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Content Management Tools for Community Boards

"Community board staff spend hours collating and retyping meeting minutes into “dumb” Word documents; community members interested in a particular issue find it nearly impossible to construct a history of that issue from the available information; and community board members themselves often must rely on institutional memory...."

Spread of the Hack: UK Councils call in the geeks to help them solve local problems

Councils across the country are using open innovation events such as hacks, challenges, camps and jams, as well as creating innovation centres, to help them use cutting-edge technology and new ways of thinking to cope with the gloom associated with disappearing budgets.

Terrible Public Engagement: the Three (or 7) D's

Don’t try to understand their context, or think about how successful engagement here will differ from what worked somewhere else.  One size fits all is easiest, right?  Until it blows up in your face.  

OpenGeo spins-off from OpenPlans

We’re proud to announce that OpenGeo has spun out from OpenPlans to form its own independent company....

#WALDOCANYONFIRE – Lessons for Social Media in a Crisis

"The community can naturally self-correct. There were several times during the fire when members of the Twitter community corrected erroneous tweets before we (as the “official” Twitter accounts) could get to them. Everyone had a stake in communicating truthfully, so we were all on the same team."

Keepers of the Kind of Small Big Ideas

You have two challenges in front of you.  The first is that you're leading the charge to something profoundly new, and that's going to scare people who are entrenched in something old.  The second is that what you are doing is so local, so fundamentally grassroots-based, so under the radar, that your work is probably going to go unrecognized outside of a small devoted circle for a while.

Vine as an engagement tool? Useful or weird? What do you think?

Because Vines are so time limited, they are very concise and could have all sorts of uses analogous to community photography exercises. It’s not always desirable to limit the length and detail of people’s input but if you are asking them to show you something this has all sorts of benefits in terms of being able to efficiently process the information.

New Zealand Fast Tracks Citizen Engagement Reforms

“The aim of the funding is to increase the efficiencies of agencies working together to allow more New Zealanders to interact with the Government online...Our target is for 70 per cent of New Zealanders’ most common transactions with government to occur online by 2017.”

Creating a Digital Town Square

From granicus.com:

Saving the world takes more than open public data