Earlier this year they hosted a conference with community foundations on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, then they announced the Knight Center of Digital Excellence focused on universal access to the "digital town square," and most recently announced a commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and $24 million in matching funds for community foundations (see my collection of online civic engagement resources for community foundations referenced in a Council on Foundation's e-newsletter).

These investments represent the largest basket of resources I've seen to date on e-democracy/citizen media in the United States focused at the local level. What comes of this matters.

Since I've been working directly on local democracy building online for 15 years, I thought I might summarize a few starting-point recommendations:

1. The intelligence is in the network.

Because those delivering on local democracy online are very locally focused, they often do not take the time nor have the capacity to share their story. People on the front lines do not realize they have done something notable because they do not have a reason to compare themselves with communities across the state, much less around the country.

Recommendation: Network local people and project aggressively and create ways to share stories online. While national conferences are nice, really work to use online tools to connect projects without travel resources. Definitely reach out beyond your comfort zone in journalism to include open government advocates, governments themselves, and democracy building/convening non-profits.

2. Gather international lessons.

Like I did for the UK Local E-Democracy National Project with global best practice case studies and briefs, take the time to gather the best domestic and international examples. In the over two dozen countries I've visited, local civil society-conceived online community building projects (often government-funded where U.S.-style foundations do not exist) I've seen much more development than in the United States. On the other hand, we tend to lead in online advocacy, e-campaigning and commercial local online news projects.

Recommendation: Learn from success and more importantly failures around the world. Document the best examples (steal my past work :-)) to help Americans realize the train has left the station with local democracy online and now is the time to catch up.

3. Connecting people-to-people.

I've come to the conclusion that connecting local people to other local people through online public spaces is the most transformational and powerful thing you can do to build communities with stronger local democracies. As long as there is a civic cross roads online -- a there there if you will, information, news, local content of any kind can find a real audience through local conversation. While news and information gets old quickly, the connections among people can be sustained and grown over time.

At E-Democracy.Org we call these local or neighborhood online town halls Issues Forums. Similar people to people models are almost completely opposite from the sad trend in local news online to attach unsigned often nasty reader comments to stories online. Instead of building real community, the main approach is to maximize the number of heat generating comments.

Disappointingly, this eyeball maximization approach is at the expense of the local media institutions public mission and reputation as well as a knock against building social expectations that the Internet can contribute positively to local civic engagement. By placing news items, information items of any kind for that matter, out as the central organizing point for commentary is needlessly splitting local citizens into small completely transitory conversations of limited reach without a sense of accountability and meaning.

Recommendation: Develop public places for sustained online conversations among local people. They are both powerful and cost-effective. Democratic information and news has limited value online with out independent places where it can be used, exchanged, commented upon, and corrected. Explore both city-wide and neighborhood examples.

4. Think transformational informational infrastructure not just news.

While these Knight initiatives can certainly build on the digital future of local journalism and the Knight News Challenge, the other 2/3 of the local democracy equation including local civil society and government/governance provide a strategic opportunity (and a more stark market failure). I have a number of ideas about upgrading local democracy for the information age. Many of them center around systematizing local democratic information -- from open source and syndicated local voter guides to the public meeting system of the future.

Imagine the public meeting calendar of the future where local news sites and others provide real-time access into all public meeting schedules, agendas, minutes, handouts, digital recordings, extended online testimony, etc. While the Sunlight Foundation promotes projects like OpenCongress.Org using scraped congressional legislative information, state-level projects could do the same. The problem now is that at the local level governments simply don't have standardized decision-making process information systems that display the official "democracy pulse" in that community.

Recommendations: The Knight initiatives should explore ways to create a promote open data standards for this kind of information so while governments will use a zillion different systems, like "web feeds" their content can be aggregated nationally and displayed to citizens from their place/perspective on media and other sites. This may be the only way citizens will ever be able to put in their zip code and some keywords and be notified in a timely manner about ALL of the local, regional, state, even Federal government meetings and calls for public input related to where they live and their issue interests.

At some point in 2007, crystallized in part by the Open House Project, a number of Americans began to wake up to the potential of the Internet in "governance." That is between elections and not just for one-way government (or media) information or protest oriented e-advocacy. This interest was further fed by the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum focused on governance (here's a video of my speech and New York Times coverage of the conference). The exciting opportunity for Knight is to connect this mostly DC-centered interest with grassroots bottom-up activity at the state and local level to make democracy online a national movement.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

The question that this essay will ask and answer is not what can we do to redesign democracy for the Internet Age, but, rather, why have we decided to delete democracy from the most visited interface citizens have with "their" government? And what are we going to do about it?

After almost two decades of "e-democracy," we seem content with simply accelerating online what's already wrong with politics. We raise money online to support more political television ads, we "democratize" national partisan punditry through blogs aimed at influencing mass media agendas, and whip up outrage through e-advocacy campaigns that fall into the electronic trash cans of Congress. Online news, campaigns, forums, blogs and other online social networks may appear public, but are ultimately privately controlled spaces where only the owner has real freedom.

Representative democracy is based on geography, on people connecting with one another locally to react to and influence government. And yet, rarely does anything truly interactive happen online that enables citizens to jointly solve problems or to get directly involved in efforts to make their communities better. Democratic participation online is having the effect of disconnecting us from our physical place in the world, to our collective demise.

The typical e-government experience is like walking into a barren room with a small glass window, a singular experience to the exclusion of other community members. There is no human face, just a one-way process of paying your taxes, registering for services, browsing the information that the government chooses to share, or leaving a private complaint that is never publicly aired. You have no ability to speak with a person next to you much less address your fellow citizen browsers as a group. As I've said for years, it is ironic that the best government web-sites are those that collect your taxes, while those that give you a say on how your taxes are spent are the worst or simply do not exist.

That said, around the world and in my hometown, I've seen transformative episodes where the online medium is used to build stronger communities. I've given "e-democracy" speeches to governments (and others) interested in using the Internet to improve democracy and citizen participation across 27 countries. In 1994, I helped create the world's first election information website, E-Democracy.Org. Through these experiences, I've been inspired by a small collection of "democracy builders" who are toiling on the edge of e-politics or dodging the grip of "services first, democracy later" e-government projects. The generational challenge we face in designing democracy to survive (perhaps even thrive) online is to identify the incremental contributions the Internet can make when democratic intent is applied to it and then to make those tools, features, practices, and rights universally accessible to all people in all cities, states, and countries.

Big Ideas for the Next Decade

We know the Internet can connect people with ideas like no medium in history. It can raise voices, share experiences, distribute knowledge, and engage people. The challenge is building a local "anywhere, any time" representative democracy, perhaps paradoxically, through globally shared models and tools.

Government needs the capacity to listen to and engage people online to settle conflicts among the loudest and most powerful voices in society as well as to engage everyday people. We desperately need tools and techniques that provide a counterbalance to the politics of divisiveness and vitriol. We need places for civility and decorum online as all of our public life, particularly politics, substantially moves online.

I am an optimist at heart and every day I try to do something positive for democracy online. So, if I had a million dollars, make that, one hundred million dollars, to invest in the future of democracy online over the next decade, here is what I would do:

1. Make The Internet a Democracy Network by Nature

Because representative democracy is based on geography, content created by citizens must be identified by place instead of simply organized by issue. Content, from a news story to an online comment to a picture or video, needs to automatically be assigned (or "tagged") with a geographic place. In addition, content bounded by a state or region or identified as global will be essential.

New content must be easily searched and aggregated for community-level display. As neighbors gravitate to talk about local issues online, so will our elected representatives tap our public pulse online. To catalyze this idea, I'd work with large open source, user-generated content producing systems such as Drupal, Plone, Joomla, MediaWiki and WordPress. Within months, a new dynamic universe of content and interactivity for us to navigate and connect to by place would exist.

2. Connecting Locally Based on Common Public Interests

In the past fifty years, as shopping malls have privatized the historic public space of Main Street, we've lost something. Today's commercial online social networks do little more than "publicize" private life. Real "public life," be it local, national, or global, needs accessible and useful public places online(be they legally "public" or functionally public with restrictions on censorship or arbitrary control by the legal owner).

Local online news sites connect communities with shared local news experiences. However, almost all online social networking experiences that people have with their friends and family online are about private life. We need to invest significantly in efforts that encourage people to connect locally based on common interests and issues, not just globally based on highly specialized interests. We don't need to build any more echo chambers.

3. Restore and Deepen Access to Representative Democracy and Governance Through New Laws and Online Public Hearings

Let's embrace the ideal of government "of, by and for" the people. Let's seize this Internet moment to build trust in our government through public interactions tied to decision-making as well as through transparency and the active dissemination of information.

We can build "sidewalks," or at least "limited public forums" in legalese, on government websites by authorizing external links to related resources so government websites are not dead-ends. Open meeting and other laws must be changed to require the proactive use of the Internet for information dissemination and notification. I'd fund the creation of open source tools to support "online public hearings." Imagine starting with a standardized online "democratic pulse" (used by all governments) of all public meetings with schedules, agendas, minutes, handouts, and digital recordings. Then add the ability to share your own e-testimony for 48 hours after the in-person meeting. People could then rate or comment on the testimony of others (with civility and decorum requirements) to help us focus our scarce attention time on the most useful submissions.

Taking this a step further, if we really believe in a government that is owned by the people, how can any public information remain offline? While the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) continues to have its place, I predict a fundamental shift: By default, all taxpayer-funded government information from a memo by a township clerk to the town board to ethics filing by Members of Congress, will be available online. Period. That's it. Only legally narrowly defined private or secret information, such as military and national security information, will be offline. Sound fanciful? Estonia already has such a document register in operation. Perhaps a distrust of government power built over 50 years of communism has allowed them to leapfrog our democracy.

4. Restoring the Bonds of Community

When I was a child and my father had cancer, I remember neighbors coming to our assistance in our time of need. Today, with modern life keeping neighbors as strangers, we must use these new tools to break down barriers to community. You deserve the right to easily e-mail your immediate neighbors the morning after you've been burglarized without having to go door-to-door to collect e-mail addresses. We can balance safety and privacy with selective public disclosure of such personal contact information with an intelligent "unlisted to most" directory option that is not the all or nothing of today.
This is big "C" community and small "d" democracy. A collection of better-connected blocks, tied to broader neighborhood and community-wide online efforts will serve as the vibrant foundation we need for accountable and effective representative democracy right up to the Congress and president. You cannot force everyone to be neighborly, but the bonds of community can be restored and nurtured despite dual income families and the assault on time for community involvement.

I am helping build an online neighborhood forum that will soon connect 10% of the households daily (in an area with 10,000 residents) where I live in Minneapolis. Every neighborhood should have an online space (see links to E-Democracy.Org's Issues Forums and projects like Vermont's Front Porch Forum, and the academic i-Neighbors project from E-Democracy.Org/nf). We also need tools that allow people who live within a block of one another to connect many-to-many in secure, semi-public ways. This builds on the simple directory idea above and extends it to support all sorts of exchanges, from babysitting referrals to communicating as a group with city hall about potholes.

Small Actions We Can All Take Today

I have shared some big ideas that will help us make progress over the long term. But what can each one of us do now, today, to restore our democracy?

A. Join or create place-based forums or blogs for your neighborhood or community.
Recruit 100 people, require the use of real names, and open up your own local forum. Learn more at E-Democracy.Org/if. Be sure to give people a choice to participate by e-mail or online.

B. Work with your elected officials to introduce legislation requiring all public meetings to be announced on the Internet. Updating open meeting laws to first require announcements, then agendas, handouts, digital recording, is a good starting point. Learn more at DoWire.Org.

C. Tag the content you produce with geographic terms or "geo tag" if you are technically inclined.

Add geographic tags to the content you share at every opportunity, whether you simply tag your blog post "Minnesota" so it shows up on WordPress.com or tag a video uploaded to YouTube. Learn more from our E-Democracy.Org/voices experiment.

We Have The Power And Obligation To Redesign Democracy

The democratic potential of this new medium has hit the grinder of partisan politics around the world. Too often in politics, the primary engine of innovation is the quest for media attention and power rather than real openness or a desire for democratic deliberation and engagement. No matter who wins in this 2008 "e-election," the new president will likely and immediately turn off the interactivity that helped to get them elected. Hopefully I am wrong and we will see White House 2.0 alongside Community 2.0.

This article is from the Personal Democracy Forum's Rebooting Democracy series. The series includes short articles from dozens of notable authors.

I do not buy it. Increasingly I see more and more people who want to connect locally online. They want two-way online spaces that help them not just consume local news, but also get to know those who live near them even if they aren't like-minds.

People want to come home online. Unfortunately, while local news sites could be a connecting point, most are allowing the divisiveness of unaccountable anonymous reader comments to poison the sense of community. Or for some reason people think regional Craiglist topics show with their politics and local news that public spaces online are simply dumping grounds of conspiracy and obscurity not worth developing.

Through E-Democracy.Org I've been trying something different in my own Standish Ericsson neighborhood of Minneapolis. A couple hundred of my neighbors have come together to talk about local development along the new light rail line, local schools, potholes, and I even started a plant swap. Our real names, civility required model is working in the Seward neighborhood as well and it complements our 1,000 person city-wide Minneapolis Issues Forum quite well. Interestingly our growing interest very local online public spaces was encouraged by our neighbourhood forums in the UK (left).

While city-wide online townhalls called Issues Forum are our signature model (over a decade), neighborhood exchanges starting with plain old working e-mail list are under the radar all over the place. Next week I am convening a discussion on Neighbors Online and the problem with sharing lessons to help all local people connect like this is that no one who does this is connected with others doing it as well. Those who might be inspired to start something for their area are not likely to seek out such forums in other communities. So we have no idea how big the neighbors revolution is online.

We do know that in addition to our embryonic efforts, the academic I-Neighbors project continues, the Front Porch Forum is taking Vermont by storm, and some neighborhood exchanges act like Freecycle, Craigslist, and an Issues Forum all in one like the 6,000 member Cleveland Park e-mail list on YahooGroups can no longer be ignored. Sites like Placeblogger also include neighborhood blogs such as the Coconut Grove Grapevine blog in Miami.

While I am skeptical of unfacilitated online spaces that are technology driven like Topix's forums where they don't have partners and Outside.In's message boards at the extreme local location, at least lots of communities (small towns and cities) have online spaces to try out. I am watching Outside.In's aggregation of local blog posts (I'm not sure that relying on geo tagging by bloggers will get you much local content) to see if that actually builds local community. What saddens me was discovering the JuicyCampus-style anonymous gossip site has made its way to public life with RottenNeighbor.com. Boo. At least these projects help crystallize why it is worth building local online spaces with real community ownership and a sense of responsibility.

In our discussion next week, I hope we identify a number of research questions that would be useful to help us spread neighbor to neighbor networking online. Perhaps you have some answers you can share to the following questions or a comment or a link to your own local neighborhood online.

Questions

What percentage of Internet users:

1. Have e-mailed those who live nearest them on their block or just down the road?

2. Have traded an e-mail address on paper with a neighbor.

3. Are aware of or a member of a neighborhood e-mail newsletter (one way)?

4. Are aware of or a member of a neighborhood e-mail discussion list/web forum/neighborhood blog (I'd ask each separately)?

5. Would sign-up for 3 or 4 if one existed for their area?

6. If interested, what topics/uses interest them most?

7. Are aware of or have visited the website for their neighborhood association (only applies in cities)?

8. Are interested in secure online spaces to connect specifically with those on their block for crime prevention, baby sitting swapping, and the kinds of group communication you don't want everyone to see on Google?

9. Add your question in a comment.

Steven Clift
http://stevenclift.com

Engage is the key word, the British Prime Minister already receives e-petitions online (nothing like that with the White House, Congress, or even one U.S. governor despite our constitutional right to petition) which is more about political expression than engagement.

From the UK-based OpenDemocracy site you can learn about UK government's "desire to hold a national debate on a British Statement of Values as part of the Governance of Britain Green Paper." You can read a summary of input thus far and comment here.

In citizen media/online news space we seem to be stuck in a reactionary rut - we put up news and people react through mostly disparaging reader comments. Sure people are more likely "respond to a draft," but perhaps there are other more two-way models you've experienced and can share with us and the UK government.

From my base in Minneapolis - I've done past work for the UK government on e-democracy issues (governments in the U.S. haven't invested squat in using the Internet to connect with citizens other than one-way information access) - I was asked to contribute my detailed thoughts,

I've cross-posted my detailed response on my Democracies Online blog along with related links. I proposed:
* Distributed Online Survey with Comment Submission and Rating
* Networked Engagement through Multiple Partners, National Promotion
* Online Deliberative Participation

What would you do online to "engage" 1,000 or even 1,000,000 people in important public policy matters of our time?

While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America.

As part of E-Democracy.Org's Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This doesn't seem very democratizing. Our goal is to connect these rural citizen media producers and bring them to workshops across the state.

Has anyone out there seen anything that combines say recent post data in Google Blog Search or Technorati and displays it as a daily/weekly/monthly "heat map" of sorts?

I've stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don't want to type in village after village. The best site I've found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.

All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. Can anyone help me out? Show me the map of my dreams.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

P.S. We are using the Del.icio.us tag mnvoices to tag Web 2.0 drive rural/Greater Minnesota sites that we find and will be adding the best sites we find to our wiki.

What about public employee salaries - should all be publicly posted online? Should only management level and above be listed specifically with others displaying the salary range per pay scales for various classifications?

I have a hard time imagining a democracy where any and all legally public government information is not on the Internet for all to see in a decade or so. This means the ethics filings of public officials will be liberated from the dusty paper files in the deep dark almost hidden office which holds such information for "accountability."

In the meantime, should newspaper slap this stuff online while open government gets its act together? Here is some of the reaction on the Bee.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

Over the last few years I've increasing found myself at conferences like Public Media and the Online News Association. I always feel a bit out of place, because despite the adoption of online interactivity in online news and media, I am still pretty much viewed as a "consumer." Someone to be captured and delivered to advertisers or to become a donor to public broadcasting. Interactivity is often viewed in the context of news be it reacting with reader comments or creating "news." True conversation, the heart of being a citizen where we set the agenda, is a poor cousin.

Well media world, I have some friends for you!

Meet the world of e-politics (the online campaigning and advocacy crowd) where most participants are viewed as "voters" or "money sources" to be organized and influenced in the act of gaining power and influence. When I put the first candidates ever on the web in 1994 (I told the Democrats and Republicans that each campaign was likely to give me their content and, hmmm, they both said yes to my non-partisan Minnesota E-Democracy effort), I had a lot of optimism that the Internet would play mostly a positive role in politics. Now that "politics as usual" has pretty much mastered the tools, I am not so sure. It is time to get ready for mud fest 2008 online.

Oops, I meant to inspire folks in the media world to connect with the e-politics world. The grinding sparks of these two worlds coming together might actually do some good.

On March 4-5, the Politics Online conference in Washington, DC is the place to be. If you attend, drop by the Local eGov session and say hello. While the conference is increasingly more than just e-campaigning, you'll learn terms "e-mail segmentation" and conversion rates.

And speaking of doing good, those in the "goody goody" camp (e-democracy/e-participation) who seek to change politics (and media) for the better are convening the first e-democracy BarCamp also in Washington, DC on March 1-2. So come on along to this "unconference" and see where citizen media and online news can connect to become something "of" the Internet and not just "on" the Internet.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

Today we often experience institutions (online and off) without a town square or commons in the center, which I try to counter with Issues Forums. However, today I'd like to focus on an element within the Forum.

The Albus (Latin for album) can be viewed as Public Notice 1.0. Perhaps the start of print media for that matter, even if it was made of government announcements.

Public Notice 2.0 is the mobile version of the crier on horseback traveling from village to village reading a proclamation aloud from a scroll (perhaps other than drums and smoke signals, the first broadcasters).

Public Notice 3.0 is where are today. Governments and others as required by law print detailed notices in newspaper but most local newspapers also print a list of public (government) meetings.

After four centuries of Public Notice 3.0, what might we do next with the public meeting notices portion online?

Public Notice 4.0 - While I'd like to see governments create rich digital media environments to not only provide personalized notice of public meetings and full access to all handouts, reports, and digital recordings, democratic innovation with e-government is slow. Our governments are much more excited about making it easy for us to pay our taxes online, but not so sure about helping us have a greater say online about how those taxes are spent.

Online news and citizen media should fill that void or they risk losing their position as a cross-roads in local democracy. Why not jump to front of the line and provide full access to local public meetings.

Turning each public meeting listing into full mixed media experience with access to public documents should include:

• E-mail/web feed notificiation of public meetings based on keyword, organization, geographic relevancy
• Full text of all meeting notices and agendas
• Copies of all handouts prepared prior to the meeting and any unanticipated documents distributed or view (power point presentations) during the meeting
• A link to any live webcasts as well as public access cable/radio broadcast schedules
• And if you really want to make a splash, copies of all digital recordings (video or audio) for on-demand access as well as automatic delivery in popular podcast feed formats (iTunes, etc.). Providing quick links from the agenda to specific moments in the meeting would also be helpful but can be labor intensive.
• In addition, the online news/citizen media site could host an lightly monitored online discussion space tied to each meeting as well as "reader comments" on documents. This is something governments in the U.S. are hesitant to host because the First Amendment limits government ability to deal with nastiness in truly public government owned online public spaces. The media can more easily censor the profane and obscene.

What do you think? Also, if anyone knows of any online news site (or a government) for that matter that is already doing this, please add a link in the comments section or drop me a note: clift@publicus.net

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

So I started thinking about ways to better connect with my neighbors despite the cold.

I am a huge fan of National Night Out when neighbors around the U.S. put up road blocks and hold community picnics in front of their homes on a weeknight in August.

While the foundation of National Night Out is community involvement in fighting crime - neighbors who know each other watch out for each other and each other's property - the gathering means so much more to those who participate.

**Why not declare a night once a year in late January as "National Night On"? ("On" as in "online.") **

Thousands of local media/citizen media/local government/service club/etc. websites could participate, enter their local online places in a directory, and create async and real-time environments for neighbors to say hello, discuss a few issues, and hopefully plan to get together in-person well before the next August.

What bugs me about the Internet, even the rise of social networking, most of the investment tends to reinforce existing ties - friends and family - and the tools that build new ties are more about professional networking (LinkedIn) or dating. There is a huge difference between publicizing private life online and creating open and accessible online spaces for local public life. There are a few projects like E-Democracy.Org's neighborhood forums in Minnesota and England, the Front Porch Forum in Vermont, and the Annenberg School's i-neighbors, and many independent efforts trying to create larger neighborhood-wide exchange, but nothing that I know of designed to be peer-to-peer two-way is essentially block-level based.

So who is with me? Are you ready to "break the ice" online and get to know the people who live nearest to you?

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

P.S. The other year I wrote an article with online ideas related to National Night Out. Here is the text:

A New Take on NNO: Building from National Night Out by Networking Neighbors Online

2006 Update: E-Democracy.Org is planning pilot neighborhood forums in Minneapolis, then beyond.

By Steven Clift

Every year on the first Tuesday in August, streets across the United States buzz as part of National Night Out. Human connections are built, block by block, with potlucks and conversations. The better we know our immediate neighbors, the stronger and safer our communities become.

As the evening winds down, folks will inevitably say, "We should do this more often. Let's not wait again until next year." However, as the road blocks are removed, the special public space we created for one evening is no more and our regular greetings shrink back to the few houses that surround us, except perhaps for the occasional long distance wave.

This year can be different.

In fact, on many blocks, our once a year "public spaces" are becoming year round online public spaces with the discovery of electronic block clubs. Instead of just going to the world online, we can also come home ... online.

Here are some tips on how to connect with your neighbors online so you can build connections throughout the year.

1. Share E-mail Addresses - At National Night Out pass around a sign up sheet (PDF) (also in Word) that includes space for every household's telephone and at least one address. One person should volunteer to type up and e-mail the results to everyone on the block. Make a print copy for those not online. If you didn't have a NNO party, go door to door and gather the information. Be clear about what will happen to the information people share.

2. Create an E-mail Announcement Group - Create a simple e-mail group in your e-mail program(either a bcc: or even simply cc: the group if under ten addresses. Assume that everyone who signed up on the sheet has opted-in. Every so often remind people they can both "opt-out" or tell others how to get on the list. If your group is more than 20 e-mail addresses you might want to consider using more automated service like YahooGroups or Google Groups. Are you not sure how to create an e-mail group? Here is some advice for Outlook Express and Hotmail.

3. Be an Information Hub - Your "e-block" needs someone willing to monitor various e-mail newsletters, web sites, and blogs for information of very local interest. You can be that person! Pass along important items like local crime alerts, community event announcements, or updates from your city council member with items directly relevant to your area. Do not send your neighbors activist "you should know about this" messages about national politics. If you or others do, many will opt-out and your online public space will die.

4. Use Online to Be Off-line Together - Think of the Internet as the ultimate icebreaker to help new and long-time residents get to know each other a little better. If a giant snowstorm blankets your area, use the online to gather volunteers offline to dig out an elderly neighbor. If someone, perhaps on the next block, falls ill or someone dies, use the e-mail list to put out a call for frozen meals to share with the family. Enjoying a beautiful evening, why not create a spontaneous BBQ by inviting your neighbors to join you and as it gets dark entertain neighbor kids by playing a movie on the side of your house (liberate your computer projector from work). In short, bring back "just-in-time" community that air conditioning, television, and the loss of the front porch have taken away.

5. Exchange Online - If the residents covered by your online network number in the hundreds or if you want to cover a larger area, you might want to explore the following ideas:

* E-mail discussion list - Encourage people to exchange information and discuss local happenings. This is great way to share tips on a good plumber or arrange a plant exchange. Think about creating a neighborhood-wide online discussion group that leverages dozens of e-blocks. Cleveland Park neighborhood in Washington DC has over 3000 members in a neighborhood-wide exchange.
* Neighborhood weblog - This "citizen media" approach works best with lots of photos and someone who has time to feed in local content and goad others to contribute.
* Neighborhood "Tags" - No, not tagging as in graffiti, but "tags" as in keywords used in social software. In simple English, if you use a photo site like Flickr, tag your photos "EricssonMpls" for the Ericsson neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yes, this is geeky, but in a few years every place will have a "tag(s)" just like websites have domain names instead of numbers. Another tag idea is to combine all kinds of National Night Out photos with the nno tag.

These are a just a few quick online ideas for how to build a neighborhood of neighbors not just houses, cars, and individuals.

We need to take a lesson from OMBWatch's Open Government online survey and ask questions of state and local candidate. Here is the survey introduction from OMBWatch:

Open Government: What We Need to Know

We deserve a more open and honest government. Elections are the time when politicians pay the most attention to people and issues, and therefore the best time to ask them questions about how they plan to govern. OMB Watch wants your help in selecting the best questions to ask.

We're asking you to vote on your five favorite questions on the issue of government transparency and openness. We will then share the top questions with the news media and other organizations that have direct contact with candidates.

This election year, one of the most important issues we face is ensuring an open and transparent government, one that enables an informed citizenry. It's an issue of central importance, and it's up to us to make sure that the right questions are asked. ... take the online survey

So what are the local versions of these questions we should be asking state and local candidates?

I have a few unasked questions to recommend:

1. If elected, will you change our open meeting laws to require all public meetings to be announced uniformly online with full agendas, handouts, minutes, and digital recordings (audio and/or video)?

2. Once in power do you promise to only use government e-mail systems for your public work and ensure that all electronic public records you create are handled properly? Will you help make this the law and prohibit the (often hidden) use of private e-mail accounts in official government business?

3. Will you support better online dissemination services that allow people to be notified of new content or meetings that interest them base on where they live or their topical preferences?

What is missing from this list? Add your questions in a blog comment.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

In 2006, I was the host of a unique asynchronous two week online candidate debate among all the candidates on the ballot for Minnesota Governor. Beyond basic online voter guides and article packages, as we go to the state and local level, this space feels a bit lonely.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

P.S. Next week I'll be in DC at an event covering the "White House 2.0" theme. The general notion is that the candidates will have hard time turning off all the online interactivity they are using to get elected. See: http://pages.e-democracy.org/Great_Expectations

In the mid-90's I managed the main website for the State of Minnesota and staffed the Minnesota Government Information Access Council. I am passionate about government's responsibility to play a lead role as the supplier of information "raw materials" for democracy.

The media can and should do a much better job promoting government accountability on these issues. Sunshine Week is good, but mostly motivated by reactionary calls for information access while the Internet allows and calls for much more pro-active information dissemination.

I recently published a short article titled "Join the Evolution - Ten Practical Online Steps for Government Support of Democracy" as part of a collection commissioned by the federal government's General Services Administration. Below is the short text (see by DoWire blog for related links and a longer more detailed version.):

Join the Evolution - Ten Practical Online Steps for Government Support of Democracy

By Steven Clift Chair, E-Democracy.Org and Ashoka Fellow

This article will appear in the upcoming Intergovernmental Solutions newsletter of the U.S. federal General Services Administration. A long version with specific examples is available.

Does e-government have anything to do with democracy and citizen participation? Let's get straight to the point - not yet.

Should it?

Yes. Government should be leading a charge into the increasingly and fundamentally interactive web.

Information access, considered the safe starting point for government accountability online now mostly presents the public a daunting needle in a huge haystack. This system is so complicated that the valuable and substantive information that government produces is often ignored in the increasingly interactive public lives of active citizens. . The lack of real and effective online access to governance will substantially increase cynicism about and distrust in government among a public that demands a more participatory representative democracy.

A bit of context: I coordinated e-government for the State of Minnesota in its early days. As a citizen, I independently started E-Democracy.Org which created the world's first election information and discussion website in 1994. When "services first, democracy later" enveloped most e-government projects, I went independent in late 1997. Since then, I've spoken and consulted across 26 countries on "e-democracy."

Here are the 10 things I would do in government at every level to help rescue our democracy in the information age.

1. Timely, personalized access to information that matters.

Government decision-making information is not really public or relevant if people cannot act on it when it still matters. Give people tools like personalized e-mail alerts based on keywords, location, etc. and eliminate the "nobody told me" backlash government often receives due to poor public outreach. Every government needs a "what's new" democracy portal or a thematic section covering all democratic processes as part of their main website.

2. Help elected officials receive and sort, then better understand and respond to e-mail.

E-mail overload is the number one complaint I hear from elected officials around the world. Most want to respond effectively, but simply aren't being provided the tools they need. If there ever was an opportunity for open source collaboration among governments, this is it. In general, our representatives and representative institutions must start to invest in the online infrastructure they need to connect directly with the public they represent.

3. Dedicate at least 10% of new e-government developments to democracy.

Let's define democracy starting with public input. In an e-service initiative, the 10% should start with citizen focus groups to guide the design of the service, usability testing and studies to generate user input and accountability, and post-transaction user surveys. If the investment is a new content management system for information access, then use the 10% to add personalization and survey input features or democratized navigation (those nifty menus that show you the top ten articles viewed that day or week).

4. Announce all government public meetings on the Internet in a uniform manner.

All public meeting notices, agendas, handouts, and digital recordings must be online. The system should be standards-based and tie state-by-state systems into a national network covering federal, state, and local government public meetings. This is the only way for people to ask to be pro-actively notified of any government public meetings within a certain geographic area addressing specific topics that interest them.

5. Allow citizens to look-up all of their elected officials from the very local to national in one search.

Along with the ability to look-up all public meetings, Americans should have the right to easily determine who all the elected and appointed officials are who represent them currently. Just before elected and appointed officials assume office, every government unit should be required to submit contact information for those officials into a national database.

6. Host online public hearings and dialogues (or "e-consultations" as they are known outside the U.S.)

As in-person public meetings begin to incorporate live online features, envision more deliberate online exchanges to improve the outcomes of the decision-making process. If your government agency hosts three public hearings across the country or your state, host the fourth hearing online over a week or two and improve the format in the process. In 10 years, the legislatures, commissions and city councils not holding hearings online will be in the minority.

7. Embrace the rule of law by mandating the most democratically empowering online services and rights across the whole of government.

Technology itself is not forcing real institutional democratic change. I estimate that 90% of the democratic innovations online that really share power are based on a political tradition or law that existed before the Internet arrived. If we want all citizens to benefit universally from a more wired democracy, then now is time to update our legal requirements and fund core online democracy services.

8. Promote dissemination through access to raw data from decision-making information systems.

Let's explode decision-making data, like Congressional information and rulemaking related content into bits via XML and open standards and make it easy to re-use public government data from many sources to create views and searches that provide insight, understanding, and accountability. Think "Web 2.0" interactivity built on top of government data by those outside of government.

9. Fund Open Source sharing internationally across e-government.

Sharing and supporting open source software takes resources - a consortium of national governments need to step up with collaborative funding. The new and less cluttered area of e-participation tools are an ideal starting point within e-government to reduce technology costs and build systems for use by multiple governments.. Efforts to place modules and customizations out for community use will be key. Government and its vendors must contribute code back for the wheels of reciprocal value to start turning.

10. Local up - a strategic approach to building local democracy online.

To build e-participation momentum, citizens need to experience results they can see and touch. By investing in transferable local models and tools, more people will use the Internet as a tool to strength their communities, protect and enrich their families and neighborhoods, and be heard in a meaningful way. Every community needs an "online town hall," E-Democracy.Org calls them Issues Forums, for agenda-setting discussion of public issues. Comparative evaluation of access and participation related online service and content indicators will introduce efforts for an online "Democracy Tune-up." This same tune-up concept should be applied at the state and federal level as well.

Conclusion

In the early days, folks thought the Internet was inherently democratic. Parts of it are, but that mistaken sense of technological determinisms has not carried over to make constitutional and legally-ground representative processes more open and responsive. Today, "politics as usual" online may actually make things worse. Civically conceived e-participation efforts need to counter such negative trends rather than being viewed as an extra option. Ultimately, each generation needs to rebuild democracy with the special tools of their time. Our tools are online and our democracy needs us.

Steven Clift leads the Online Consultation and E-Participation online community of practice at DoWire.Org and shares numerous articles on e-democracy from Publicus.Net. His primary concentration today is as the leader of E-Democracy.Org, review their strategic plan to get a sense of his work on the "demand side" for democracy online.

At the recent Online News Association conference there was definitely a sense of turmoil surrounding reader comments online. I'd hate to see interactivity switched off due to the lack of "here is how we make it work" knowledge sharing. Those in local media are in particular asked to send in some success stories.

Please comment here or privately to me - clift@publicus.net - about your success stories. Add links to examples when possible.

Some questions to ponder:

1. How are your online reader comments helping your media organization meet your mission?

2. Share a story about how a particular comment or set of online comments influenced follow-up reporting.

3. Share a story about how a particular comment or set of online comments influenced a local government decision or decision-maker.

4. Have readers acted as "citizens" on your forums to organize or coordinate action to meet some sort of local public challenge?

5. What generates the highest volume of comments as well as page views?

6. What technology has worked best for you? How is your technology generating better value?

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

10Questions, with scores of netroots and some media sponsors as led by TechPresident, allows you to upload you video question to various video services. You simply tag your question "10questions" and it will show up on the 10Questions site for people to vote on. With the buzz this is generating, I can't imagine many candidates serious about connecting with voters skipping the opportunity to respond. Of course, what I want to see are some real candidate video rebuttals (a.k.a real debate) demonstrating how an asynchronous, yet time-based online debate can create new value.

If you work with a media site you can embed the online question voting right into your own site, just as E-Democracy.Org has done here. Imagine the power of hundreds of online news sites working collaboratively to combine their audience through one democratic experiment.

While I now focus much more locally with online citizen engagement, the presidential campaign is the signature experience which defines the expectations for races down the ballot. In short, a good online presidential debate might give me that dog catcher e-debate that I am just itching to see.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

Cross posted to DoWire.Org - the Democracies Online Newswire.

As far as I can tell, both areas overlap as hosts of extensive expression. The end goals differ with media folks looking at news generation as the primary objective and online citizen engagement focused on participation and public problem-solving.

I look forward to poking and prodding the online news world to exercise their power to move people and ideas online. As the number one destination websites in local communities, media sites have the opportunity... no, make that a responsibility to convene people for effective online participation in local democracy that goes well beyond reactionary comments to news stories. Stay tuned for more.

Let me introduce myself a bit. With a group of volunteer citizens in 1994, I helped create the world's first election-oriented website in Minnesota. We had everyone on our site, including election news from the Minneapolis StarTribune, and even hosted online candidate debates. Today, I lead the E-Democracy.Org organization full-time with support of an Ashoka Fellowship for social entrepreneurship. We focus on two-way online townhalls we call Issues Forums (more later) in ten communities across three countries. Between 1994 and the start of my fellowship last year I worked first as the coordinator of e-government for the State of Minnesota and then as an independent public speaker and consultant on e-democracy. I invite you to join the online communities of practice built in large part from my trips to 26 countries hosted on my Democracies Online site. Feel free to join. Finally, I have a couple dozen articles and speeches that may or may not bore you to death.

Talk to you later.

Steven Clift

P.S. If you happen to be in Toronto this week at the Online News Association, you can meet some "e-democracy" interested folks at a side gathering by signing up on this wiki page.