International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking

I'm currently at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for the opening conference of the new, NSF-funded International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking led by Peter Shane of Ohio State and Stephen Coleman of Leeds. The group consists of 17 members from around the world; a great mix of senior and junior colleagues with a diverse range of interests and concerns. The meeting has been extremely interesting and fruitful so far, with an excellent programme of future events and concrete outputs, including a special issue of the journal I/S and a jointly-authored book to follow. A list of the participants:

Professor Peter M. Shane, The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law
Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication, University of Leeds
Steven J. Balla, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Patrizia Bertini, independent practitioner and Researcher, European Internet Accessibilità Observatory, Manerbio, Italy
Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway College, University of London
Sungsoo Hwang, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pittsburgh
David Lazer, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Jeffrey Lubbers, Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C.
Laurence Monnoyer-Smith, University of Technology at Compiègne, France
Beth Noveck, New York Law School
Kerrie Oakes, Ph.D. Candidate, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Oren Perez, Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Vincent Price, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Alicia Schatteman, Ph.D. candidate, The State University of New Jersey at Newark, NJ
Polona Picman Štefancic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Peter L. Strauss, Betts Professor of Law, Columbia University
Scott Wright, De Montfort University, Leicester, England.

See also David Lazer's blog entry at the Kennedy School Program on Networked Governance

Open Source Policy Making

An interesting experiment being organised by Demos, the left of centre think tank, as explained on their blog.  They have produced the skeletal structure of a document and then posted it onto a wiki. Anyone can register on their website, and then edit the wiki, and so contribute to the creation of policy ideas. It will be really interesting to follow the project and see how it works out. The idea of open source policy making follows on from the release of a Demos publication last Friday, The Collaborative State.

Incidentally, for a theoretical take on how such processes work, this post on my own blog may be of interest.   

Challenges to GooTube

News Corp and NBC are banding together to create an online video presence that they, rather than Google, control. As I blogged when the GooTube deal was first struck, they were always in danger of intellectual property related weakness. The Los Angeles Times says:

"Hollywood has long been the king of entertainment. It believes that viewers will eventually get tired of the amateur videos that populate YouTube and other video-sharing sites, and that professionally produced material will win out."

They might be onto something.

Hansard Society's Digital Dialogues Project

header.jpgJust before last Christmas I was lucky enough to be at a conference at the OII which involved some discussion of the new interim report of the Hansard Society's and UK Department for Constitutional Affairs' excellent new e-democracy initiative, Digital Dialogues. The report is now publicly available and the project continues. One of the main themes that emerges is the lack of marketing in several of the initiatives, but there are some good examples of small-scale successes. The other thing I like about the approach is that it doesn't rely on just forums, but encompasses blogs and chats. Phase Two is now underway.