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.
We’re keeping this beta so we can focus our effort and attention on a handful of users interested in developing a dashboard for their stakeholders — such as the mayor, council, or city manager…
Whether town hall meetings, petitions, hand-written letters, social media, online forums, and the dreaded paper form — conveying information from citizens to leaders is no simple task.
At PublicInput.com, our focus has been tying together the many input channels into one dashboard to simplify the process for both citizens and agencies…
They’d successfully pulled off something we had only imagined a month earlier — improving ‘meeting mode’ to include the ability to live broadcast public meetings and collect responses and questions from online viewers….
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.
Though we were only in Anaheim for 3 days, and got a cumulative 12 hours of sleep, we met a ton of great people and were reminded of why PublicInput’s work matters…
We are all about public engagement at PublicInput.com, but more importantly effective public engagement. An important step of this is lowering the barrier to getting people’s input. So the question was posed, “are we getting the most out of our online surveys?”
As the Lead Data Scientist at PublicInput…I got excited. We hit the data and here are some of the high level points we came up with….
A few months ago, I got a call from a client about a bright student who was looking for an internship in the civic tech space. “Kevin is a high schooler, but he’s a bit of a prodigy. You should meet him.”
So a few days later, I found myself sitting in with a 17-year-old showing off the video game he built for his classmates…
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.
We had provided the public with clean, low-friction input channels—a mobile friendly online survey, targeted social media posts, and live meeting voting. But somehow, residents felt compelled to email support@publicinput.comwith their comments…
We hear the question almost weekly from clients doing public outreach on on planning initiatives and public projects:
“How do I know when I’ve heard from enough people?”
For many years, the answer to that question has been “it depends”. How many people came to the meetings? What do you know about your area’s residents? Do you feel like you heard from more than the usual suspects…
Today we’re excited to share some great coverage of Cityzen’s new partnership with EducationNC as part of the Reach NC Voices project…