Richmond, Indiana Using Community Indicators for Community Discussion

Check out this report from the Palladium-Item (which is one of the odder names for a local newspaper I've ever seen) about the RICHMOND INDICATORS: A Community and Economic Benchmark Report (PDF). They're hosting a televised program with interactive internet chat to discuss the implications of the indicators report for competition, struggle, and opportunity in economic development.

The report covers demographics and economic indicators, plus a social capital index, commute sheds, and an innovation index. It's an interesting report out of eastern Indiana and worth a look at what they're doing and how they're trying to engage the public around the report.

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Mad Props to Tad Long!

I'm at the 2009 Community Indicators Consortium Conference in Bellevue, Washington. I'll be sharing my notes on the sessions shortly.

But I had to applaud Tad Long from NewCity Morehead for concluding his presentation by going to his website and showing how his presentation, report, and template were online and waiting for us, collected on a page for conference attendees.

Two quick thoughts from his presentation:

• measuring results has to go beyond usual ways we measure
• engaging citizens needs to go beyond the traditional ways we have brought people together

www.newcities.org

I'm going to be spending more time comparing their community engagement scorecard with the Indicators of Civic Health project we did with the National Civic League back in 2002. I like how many of the same themes have been develloped further.

Way to represent!

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Community Engagement and Civic Indicators

I was reading David Brown's "Citizen-Centered Democracy" interview with Matt Leighninger (of Everyday Democracy and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium) found in Kettering's recent (2009) Higher Education Exchange, and I began thinking about the role and importance of community indicators in both facilitating meaningful civic engagement and in measuring the extent and effectiveness of that engagement.

In the interview, Leighninger (speaking of his book, The Next Form of Democracy) says:

"Different communities will come up with different frameworks for the relationship between citizens and government. But the question of how they know where they are headed, and (perhaps more importantly) how they know they are making progress, is a major challenge for the field. Right now, in most instances, communities and public agencies fail to measure how they are doing with public participation. We need systems that will help people track the quantitative kinds of information -- how many people participated, how diverse and representative they were -- along with more qualitative kinds of data -- what did the participants and the decision makers think of the process, what kinds of tangible changes resulted, and so on. This kind of tracking and measuring ought to be easier now, with all the online technology we have at our disposal, but I haven't yet seen an online system that does all this. Without these kinds of information loops, it is harder for communities to figure out where they are going and how they might get there faster." [emphasis added]

This intrigued me for multiple reasons.

First, I strongly believe that successful community indicators systems must be built on public participation. Absent meaning civic dialogue in determining a shared community vision and consensus in the kinds of information needed to track progress towards that vision, indicators become merely another academic exercise. Community indicators need to be of and from the community, not just for and about the community.

Second, part of our measures of a community ought to include the civic health of the community. How involved are citizens in governance? Are they successful? Do they feel successful? I disagree that counting noses at public meetings is a necessary or even useful indicator, but it is a start. I'd appreciate further conversations that would pick up where the National Civic League's Indicators of Civic Health project left off. To some extent, the current efforts toward bridging community indicators and government performance measures are leading to redefinitions of citizen involvement in community governance, but often in a round-about way -- we probably ought to be more intentional about that conversation and more precise in what we measure.

Third, I suspect that we have some difficulty at times in the field of community indicators bridging community-oriented public dialogue principles and skillsets with data-driven measurement and research capacities -- it's uncomfortable to recognize that we need to bring together both data people and people people in order for our work to make a difference. Balancing the competing needs for data excellence and community conversation (which is often much messier and much less quantifiable) is a challenge that will undermine our work if we're not aware of the tensions and plan our engagement processes accordingly.

I found Leighninger's response to the question of "professionalization" particularly intriguing. (You may remember Ken Jones leading a similar discussion at the 2005 joint Community Indicators Consortium/National Association of Planning Councils conference in Washington, D.C.)

Leighninger said:

"Professionalization is both promising and problematic for us. Right now, there are virtually no barriers to entry in this field -- it seems like all you need to set up shop as an expert on democracy is some free time and a Web site! There's a sort of excitement to that, and it may encourage various kinds of innovation, but at the same time it makes it very difficult for the prospective employers (public managers and other kinds of leaders who need help working more intensively with citizens) to find the right prospective employees (either job candidates for permanent positions, or nonprofits and consultants for temporary projects) who have the right skills and experiences to be effective.

"We need certain aspects of professionalization: a more unified sense of the main principles that undergird the field; stronger degree programs (in disciplines like public administration) that prepare students to engage citizens more productively; and greater awareness of the main organizations, models, and techniques. But we need to retain some antiprofessional qualities as well: the sense that at least some of the basic skills you need to do this work can be learned fairly quickly by committed amateurs without formal training; a shared understanding that your mindset and attitude toward citizens is at least as important as the skills and experiences you bring to the job; and the flexibility to continue adapting models, methods, and principles, so that shared learning is one of the most prized tenets of the field."

I found myself in wholehearted agreement, especially as I considered how this applied to our field of community indicators. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments on what you think this means to our work.

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Spartanburg, Indicators Reports, and Community Engagement

I like how the Spartanburg community came together to talk about the challenges raised in their new community indicators report. There's a video available at the site (I couldn't get this one to embed properly), but you may want to take a look at it.

The meeting raises the challenge all indicator projects must face: how do you move from reporting the problems to solving them? We know providing the data alone is insufficient to solving the problem (though may times it serves as a necessary precondition for action). We also know that, while indicators reports sometimes catalyze community action by raising the key issues of the community, more often than not the report itself highlights the problem, sparks a little conversation, and then (if left alone) people move on.

At the same time, no one organization can solve all the community's problems. We know that. But when we report on all the community's problems, and people ask us what we're going to do to fix them, we can inadvertently create expectations of problem ownership (especially if no one else is talking about the problem or is stepping forward to lead community action.)

So what do we do about it? Some thoughts follow:

I've suggested before that community indicators are one piece in an overall model for community improvement. I'll likely say it a few more times.

Right now, though, what I want to focus in on is the need for a credible, neutral source in the community that can take a bigger-picture view of the aspects of a community that contribute to good living/high quality of life/healthy/sustainable community (whatever your framework for describing what's important about where you life.)

Lots of people and organizations are working on issues. For each of these, the most important issue is the one they are facing today. Their voices, especially in a time of relative resource scarcity, keep getting louder as they fight for a place in community priorities and attention. Some people are more effective at being heard than others. Some become too effective in getting their message out until it becomes overkill and people stop listening -- there are only so many times you can hear that the sky is falling before you start resenting the calls for action. (Just check out the latest poll numbers on global warming -- the intensity and omnipresence of the message is spurring a backlash, and the weather isn't helping.)

In a worst-case scenario, people and organizations get so tied to a message that others actively shut out content and replace it with caricature. (Take PETA, for example -- they've done a pretty good job of alienating people from hearing a set of important ethical messages, in my opinion. Somewhere along the way they stopped sharing information and started looking like desperate folks who will do anything to get attention. Can anyone with a straight face tell me that their banned Superbowl ad helped advance community discussion? Or when exploiting women became OK if it was in the cause of not exploiting animals? OK, I'll stop ranting.)

The strength of a community indicators report is the ability, again in my opinion, to rise above the issue-specific turf wars and get people to see the community through a wider lens. This helps issues get framed as parts of overall systems. It demonstrates interrelatedness of problems. It tears down silos. It encourages collaborative action.

The temptation is to dive in on a particular issue and begin leading the charge. On the plus side, this issue may need a champion, and the community is looking at you already and wants to know what you are going to do about it. You can galvanize the community, you can with intentionality forge those coalitions. You can be the voice of the community and lead action to make things better!

The negative side to that is twofold. First, You dove into the pool. You became just another advocacy organization. From now on, your report will be viewed differently -- no longer above the fray, you're now talking about how everything relates with your issue. It changes how you are seen, and how your report is perceived.

Second, you've used your community capital on that issue. It will be twice as hard to try to tackle another issue. You're in the pool already, so can't dive in as the lifeguard to rescue another community problem with quite as much ease, especially since that problem is likely still hanging on to you for dear life.

Third, when you jumped in, others were free to stay out. They could go on with their lives, secure in the knowledge that you were taking care of the problem. You and they lost the opportunity to see who else could be a lifesaver. You took the pressure off the community and put it on yourself.

The good news is that a strong model of community improvement can keep you (and your community) afloat, even in tough times. I'll talk more about that model in another post. In the meantime, congratulations to Spartanburg (and to all the rest of you out there) for keeping those community conversations alive. The problems out there are too big for just one organization, even a really cool one that knows how to do indicators.

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PPMRN Conference: Other Thoughts

I was excited about one session in particular on Saturday morning at the PPMRN conference. The session was entitled “Citizen Engagement,” and the teaser promised that we would hear the panel “discuss their innovative programs that encourage governments to involve citizens in performance measurement and reporting processes.”

What I heard was some really good work in enhancing the way governments provide information to citizens (or residents or people -- the nomenclature has been changing as communities struggle with inclusivity and their non-citizen populations.) There's also interesting work in surveying citizens to see what they want and what's important to them.

Both of these communication strategies are critical in how we link people to the governments that serve them, and how we promote increased information-sharing from government to the people and from the people to government.

The challenge is to move beyond information-sharing to this thing we call “citizen engagement.” We're dealing in communities with disconnects, dissatisfaction, distrust, and powerlessness. Engaging citizens in community governance is both a logical and a necessary strategy to resolve these concerns and create more effective governance. But engaging requires more than an information exchange, especially if the information exchange occurs through an intermediary.

The difficulty is that we can't overcome powerlessness without a willingness to share or transfer power. Real engagement requires shared conversations -- not just surveys -- and participation in the decision-making processes. For those of us in the measurement business, that can be as simple as bringing people and government together in a room and deciding together what is important, what good government looks like, and how to measure progress on reaching a shared vision for effective governance.

One benefit to this kind of approach is to reconnect citizens and government and to begin building trust. A second benefit is to involve citizens in creating the solutions -- how can people help improve their community on their own or in voluntary associations? (See de Tocqueville for our history with these kind of associations and their critical function in making communities work.)

The good news is that this is more than just a theoretical discussion. Across America, these kinds of discussions are taking place -- in Sheriff's Advisory Committees, in committee meetings, and in organizations like the one I work in.

As we continue to enhance the amazing work being accomplished in government performance measurement in reporting, we need to bring the people into the picture. Is it hard to understand? Let's take a moment and talk it through together. Does government have limits? Of course it does, and through shared conversation we can move from wishful thinking to the practical. But those conversation need to happen in order to help both citizen and government understand what good government looks like.

Last story and I will stop musing on the topic: We had, in one community, a named storm come through. Trees fell. Power was knocked out. Our Emergency Operations Center went into action. Plans were put into effect. Goals were met, and the lights were back on and the street debris was all gone within 48 hours. High-fives and congratulations abounded within the EOC. That is, until they started hearing citizen complainst that it took two days for the power to be back on and the debris removed.

The problem wasn't government efficiency. The problem was in developing a shared understanding with the citizens on what efficient government was. The real challenge wasn't the performance measures, but the lack of engagement.

I'd appreciate your thoughts and reactions on this topic. What am I missing? Oversimplifying? Let me know if you want to talk further about the roles outside help can bring to engaging your community with government.

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PPMRN Conference

I'm at Rutgers, attending the Public Performance Measurement & Reporting Network's Second Annual Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Conference and having a great time. The discussion has been lively and the presentations, for the most part, thought-provoking. The conference organizers are promising to have the presentations available online fairly shortly, and are recording each session in order to put the audio online as well -- though the presenters didn't always stay near the microphones/recording devices, so I don't know how well that will work.

Because the presentations should be available, I'll just share a couple of thoughts on Friday's sessions that I attended. (They had three workshops going on at any one time, so I had to pick and choose what I could attend, which is another reason I'm looking forward to the other presentations being made available.)

It became clear in the first session that "performance reporting" and "performance budgeting" and "performance management" and "performance measurement" were terms used by different presenters to mean related, but different, things. For example, one speaker defined performance budgeting as "requiring strategic planning by executive agencies, the development of goals and objectives, performance measurement development, reporting, benchmarking, and the evaluation of performance." Others saw performance budgeting as a piece of that picture, part of a system of performance management. David Ammons questioned whether performance management was a system or an act, and pointed to acts of performance management. It was heady discussion.

But I was there primarily to understand and talk about two things: how data are used to improve decision-making and policy, and how citizens get involved in the process. I was pleased to see those two topics visited by nearly every speaker, with a range of opinions associated with how citizens could be involved in government performance measurement. Some of the roles they described for citizens were:

• Audience. From most of the people I heard, government performance measures of some sort ought to be reported out to the people served by government. One speaker said it was the professional thing to do. Others were concerned that it might be too much information for citizens to understand, but there was general agreement that some level of information needed to be provided to the public and not just used for internal efficiencies and management purposes. (One attendee raised the point that there could never be too much data for the citizens, which I found heart-warming, but we were all largely data-interested folks there anyway.)
• Survey respondents. We had some great presentations about the use of survey data and citizen responses as part of a performance reporting and management system. I particularly enjoyed (and recommend) Gregg Van Ryzin's work on analyzing citizen surveys for derived importance -- it's a different way of looking at the data that helps understand and create priorities.
• Advocates for change. We heard of some performance management systems that were created because the citizenry demanded better performance of government.
• Voters. We also heard of the filter some elected officials use in evaluating performance management reporting and budgeting systems -- "how will this help me get re-elected?" The role of citizen as voter has to be part of the list, because of this impact on how performance management reporting happens.
• Participants in defining measures. A couple of speakers went farther to talk about how to involve citizens in defining what should be measured. I recommend Natasha Mihal's presentation from San Francisco as well as the Citizen Engagement presentation from Jacksonville -- yes, that's mine. Here's my particular bias: citizens can do more than just read a report or answer the phone when you want to know what they think. They can (and should) be full participants in the process. But you already knew that's what I thought ...
• Users of information to improve the community. This role goes hand in hand with the one above. If it's government's information, it holds government accountable to fix a problem defined as a government responsibility. If it's the community's information, the citizenry can be brought in as partners to address a shared community problem, in which government has a role to play. That's my personal soapbox, but it was validating to hear the results in San Francisco where citizen involvement and improved government performance reporting went hand in hand.

Today should be even more interesting. If you're at the conference and are reading this, I welcome your feedback into the big topics I missed. (I also need to write about David Ammons' extended analogy of the forest of hardwood and softwood trees facing the storm.) If you weren't, your feedback is welcome anyway.

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Trailblazer Award Announcement

(Click on the announcement to resize)

See www.civicinnovation.org for more information.

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Involving the Public in Public Performance Measurement

I'm headed up tomorrow to the Second Annual Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Conference being held up at Rutgers University in Newark. I'll be speaking Friday afternoon on "Citizen Engagement in Community Benchmarks: Lessons Learned from The Jacksonville Community Council."

If you're going to be at the conference, be sure to say hello. For those who can't attend, I plan on sharing my notes and impressions with you in this blog, and will try to find others to share notes from the sessions that I can't attend.

We've been working on reporting indicators for some time now in Jacksonville -- next week we will release our 24th annual report on the Quality of Life in Jacksonville -- and we've helped quite a few other communities develop their own indicators systems. From that, I suggest we've learned some valuable lessons. I touched on some of them briefly at the National League of Cities Congress a couple of months ago, but one thought in particularly is on my mind this morning.

Simply put, good data are not enough. The best indicators in the world are irrelevant at best (and damaging at worst) without the right kind of process behind them. And this is doubly true for public performance indicators.

In a former career, I studied to be a therapist. With one of my earliest clients, I was excited to recognize the pathologies, diagnose the problem, and relay the answer -- all in the first session. I felt on top of the world -- this therapy stuff was easy -- and reported back to my supervisor. He smiled and remarked on my adorable mix of naivete and stupidity. The point of therapy wasn't about the therapist knowing what the client had to do differently; it's about the client owning the solutions, and that happens through a process of discovery, not being told what to do.

I see the same dynamic in government performance benchmarking and citizen engagement. Some internal performance measures are critical for administrative purposes. You need to be paying attention to who shows up for work in order to pay them, for example. But that's a management process, not an accountability process.

Citizen engagement is critical for community feedback into what matters (where are the priorities?), and community confidence in government activities (are they doing what we need them to be doing?) Government telling the community what's important and announcing what they will measure and what the results are feels somewhat like my initial foray into therapy -- it doesn't mean anything unless I've had the opportunity to be part of the process of discovering the answers.

Let me try another metaphor. At our organization, we have a team of auditors go over our books every year and report their results to our board. It's easier (and cheaper) for us to look at our books ourselves, and then tell the board that we think everything's fine and our internal financial controls are just peachy. That may be the absolute gospel truth, but it's completely irrelevant to the board (and they will likely trust us even less the more we insist we handling the money just fine.) Accountability requires, at some level, external review of the information, and someone outside the organization asking the questions.

So to summarize, why is citizen involvement in government performance measures so important? For one reason, people need to be involved in the process to make it their own, otherwise the exercise lacks essential meaning. For another, community confidence depends on being able to ask the right questions and trust the answers, and trust usually involves someone else reporting the information. Those aren't the only reasons, by a long shot -- just the ones that I was thinking over this morning. (You'll have to attend my session on Friday, or wait until I write it up and post it, to hear the others.)

That's why, as uncomfortable as it gets sometimes for everyone involved, our work with our local government entities in reporting government performance as part as an overall picture of the quality of life in our community is so important. It's connecting the citizenry to government, and government to citizens, that makes the reporting a true measure of accountability and progress.

We need to do more locally. We know that. But we can build on the layers of trust we've built over time to make good benchmarking even better.

What are your thoughts?

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Citizen Engagement in Community Indicators Conference

I briefly mentioned the Strasbourg conference that I had to miss because I was getting married that weekend. I remembered to get married, but I forgot to share with you the results of conference.

You can see here the format and many of the presentations of the Seminar on ‘Involving citizens and communities in measuring and fostering well-being and progress’ hosted by the Council of Europe, in partnership with the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy) and the OECD.

The description of the conference follows:

The aim of the seminar was to develop new approaches and tools for measuring how societies are changing by using high quality, reliable statistics to assess progress in a range of areas affecting citizens’ quality of life. Citizen participation in this process and the strengthening of their capacity to understand the social and economic context in which they live is important for improving policy making, democracy and citizen well-being.

The event provided the opportunity for an exchange of good practices from various Council of Europe member states as well as non-member states such as Australia, Canada, Colombia and Japan and sought to promote international co-operation at governmental and non-governmental level.

Participants had the opportunity to attend two round tables and six separate workshops addressing the following issues:

• Well-being and well-being for all: what differences and which indicators?

• Determining the objective and the political aim of involving citizens in developing indicators; identifying responsibilities and clarifying the institutional aspects of the approach

• Links between traditional systems of indicators and those developed with citizens/communities: antagonisms, alternatives or complementarities?

• Working with citizens /communities to develop indicators of well-being/progress

• Assessing needs in conjunction with citizens, collecting data establishing a link with conventional statistical data

• How can the question of goods for well being be taken into account in the work to develop indicators with citizens/communities?

See more here.

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Engaging Citizens in Public Performance Measurement

Here's a heads-up from the Public Performance Measurement Reporting Network (PPMRN). A new report has been released which you may find useful in your own community indicators efforts, especially in trying to integrate community indicators with government performance measurement systems.

Engaging Citizens in Measuring and Reporting Government Performance and Community Conditions: -- A Manager's Guide

Alfred T. Ho
Associate Professor
School of Public & Environmental Affairs
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

Report link: http://www.businessofgovernment.org/main/publications/grant_reports/details/index.asp?gid=301

This report presents specific guidelines to local public managers as well as nonprofit leaders on how they can work with each other and with citizen representatives to use public input to guide government performance and community conditions reporting. This report challenges the traditional notion of "performance management," in which public managers dictate what indicators should be used and how data should be analyzed and presented and suggests that citizen engagement should play a larger role in the process.

Two models of public engagement are recommended in this report. The "partnership" model emphasizes equal sharing of power between citizen representatives and public officials in deciding what and how performance indicators should be used. This model is illustrated through a case study of the Des Moines "Citizen-Initiated Performance Assessment" project in 2001-2004, which was a partnership between the city government of Des Moines, Des Moines Neighbors, and several universities in the region. The second model, which is the "community indicators" model, gives even more power to the public by empowering and supporting nonprofit organizations in a community to measure the quality of life and policy outcomes through self-organized efforts and collaborative partnerships between government, nonprofit and business organizations. This approach is illustrated in this report through a case study of the Boston Indicators Project, which just released its 2004-2006 report in June 2007.

From the Des Moines and Boston experiences, the report provides specific recommendations on the following aspects:

• how to prepare government and community leadership to engage the public in performance measurement and community conditions reporting before the project launch;
• how to solicit public input and engage the general citizenry effectively in designing performance indicators;
• how to report community conditions and program results effectively to citizens so that the content of the report, whether in paper or in electronic media, is meaningful, understandable, accessible, and credible to citizens;
• how to engage the public in follow-up after the release of a performance report so that the analysis can be used to empower policymakers, community leaders and public managers to take responsive action.
  

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More from Regards to Rural Conference

Good morning! Last night as part of the Regards to Rural V Conference we had a chance to hear from Frances Moore Lappé, author of books like Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad, Democracy's Edge, and You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear.

What she had to say wasn't about indicators, but about community. Yet there were a few thoughts I thought that community indicators practitioners might want to pay attention to.

Democracy, she suggested, wasn't merely elections plus free markets, some structure or set of institutions inherited from the past that continues unaided into the future. Instead, democracy is something we do; democracy isn't a system, it is a set of shared values that undergird how we make decisions that matter for the community. There are plenty of examples of systems that use the forms of democracy without really engaging the people in making decisions that matter.

Important for democracy, then, are institutions that act in a convener role, and that engage citizens in acts of power. To get there, we need to rethink power. Power is not a thing, it is the capacity to act, and power is always relationships.

We need to rethink fear, because perhaps the only real problem we have to overcome is citizens feeling powerlessness.

So how does this fit with communtiy indicators efforts? As we engage communities in identifying what matters, and measuring our progress towards real and actual change, we are engaging citizens in acts of true power -- building relationships, enlarging the capacity to make change.

And when we succeed, which we often do in quiet and marvelous ways, we need to do a better job of telling our stories. Frances Moore Lappé says that we become part of this "living democracy" through shared story-telling, seeing the examples of democracy-in-action, and creating new norms for our communities. We've been talking quite a bit here about the importance of storytelling, and here's another reason to get better at telling our stories: not just to move the actions we're working on, but to inspire others with a greater sense of capacity to act (power) so that they too can do much good in our communities.

What do you think?

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Data and Mapping for Prisoner Re-Entry

Back in 2001, my organization took a look at services for ex-offenders and the challenges involved in prisoner re-entry.

Now there's a new report on using data and mapping technology to help communities address these same issues. The report, Mapping for Community-Based Prisoner Reentry Efforts (PDF), is produced by The Police Foundation and is subtitled "A Guidebook for Law Enforcement Agencies and Their Partners." But the report doesn't concentrate only on community safety issues (though that's one of the primary concerns of the report.) It also looks at how mapping re-entry services, housing opportunities, and the like can help people not re-offend.

Beyond the specific subject material, however, the report is a good example of the power of community-based solutions using data, trendlines, and mapping technology. If you don't read it for the content, read it for the process used to develop its answers -- and think about how your community processes could benefit from a similar approach.

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Using the Web to Make Change

Community indicators are primarily about community improvement, right? We measure conditions in the community in order to inspire action and measure progress toward reaching a desired community vision or goal. Otherwise, this would just be an interesting exercise in data retrieval and display (not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Allison Fine, who wrote Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, gives us a brief summary of how to use the Web to connect people and move ideas forward. (I like that one of the reviewers of her book recommends it as a companion volume to Made to Stick).

In her article, Using Tech to Connect: Social Media Tools for Social Change, Fine lays out a series of tips for using the internet to connect people and ideas and help them become effective in community improvement efforts. She also provides examples of model websites to show what she's talking about. It's worth a read.

In a related article, Britt Bravo provides tips for how to use blogs to make change, and provides a sample list of blogs for consideration. (This blog is not on the list.)

Let me know what other resources you find useful to use technology to promote social change, especially those who use community indicators as ignition points.

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Citizen Engagement

One of the unique (and powerful) factors involved in community indicators is the citizen engagement in defining and users the indicators for community change. There's a fascinating intersection between data people and deliberative dialogue people in this field.

A useful resource for public deliberation and citizen engagement work is the IBM Center for The Business of Government report, "Public Deliberation: A Manager’s Guide to Citizen Engagement." In this report, Carolyn Lukensmeyer and Lars Hasselblad Torres describe a changing landscape in how citizens are becoming more involved in government, world wide. They describe a shift from the traditional "information exchange" to an "information processing" model of engagement, where citizens are no longer just consumers of government programs and policies but actively engage in shaping them. They describe a spectrum of citizen engagement models, ranging from the traditional approach of informing citizens of planned efforts, all the way to empowering citizens to directly make decisions.

Lukensmeyer and Torres provide a series of examples of how some cutting-edge citizen engagement model work, both face-to-face, and on-line. For example, in some communities in Brazil, citizens vote on how some budget items are to be spent in their neighborhoods. They conclude with recommendations to both agency leaders and governmentwide policymakers, recommending the creation of "champions" to review existing potential bureaucratic barriers to the use of these cutting-edge tools and to serve as advocates for their use in large-scale initiatives.

Lukensmeyer Report:
http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/LukensmeyerReport.pdf

IBM's Center for The Business of Government at:
http://www.businessofgovernment.org

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