Countable Wants To Make Politics A ‘Continual Conversation’ | The Governance Lab @ NYUThe Governance Lab @ NYU:
Countable, available for iOS and coming to Android soon, presents a succinct summary of each piece of legislation Congress is considering, along with a short one-sentence argument in favor of the bill or against it. You are then able to vote “yay” or “nay.” When you are logged in through Facebook, Countable can automatically generate a message and send it to your representatives based on your location.
Countable also keeps track of how the lawmakers vote and then informs you how your representatives’ votes stack up to your own, generating “compatibility rankings."
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In Brooklyn, Testing a Texting Platform That Connects Locals, Representatives & Community Leaders | TechPresident:
What if you wanted to start a dialogue about charter schools in your neighborhood? The information hotline wasn't built to handle conversations like that, but a new text message-based platform called HeartGov is.
If you looked at a graph that measured "scale of issue", on one end you would put "reporting", which would be things like pot hole reporting, which 311 handles. On the other end of the spectrum you could have "big ideas", such as "marriage equality" or things that something like change.org handles. In between are medium scale civic ideas that are trackable and tangible.
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Making cities smarter through citizen engagement | The Governance Lab @ NYUThe Governance Lab @ NYU:
Vaidehi Shah at Eco-Business: “Rapidly progressing information communications technology (ICT) is giving rise to an almost infinite range of innovations that can be implemented in cities to make them more efficient and better connected. However, in order for technology to yield sustainable solutions, planners must prioritise citizen engagement and strong leadership.
This was the consensus on Tuesday at the World Cities Summit 2014, where representatives from city and national governments, technology firms and private sector organisations gathered in Singapore to discuss strategies and challenges to achieving sustainable cities in the future.
The Civinomics Roadmap: From here to November | Tipping Point:
Stated simply, the goal of the Civinomics site is to provide members with an online “civic tool box”, a selection of web-based tools to facilitate participation in the civic process.
Current features include online workshops and initiatives and the just released new public meetings and agendas listings. There are several other features in the works, to be launched between now and over the summer and early fall to coincide with the November elections.
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What Is Civic Engagement?:
"According to Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, civic engagement can be defined as:
Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern."
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NCDD Community News » Registration open for our June 12th Confab with Peter Levine:
"We’re excited to have Peter Levine as our featured speaker on our next NCDD Confab call. Sign up today to reserve your spot on June’s Confab, which is set for 2-3pm Eastern (11-noon Pacific) on Thursday, June 12th."
We’ll be talking to Peter about his new book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. This is an important book for us to discuss, and you have time to get your hands on a copy before the confab if you’d like (here’s the Amazon link). I especially encourage you to check out Chapter 7, titled Strategies: How to Accomplish Civic Renewal, which is what we’ll dig into deepest on the call.
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Can you hear me now? The troublesome democratic divide online – Sept. 18 virtual gathering | E-Democracy.org – Project Blog:
- Today, the New York Times shared a story on the millions of Americans who remain unplugged and we invited our Digital Inclusion Network members to offer their two cents. Our view is that democratic divide is much wider than the digital divide, so therefore we must proactively use civic technology to help build stronger and more inclusive communities and democracies and not wait for everyone to be online.
- ... to raise new and more representative voices online, you need to reach out to people of color and to people in the political center to make up the most ground. As a non-partisan, non-profit online civic engagement project, we have a special responsibility to make up for .com and .org advocacy efforts whose bottom line is either to reach the most advertiser sought out people or to reach those most willing to speak out for their cause.
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Inside the 'ALEC Universe' | Eye on ALEC, Q&A, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com:
- That sentiment was underscored so many times to me, that they don’t want people involved in the political process, or in the policy process. And that seems to be the intent in a lot of ways: You have a think tank in every state and all they do is come up with these very, very regressive policies, you have corporations who are going to benefit so they fund it all, and then you have the legislators as your foot soldiers to carry out the tasks.
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Civic Commons and ideastream join forces with Knight Foundation support - Knight Foundation:
- The Civic Commons is a civic engagement utility and consultancy serving community leaders, institutions and the growing desire of citizens to be engaged and empowered on key civic decisions. The Civic Commons is an online environment combining the best and most effective aspects of social networking and social media. Its mission is to build conversations and connections that have the power to become informed, productive and collective civic action.
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Donna M. Butts: Civic Engagement Alive And Well With Older Adults:
- In a recent study of civic engagement among midlife and older adults, AARP found that the spirit of volunteering is alive and well among our older generations. Since the turn of the century, volunteer engagement has jumped 14 percent with 76 percent of those 45 and older saying they have volunteered in some capacity over the last 12 months. Although volunteerism dipped during the economic downturn in 2007-2008, it has since rebounded to pre-recession levels.
- When so many adult volunteers choose to give their time to programs serving children and youth, it says tremendous things about our future. Not only are we taking the time to share our wisdom and expertise with future generations, but we're also instilling the importance of giving back and sharing -- two core American values on which many fear we're losing ground.
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Squaring the CIRCLE of Civic Engagement - Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service:
- “Developing political strategies for citizens is just as intellectually challenging as empirical research and moral argument, but such civic strategy is much less studied, taught, and integrated,” said Peter Levine, Tisch College director of research and director of CIRCLE.
- Levine lays out his vision for the importance of strategy in his book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America, forthcoming from the Oxford University Press.
- For Levine, civic engagement is most valuable when deliberation (talking and learning about public matters) is connected to work and making things, particularly collaborative efforts that produce things of public value. Talking and working together forges relationships that he calls “scarce but renewable sources of energy and power.”
- We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For assembles evidence that this kind of engagement, although waning in America, actually solves social problems. The book concludes with strategies for civic renewal.
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How Race Influences Citizen Contact With Officerholders | Demos:
- According to some surveys, whites are twice as likely as citizens of other races to communicate with elected representatives.
- The racial identities of elected officials matter to citizens, my field experiments suggest. When thousands of residents of multi-member state legislative districts were invited to communicate with their legislators, blacks were much more willing – in fact, twice as willing – to communicate with black representatives, while white constituents were twice as willing to communicate with white legislators. Constituents of both races were more reluctant to send messages to legislators not of their own racial background.
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