Strarting in February I am now one of a handful of Senior Public Consultation Coordinators with the City of Toronto.  You can see a list of the typical projects we help manage here: toronto.ca/involved/projects  Its a challenging and rewarding job that allows my to apply my experience and skills in stakeholder engagement on a daily basis.  Hopefully I have opporunities to user Dotmocracy as well.

On September 26, 2009 approximately 4,000 citizens in 38 countries discussed and recognized their collective opinions on the issue of climate change.  The format was an incredible example of best practices in public participation, that included:

Recently Joseph Peters (Partner at Ascentum) and Joe Goldman (Vice President of Citizen Engagement at AmericaSpeaks) published an excellent two page article called: Open Policy Making 101: 10 Questions To Ask Before Launching Your Online Public Consultation

For BikeCamp TO I created a simple one page (two-sided) form to help small groups to document a plan to get something done.

Sections included in the form are:

• Name for the plan
• Desired results to be achieved and strategies to be used
• Key strengths, challenges, opportunities and threats (aka a SWOT analysis)
• Contact information for team members
• Timeline of important tasks and major milestones

This simple template can help focus ad-hoc teams and give concrete outcomes to open space conferences. I hope you find it useful!

Download the Action Implementation Plan form (PDF)

This Saturday, October 17th, I will be assisting renowned facilitator Daniel Rose from Omakase Group to apply Dotmocracy at the first Toronto BikeCamp hosted by the Toronto Cyclists Union.

On September 29th 2009, my self and Simone Arsenault-May presented an evening workshop for parents at the Grove Community School, a new alternative school part of the Toronto District School Board.

This workshop focused on teaching the basics of a consensus process that uses cooperative dialogue. It also covered techniques for an efficient council and tools for effective community engagement.

This October 22-25 C2D2 and Toronto Community Housing will be co-hosting the third bi-annual Canadian Conference for Dialogue and Deliberation. As part of the program, I will be conducting a process to develop a Consensus Document, asking participants "How do we use dialogue and deliberation to make stronger communities and healthier democracies?"  We will collectively author an answer to this question using a Dotmocracy wall and through a workshop. Learn more about the Consensus Document project and register today for this important conference.

(Originally published on WorldChanging.com September 6th 2008)

Politicians should take note; there is a new answer to some of the toughest questions of our times. When presented with an issue with no obvious popular and sensible solution, or a situation where a legislature is unable to make progress on an important topic, 100 random citizens can be called on to solve the political puzzle, as they did in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (my home province).

Back in 2000 Health Canada published an excellent resource called The Health Canada Policy Toolkit for Public Involvement in Decision Making.
It is a complete toolkit with guidelines, about 50 techniques described in concise details and with useful suggestions, and also case studies and references. I highly recommend it as a definitive reference on the various options for effective public engagement within the Canadian context. You can access other free resources in my links section.

I'm on the Board of C2D2 and we needed a mailing list application that could provide for a full bi-lingual (French/English) e-newsletter blast. In my research I could not find any hosted mailing list services that advertise support for multi-lingual email marketing. That said, I did find some acceptable solutions...