Just a friendly reminder that Civic Hall will be closed on January 21, 2019 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
In just the last two weeks, newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has gained half a million new Twitter followers, zooming from 1.6M to 2.1M. On Instagram, another platform where she excels at sharing interesting glimpses of her life as an activist-turned-newly-successful-politician, Ocasio-Cortez now has 1.6M followers, putting her in...
Last week, I spent a good part of Monday and Tuesday at a training workshop on the vTaiwan public engagement process and Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), the innovation lab inside the central Taiwanese government. It was organized by the New York City node of the g0v (pronounced “gov...
How a radical experiment in participatory democracy came to Bowling Green, Kentucky.
For the past five years, the little co-op I co-founded has been working on a tool called Loomio. Workplaces, government departments, co-ops, and political parties around the world use Loomio to involve members and citizens in bottom-up decision-making. We focus on small groups, usually less than 500 people. At that...
In the midst of the signal failure known as the US electoral season, here’s something to be inspired about: a true story about rational deliberation on a national scale.
Last week the Ash Institute For Democratic Governance and Innovation published Civicist contributor Hollie Russon Gilman’s first book, Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America. What follows is a short Q&A with Gilman about her new book and what the future may hold for participatory budgeting and other...
Smart Participation is an experiment led by Cornell researchers to see how public comment processes developed at the federal level will do in local contexts.
The People's Lobby is run entirely online using the digital tools NationBuilder and Loomio.