Digital communication has truly transformed public participation but it’s not an automatic or comprehensive solution to working with the public. It does not solve everything. Thus, it is important to choose your digital tools wisely in order to promote the collaborative process.
When I look at ...
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OK, so this may not be the most politically correct headline for a blog today, but I will stand by it. For over 20 years, before cell phones made the effort moot, Ma Bell and later AT&T used this slogan to get people to call long distance. It turns out ...
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Meeting facilitation can be a complex art and science when the issues themselves are comparably complex. As we teach in our meeting facilitation training, learning to do meeting facilitation well requires paying attention to nuances, one of which is getting the right people in the room. The room, of ...
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The thesis of this article is that the best, most effective crisis management team is You. And your neighbors and your community. Us. The Tribe.
About a year ago, I read Sebastian Junger’s wonderful book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What an ...
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America seems to love polls, and the media loves to feed us poll results on a daily basis, but what do they really mean? And what is their true usefulness? If we take a poll on a specific question with a few hundred people out of a population of 300 ...
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At the risk of revealing a dirty little blogging secret, the phrase I’ve used as the title of this article has been included in our guiding list of ‘key words’ for quite some time. So, I know there’s at least one of you out there who thinks this is an ...
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Citizens Advisory Boards are convened by government agencies to seek advice over time. Members are typically selected from diverse perspectives. As a cross-section of the broader community, they commit to spending time together to develop agreement on the advice they will provide to the sponsoring agency they serve.
Documenting the ...
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We have all been there. Our clients want the latest and greatest online participation tools—not to enhance their programs, but to replace the need to actually get out and meet with stakeholders. The risks with online public engagement are great.
Online tools are obviously great at many things: reaching a ...
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The world has changed. Maybe you like it better now; maybe you don’t. In either case, most people are feeling a bit out of sorts as we observe how things have changed and consider how to recalibrate to interface with the new reality.
Of course, it’s not just about how ...
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Whether you are engaging in basic public communications or crisis management activities, simple facilitation or consensus building on a complex topic, there is one skill that we all need at all times: The ability to listen. If you have watched any of the recent town hall meetings on TV, you ...
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