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For links, see Steven Clift's blog: http://dowire.org/notes/?p=203 Post: Report - Scotland's E-Community Council Pilots - Model e-participation support for neighborhood associations? The E-Community Council effort lead by the International Teledemocracy Centre (project background link) has issued an excellent, well written and significantly granular reports on this initiative: * An e-Democracy Model for Communities: Final Report of the e-Community Council Project - PDF * An e-Democracy Model for Communities: Annexes to the Final Report - PDF * Also of interest is Towards an e-Democracy Model for Communities - PDF among other ITC publications. I think a special acknowledgement should go out to Stirling Council for creating the right kind of democratic climate for this initiative. For those in countries with active neighborhood/neighbourhood or residents associations, these detailed reports should interest you. In Minneapolis, we have dozens of active neighborhood associations that also provide input into local planning and they do not have a shared online platform for better organizing their participatory and consultative activities. One challenge however, is where the local people "are" online and whether it makes more sense for a community council to go to them gather input instead expecting them to come to you. I've been monitoring the exciting online neighborhood forum movement as we plan to launch them in Minneapolis. It might be that these "local life" forums with only 20 percent "politics" might generate more participation and reach. One open question to the folks at ITC. Have you consider the role of open source with this tool and whether it would have a longer shelf life as an open source Drupal/Plone/Joomla/GroupServer extension rather than as a stand-alone tool? This is a question I plan to ask lots of e-democracy project. *** Democracies Online Newswire - http://DoWire.Org *** To comment: http://dowire.org/notes/?p=203 To network: http://groups.dowire.org Submit posts: http://dowire.org/submit Member profile for Steven: http://groups.dowire.org/main/contacts/stevenclift ----------------------------------------- Group home for Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail: http://groups.dowire.org/main/groups/newswire Replies go to members of Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/topic/111064 For digest version or to leave Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail, email [email protected] with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.
