An interesting story out of the State of Victoria in Australia, where a leaked email seems to show that the state’s Planning Minister considered creating a rigged “public engagement” process as a way to scuttle a $260MM AU redevelopment project. As the article in the Herald Sun states, “The internal memo proposed that a sham [...]
Great piece on the UK blog “Talk About Local” entitled “Community surgery: how to tackle the problems that could kill your blog”. In it, symptoms for and solutions to typical problems faced when launching and administering a local gov’t blog.
For example, to the “we’re too small” problem where nobody contributes information to the site, the [...]
Covered here in the past, Vermont’s Front Porch Forum is an incredible “micro-online community” platform that has been spreading across the state - town by town. The latest issue of Yankee Magazine carries an encouraging profile of the service and its founders, Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis.
More of a community-building than deliberative/policy-making resource, Front Porch Forums [...]