Engage Your Community
The PublicInput.com Blog
This past week, I found myself unable to put down a book by New York City's former transportation director, Janette Sadik-Khan. In Street Fight, she outlines her experiences of making big transportation changes in a city where change is notoriously hard.
One story in particular caught my attention. When working on the citywide roll-out of Citi Bike, New York's bike share system, Sadik-Khan did something unusual with the public engagement process. She used data in a surprising, effective way.
We recently dropped in on an engagement activity with one of our clients. The City of Raleigh Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department is undergoing a dog park study to determine the public's interest in dog facilities in the park system. As part of that process they have created a set of questions for the community and created an engagement portal on PublicInput.com.
Despite the proliferation of online discussion forums and social media, many agencies have struggled to embrace online dialog as a functional part of the public process. Their hesitation is simple - curating these spaces has historically meant significant investments of time and worry over what might be posted.
New tools are giving organizations the power to more efficiently manage public discourse within their comfort level.
Sometimes our clients want the next big thing to solve their public involvement challenges. It's understandable: leadership pushes hard to engage the public and historic efforts to reach the public have often been disappointing.
What we find is that the car is often rolling right along, we just don't know where its been or where it is going.
For the second year in a row, PublicInput.com was excited to be named to the GovTech 100, a listing of the top tech companies that serve government.
A full listing of the GovTech 100 is available here. Or read the feature story on GovTech.com.
Today, while much has changed, some hasn't. Democracy, at its best, conveys the voice of the people to the institutions built to serve the people. But the tools, channels, and means of conveying that voice have multiplied.
As those channels have multiplied, complexity has reared its ugly head, making the simple act of listening into something much more involved than once encountered.
