: team@e-democracy.org

We need to plot out the long-term path for E-Democracy.Org in the UK, work to
connect local efforts for knowledge and experience sharing, brainstorm ideas for
securing a UK coordinator (volunteer, funded, etc. … want to volunteer now to
jump start efforts?), figure out how to get “community empowerment” folks to
think digitally and discover our highly cost-effective model, explore ideas for
sharing the model with more communities (in the U.S. we are successfully focused
on funded start-ups be they council, university, or foundation funded) in the UK
and beyond in Europe.

If you can’t make it, but would like to advise E-Democracy.Org in the UK or get
involved in some way, drop me a note. We are forming an online advisory team of
those willing to help us build local democracy and neighbourhood participation
online in the UK.

Also, from the UKIE group, folks expressed interest in discussing general
“what’s next” opportunities in local e-democracy in the UK now that ICELE -
www.icele.org has been closed -
groups.dowire.org/r/topic/6AYanoQaGcIpwtS62soT7w - if interest remains, I
am open to someone else leading such a discussion. Anyone here willing to
step, up and chair such a discussion?

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

P.S. I’ll arrive at Heathrow the afternoon of Oct 1st from the EDem2008
conference in Krebs, Austria: www.donau-uni.ac.at/edem
I leave for home in Minneapolis on Oct 3.

Last week, Steve Kranz and I had a great time up in northern Minnesota spreading
the word about Issues Forum as part of our Blandin Foundation funded Rural
Voices effort. I’ve blogged about it on E-Democracy.Org and shared my updated
slides (which have evolved from a training on Issues Forums in Estonia!) and a
short video clip:

blog.e-democracy.org/posts/166

I often take about how our forums have spread to three countries, now I can add
a “sovereign nation” with the Cass Lake Leech Lake forum covering the Leech Lake
Indian Reservation and other jurisdictions including the town of Cass Lake, a
few counties, and even federal government national forest lands. I look forward
to sharing lessons as this project and neighborhood forums in high immigrant
area projects move along.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

More cross-posting. Steven Clift

Subject: oGosh! IRC Meeting Aug 16 4pm EDT
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:55:15 -0400
From: Josh Tauberer
Reply-To: open-government@googlegroups.com
To: openhouseproject@googlegroups.com, poliparse@googlegroups.com, open-government@googlegroups.com, “Open(Data).Open[Govt]”

(Apologies for four-way cross-posting!)

Hi all,

A current interest of mine is now how to build a larger, coherent
developer community around U.S. civic-technology projects of the types
we all work on. Something like channeling the developer power that is
out there that probably would want to work on these projects, in an
open-source project style, if only they knew about what interesting
things there are to do. There are a bunch of people thinking about a
developer community, each of us perhaps taking a stab at this in
different ways, so here’s a stab from me.

I’m holding a meeting on IRC to talk about civic-technology projects,
on Saturday, August 16 at 4pm Eastern time. The agenda will be a mix
between seeing what various civic technology projects are up to
(GovTrack, OpenCongress, and any others run by people who show up), and
getting new people involved in ongoing projects. So, for instance, even
if no newcomers show up, the meeting will be useful for the old-timers
like us just to catch up with each other’s recent work. But if we get
some newcomers, we can talk about how to get them on-board helping an
existing project.

As for the name “oGosh!”– A couple of months ago I created the Facebook
group oGosh: Open Government Open Source Hacking. (For the ODOG list
members, it’s a hat tip to that conference and a joke Micah made at the
beginning if the acronym had been OGOD.) The theme of the group is to be
a wide net for any technology project aimed at civics, in the U.S., like
the usual legislative transparency to, if I can eventually contact the
people, things like election transparency.

Despite the name, I don’t mean to specifically exclude closed source
projects. Especially for this IRC meeting. It’s just a name. It was
tricky finding something catchy aimed at the developer side of things.

Also as for the time- I’m doing this on a Saturday in the hopes of
making it more accessible to newcomers. We’ll see how that works out.

The chat will be in the #transparency channel on Freenode. For more
information on the meeting (and on how to get to the chat), see:

wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh
www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=45606565313

Suggestions for agenda topics are most welcome either to me directly
(off-list) or by revising the wiki page above.

Hope to see you there.

–
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us

razor.occams.info

“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!” Achilles to
Tortoise (in “Godel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter)

Subject: Web 2.0: The Future of Collaborative Government [Real Player, pdf]
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 11:06:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dan Knauss

Web 2.0: The Future of Collaborative Government [Real Player, pdf]
www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,cid%253D208669,00.html?WT.mc_id=USRSS

Many units of government have their own websites, though their quality
varies widely. With that state of affairs in mind, the Deloitte
Consulting Group and the National Academy of Public Administration
teamed up in June 2008 as part of a group conference in order to take
a critical look at developing a “road map to help the next
administration navigate the work force and organization changes that
need to occur to move to a more collaborative model of government.”
During their group meeting, the participants (which included the
global director of public sector at Deloitte Research and the
assistant director of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence) engaged in a discussion about this timely topic, and
some of their thoughts and ideas can be found on this site. Visitors
can read profiles of those invited to the meeting and then scroll down
the homepage to view webcasts from the event and also take a look at
several documents which chart the potential future of collaborative
government and how this plan might be implemented. [KMG]

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2008.
scout.wisc.edu/

Also check out the good work of Washington State-based:
knowledgeaspower.org

See:
www.ipdi.org/uploadedfiles/CRM_June17.pdf

Subject: New IPDI White Paper – eCRM for State Legislators
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:03:38 +0000
From: Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet

The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (www.ipdi.org)
is pleased to announce the release of its latest white paper,
/e-Constituent Relationship Management for State Legislators/, which it
authored with the Council of State Governments-WEST (www.csgwest.org).
The white paper looks at adopting corporate “customer relationship
management” principles and practices on a state level, to help
legislators better manage constituent email, phone calls, and requests.

e-Constituent Relationship Management is available for download online
.
It includes practical sections on

* What to consider before you begin to implement any CMR tactics.
* Principles of constituent relationship management for state
legislators.
* Case studies on building better programs, managing constituent
email, developing a data strategy, and proactively using
communications.
* What to look for in a technology system.
* Data privacy.
* Transitioning from elected office to the campaign trail.
* Managing constituent casework.
* Sorting through from third party organizations.

Hear about day-to-day tactics and tools from state legislators and IT
staff:

* Representative Janice E. Arnold-Jones - New Mexico State House
* Ric Cantrell - Chief Deputy, Utah State Senate
* Representative Mike Doogan - Alaska State House
* Lee Harris - Legislative Data Center, California State Legislature
* Kevin Hayes - Session Information Office, Montana Sate Legislature
* Paul Mouritsen - Constituent Services, Nevada State Legislature
* Bud Richmond - IT Analyst, Oregon State Legislature

Learn from the advice and recommendations of CRM experts and
inside-the-Beltway strategists:

* Daniel Bennett - Practitioner-in-Residence, IPDI
* Peter Churchill - Center for American Progress
* Paul Greenberg - The 56 Group
* Jeff Mascott - Adfero Group
* Chris Massicotte - NGP
* Nick Schaper - Office of House Republican Leader John Boehner
* Thomas VanderWal - Infocloud Solutions
* Ken Ward - Adfero Group

Download a copy of e-Constituent Relationship Management online
.

————————————————————————
Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet
805 21st Street NW, Suite 401
Washington, District of Columbia 20052