Post in MTN & Portals

Nov 17 14:39 UTC

Sorry for joining the discussion late.

I'd like to see/help ensure that the "civic garden" includes local citizen
produced community oriented content. I happened to chat offline with Catherine
the other week about ensuring that this forum was included in the civic garden
as soon as possible. She indicated the need for an advisory committee of sorts
that would set the criteria for user generated content in the garden -
essentially a political buffer between city officials who might fear liability
1or real openness.

In addition to the Minneapolis Issues Forum, I'd also like to see in the
garden:

1. MTN/City Meetings On-Demand

2. Neighborhood Forums (We are rolling these out and started with Seward)
   - http://e-democracy.org/nf
   - We also some grant funding to help a couple predominantly immigrant/low
     income/communities of color get started:
http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/112

3. Minneapolis Wiki - Neighborhood Wiki
   - http://pages.e-democracy.org/Minneapolis
   - http://pages.e-democracy.org/Minneapolis_neighborhoods

4. Community Survey Platform
   - This should be a community utility that involves public institutions but
isn't limited to city use. We've outlined this idea in a Knight News Challenge
proposal - http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/111 . Here is some text:

Community Survey Platform

Description: The problem: Online polls are a joke. Online comments reflect the
extremes and the most vocal. Telephone surveys are expensive, miss huge
swatches of the population, and rarely focus locally. The solution? We will not
know until we try. We propose a pilot online community survey platform designed
to engage ten percent of households in Minneapolis and St. Paul on an ongoing
basis. Monthly question sets will come from both local institutions like the
neighborhood newspapers, non-profit and community groups and local government
as well as through a deliberative selection and "balanced" drafting effort
among interested participants. The anonymized results will be weighed based on
demographic data and shared "as is" for all to see. This model is used for
government only online surveys in Issy France and we want to democratize the
model and compare the results with a set of alternative and traditionally
scientific public opinion polls. Who knows, perhaps we will discover and
legitimate and low cost mechanism to survey local citizens about important
issues in their community to improve decision-making and democratic
accountability.

Users: Getting beyond those who already show up will be essential for this
survey platform to work in a meaningful way. With aggressive outreach - even
some door to door in less represented areas, we'll engage more people in local
public affairs than any process outside of occasional voting.

Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org