This past week, I found myself unable to put down a book by New York City’s former transportation director, Janette Sadik-Khan. In Street Fight, she outlines her experiences of making big transportation changes in a city where change is notoriously hard.
One story in particular caught my attention. When working on the citywide roll-out of Citi Bike, New York’s bike share system, Sadik-Khan did something unusual with the public engagement process. She used data in a surprising, effective way.
When working with our partner agencies, we often help them iterate their engagement processes from where they’re at to help them develop flexible public involvement strategies that can work for all situations and require minimal training or adjustment of existing processes.
The City of Raleigh Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Department is undergoing a dog park study to determine the public’s interest in dog facilities in the park system. As part of that process they have created a set of questions for the community and created an engagement portal on PublicInput.com.
Despite the proliferation of online discussion forums and social media, many agencies have struggled to embrace online dialog as a functional part of the public process. Their hesitation is simple – curating these spaces has historically meant significant investments of time and worry over what might be posted.
New tools are giving organizations the power to more efficiently manage public discourse within their comfort level.
Sometimes government agencies want “the next big thing” to solve their public involvement challenges. It’s understandable: leadership pushes hard to engage the public, and historically efforts have been disappointing. This may lead us into thinking that we need a shiny new piece of technology, an off-the-shelf solution that acts as a community engagement magic wand. However, this is a bit backwards…
Many times, early in project planning, teams find themselves wanting to expand public involvement in projects. The promise of social media looms large in increasing participation which leads many teams to ask: should this project have a Facebook page? The answer…
Last week we had the privilege of presenting on our partnership with the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) at the annual Transportation Research Board (TRB) meeting in Washington, DC.
Today, while much has changed, some hasn’t. Democracy, at its best, conveys the voice of the people to the institutions built to serve the people. But the tools, channels, and means of conveying that voice have multiplied.
As those channels have multiplied, complexity has reared its ugly head, making the simple act of listening into something much more involved than once encountered.
Since the dawn of digital engagement tools, public engagement has suffered from an echo chamber effect where a small handful of people dominate both the online and offline public involvement process. This makes outreach a key piece of any public involvement effort….
The failure of “if you build it they will come” Since the dawn of digital engagement tools, public engagement has suffered from an echo chamber...
To simplify data reporting and sharing, PublicInput.com partnered with Reach to develop the all-new Data Dashboard tool. The dashboard is a central toolkit to find and share insights from the data collected through text messaging, embedded news surveys, EdNC.org, paper surveys, and offline events. It also makes it easier for our reporters and researchers to access the data and stories.
The dashboard is designed to bring together the data collected through Reach along with related public datasets, such as US Census Data. The results are highly visual insights that can be shared on social media or embedded on the web.