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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Back in one of my previous lives (working for a Fortune 50 company), most of my job was managing a variety of the inadvertent kinds of problems that negatively affected the business, or the variety of other issues brought on by dumb manager decisions and things that people in the ...
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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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Social facilitation, or the audience effect, is defined as the tendency for people to act differently with an audience than when they’re alone. With social media, people always have an audience. Media and politics are giving us permission to act – online and in person — in ways that we ...
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Although federal agencies can be reticent to convene advisory committees (in part due to restrictions posed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act), municipal governments routinely employ citizens advisory committees for issues ranging from parks and recreation and solid waste management to business recruitment and retention, libraries, and the arts. Well ...
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As the principal government agency responsible for enforcing federal law around our environmental health – clean air, water and waste – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has protected and prolonged the lives of people in the United States since late 1970 – and, because of the EPA’s work with ...
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