24 CFR Subtitle A

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2003.

Document from the Office of the Secretary, Housing and Urban Development, detailing the requirements for citizen participation in the use of funds from the government towards Housing and Urban Development directives.

Resource Link: http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_00/24cfrv1_00.html

A Citizen-Centric Internet: Why Candidate, Advocacy Group and Other Political Sites Fail, and What They Can Do About It

Scott Reents and Thomas Hill.

"The election year 2000," according to the authors, writing before the year 2000, "will be the year that the Internet shakes up politics." The authors estimated that the number of people going online for election information in 2000 would reach 35 million--more than three times the number who did the same in 1998 (source: Pew Research). The way in which political organizations respond to this massive demand will have lasting implications on their ability to function effectively.

Resource Link: http://www.e-thepeople.org/democracyproject/about_us/citizen.htm

A Green Grassroots Revolution

Bill McAuliffe. Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, April 22, 2007.

Nan Skelton at the University of Minnesota brought this article to our attention, which she says is a great local story that shows the Mayors in St. Paul and Minneapolis beginning to make the paradigm shift to a culture of citizen-government partnership. The subtitle of this article is "It's called global warming, but cities and towns, including the Twin Cities, are waging the war."

Resource Link: http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1137316.html

A Guide to Participatory Budgeting

Brian Wampler.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) programs are innovative policymaking processes. Citizens are directly involved in making policy decisions. Forums are held throughout the year so that citizens have the opportunity to allocate resources, prioritize broad social policies, and monitor public spending. These programs are designed incorporate citizens into the policymaking process, spur administrative reform, and distribute public resources to low-income neighborhoods. Download the 32-page guide directly from the NCDD website.

Resource Link: http://www.thataway.org/exchange/files/docs/Wampler_PBGuide.pdf

A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society

An interdisciplinary journal of research and commentary concentrating on the intersection of law, policy, and information technology, the first issue featured a symposium on electronic rule-making, book reviews and an article on HIV/AIDS, Information and Communication in Africa. The journal is jointly produced by Carnegie Mellon's InSITeS and the Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies at The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

Resource Link: http://www.is-journal.org

A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation

Lisa VeneKlasen with Valerie Miller. Just Associates, 2002.

A New Weave of Power, People & Politics provides a well-tested approach for building people?’s participation and collective power that goes beyond influencing policy and politics to transforming public decision-making altogether. Based on 25 years of participatory research, community development, neighborhood organizing, legal rights education, and large-scale campaign advocacy experiences worldwide, A New Weave combines concrete and practical action ?“steps?” with a sound theoretical foundation to help users understand the process of people-centered politics from planning to action.

Resource Link: http://www.justassociates.org/ActionGuide.htm

A Public Voice '01: Money and Politics

Milton B. Hoffman Productions.

Each year, many public television stations around the nation air an hour-long program that features U.S. citizens deliberating in National Issues Forums around the nation. The programs also feature distinguished panels of nationally known political leaders, commentators and journalists meeting at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to reflect on what this 'public voice' may mean in setting direction for America. The topics are different each year.

Resource Link: http://www.nifi.org

A Simple, Open, Scalable and Distributed Platform for Public Discourse

Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS.

There is some current debate about the relationships between e-democracy, e-government and, more recently, e-governance. The most widely accepted view, and the view the authors accept for the purposes of this paper, is that e-democracy is a subfield of e-government. One of the main issues in the field of e-democracy, and one that the authors discuss in this paper, is how to best use information and communications technology to facilitate public consultation, deliberation, participation or 'engagement' in policy-making processes such as urban planning.

Resource Link: http://www.lri.jur.uva.nl/~winkels/eGov2002/Gordon.pdf

A View From the City: Local Government Perspectives on Neighborhood-based Governance in Community-Building Initiatives

Robert Chaskin and Ali Abunimah. Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, 1997.

A study of efforts by private foundations and others to spur the use neighborhood-based governance structures to support communities' overall development suggests they have met with general acceptance by local governments. However, some limitations remain in the eyes of public officials.

Resource Link: http://www.chapinhall.org/article_abstract.aspx?ar=1289&L2=63&L3=108

Accountable Autonomy: Participatory Deliberation in Urban Governance

Archon Fung.

The author examines the Chicago reforms to derive lessons about the institutional designs, politics, and public policies that can establish the direct and deliberative channels of participation for ordinary citizens in the governance of complex common issues. As a rich source to expand theory and practice, the organization of educational and police governance in Chicago differs from that of other cities, and indeed from conventional accounts of participatory democracy.

Resource Link: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/urban/docs/AccountAutonomy.pdf

Active Citizenship: Empowering America's Youth

John Minkler. Educators for Social Responsibility, 1998.

This curriculum introduces students to the knowledge, skills, and values of responsible citizenship in the context of analyzing and solving real school and community problems. Contains 17 lessons with extensions including a group project in which students identify a real political problem, research related issues, and propose a solution.

Resource Link: http://esrnational.org/Merchant2/merchant.mvc

Alliance for Regional Stewardship

The Alliance for Regional Stewardship (ARS) is a national, peer-to-peer network of regional leaders working across boundaries to solve tough community problems. They come from business, government, education, and the civic sectors, but they share a common commitment to collaborative action and achieving results. The ARS Network is for proven leaders who recognize that economic competitiveness, a sustainable quality of life, and strong communities are all connected. ARS supports these leaders and their efforts by helping them learn about effective practices from other regions, develop their own civic leadership skills, and design and carry out strategies for breakthrough results.

Resource Link: http://www.regionalstewardship.org

American Assembly

The American Assembly, an affiliate of Columbia University, was founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1950 to illuminate issues of public policy. The Assembly's major objectives are to focus attention and stimulate informed discussion on a range of critical U.S. policy topics; to inform government officials, community and civic leadership, and the general public regarding the factual background and the range of policy options in a given issue; to facilitate increased communication among decision makers from the public and private sectors, as well as from institutions and organizations concerned with critical public policy issues; and to raise on a continuing basis the level and quality of public policy discourse on national and international issues.

Resource Link: http://www.americanassembly.org

Americans Talk Issues

The ATI Foundation promotes a democratic process that combines repeated large-scale, random polling of Americans with 30-minute deliberations between individual voters and unbiased professional interviewers. The result is a consensus of public opinion, which sometimes includes unexpected positions and solutions. As explained in the book Locating Consensus for Democracy, Public Interest Polling provides an inexpensive, practical way to locate a consensus of all Americans on major national issues.

Resource Link: http://www.publicinterestpolling.com

AmericaSpeaks

Promoting the founding belief that every citizen has a right to impact the decisions of government, AmericaSpeaks serves as a neutral convener of large-scale public participation forums. Through close consultation with leaders, citizens, the media and others, AmericaSpeaks designs and facilitates deliberative meetings for 500 to 5,000 participants. Its partners have included regional planning groups, local, state, and national government bodies, and national organizations. Issues have ranged from Social Security reform to redevelopment of ground zero in New York.

Resource Link: http://www.americaspeaks.org

Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

The Annenberg Public Policy Center has been the premier communication policy center in the country since its founding in 1993. By conducting and releasing research, staging conferences and hosting policy discussions, its scholars have addressed the role of communication in politics, adolescent behavior, child development, health care, civics and mental health, among other important arenas. The Center?’s researchers have drafted materials that helped policy-makers, journalists, scholars, constituent groups and the general public better understand the role that media play in their lives and the life of the nation. The Policy Center maintains offices in Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

Resource Link: http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org

Benton Foundation

The Foundation works to realize the social benefits made possible by the public interest use of communications. Provides links to online tools for community organizing and community building.

Resource Link: http://www.benton.org

Beyond Public Meetings: Connecting Community Engagement with Decision-Making

Vivien Twyford, Max Hardy, John Dengate, Stuart Waters and Dr. Vicki Vaartjes. Published by Twyford Consulting, 2007.

Beyond Public Meetings challenges myths and assumptions associated with community engagement and provides organisations, including all layers of government, with a comprehensive guide to why and how communities can be engaged to make better decisions. Written by five internationally recognised experts in the field of community engagement, the book provides a best practice guide to community engagement, building upon the successful framework developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2).

Resource Link: http://www.twyford.com.au/Book_brochure.pdf

Beyond the Reinvention of Government

Alexandra Samuel.

For the past ten years, the Alliance for Converging Technologies team has tracked developments as they reshaped the business-government interface. They are now convinced that a more fundamental consideration of governance is urgently needed, aimed at producing a road map and migration plan for the shift from industrial to digital governance. This encompasses the challenge of reinventing government through electronic service delivery and public-private partnerships, but also extends beyond it by attempting a reformulation of the very notion of governance.

Resource Link: http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/governance/beyondreinvention.pdf

Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation

Stephen Coleman and John Gotze.

In his famous book Bowling Alone, U.S. political scientist Robert Putnam argues that a decline in membership of civic networks has resulted in a precipitous drop in political engagement. People become engaged in civic and wider political affairs when they have acquired habits of communal connection; as these habits fade, political engagement atrophies. Whether or not one subscribes entirely to Putnam's theory of social capital, it is undoubtedly the case that most developed democracies are experiencing a collapse of confidence in traditional models of democratic governance. This report outlines a model of e-democracy that could begin to reverse this trend.

Resource Link: http://bowlingtogether.net