Digital communication has truly transformed public participation, from risk communication to online town hall meetings. However, it is not an automatic or comprehensive solution to working with the public. Agencies would like it to address everything they want to do with the public, but it just doesn’t. When I look at my digital toolbox with… read more →
The Town Hall Meeting format will need to be thrown on the scrap heap for the next four years. It’s deadly if you’re trying to control the message and this President and this congress clearly need to control their messages. In their defense, controlling messages and the public narrative is something that almost everyone in… read more →
There are many terms for a community advisory board. These boards can be called citizens’ working committees, public reference groups, stakeholder task forces, whatever. They go by many names – but what are they, and why are they used? A community advisory board can be a viable alternative to engaging the community, particularly when a… read more →
Election winners frequently tout their success as a mandate to do as they choose, suggesting that they have been ordained to represent and act on overwhelming public opinion. This is generally the argument regardless of the winning party and it’s generally wrong. I have to think that this is something that the authors of the… read more →
What if you were in a coma for six years and woke up to the social media apocalypse of 2016? Ask blogger Hossein Derakhshan. He was jailed from 2008 to 2014 in Tehran for his online activism about Iran. In his November article for MIT Technology review, he writes: “when I left prison and came… read more →
In the December 29 issue of the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes an interesting column on the trajectory of democracy in the United States. In it, he discusses the concept of “illiberal democracy” where elections and populism are in place, but the rule of law, respect for minorities, freedom of the press and other… read more →
What is a town hall meeting? In the United States, a town hall meeting is an informal public meeting, function, or event derived from the traditional town hall meetings of Colonial America. Typically open to everybody in a town community and held at the local municipal building, attendees would present ideas, voice their opinions, and… read more →
Whew! The holidays are behind me. As I reflect on the past several weeks, I realize that preparing for a house full of family around the holidays is a lot like preparing for a public meeting. Anticipation. We all know that the actual time needed for planning and designing a public workshop or meeting is… read more →
Across the US, civility is declining. We could argue about why – but the bottom line is that our communities’ capacity to have constructive conversations about things that matter is not what it used to be. People are not always interested in finding agreement and some even come to public meetings with a goal of… read more →
Lots of things changed on November 8, not the least of which was our time-honored tradition of conducting and relying on public opinion polls as reasonable predictors of outcomes. It was fascinating on election night to watch as it slowly dawned on the media that their entire paradigm had shifted; everything they had taken as… read more →