Citizen Engagement: Tools for Bridging the Gap

During yesterday’s launch webinar, I presented the positive effect of putting public feedback at the fingertips of government staff and elected officials with our new version of iLegislate. Based on the quantity and quality of the questions that were asked, it seems government innovators are eager to make mobility and community engagement work together.

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Highline Public Schools Launches Website to Gather Game-Changing Ideas

Highline Public Schools oversees 36 schools and 18,000 students in South King County Washington. The communities it serves are located just south of Seattle – they have high mobility rates and rich cultural diversity, representing 80 nationalities and 70 different languages. Recently, the school district worked with Granicus to launch a new online forum called Imagine Highline to make it easier to reach their diverse community and gather feedback on important issues facing their schools. 

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Three Ways to Leverage Online Citizen Crowdsourcing

Local government leaders have often told us that capturing feedback from their community is important, but challenging. Citizen crowdsourcing on the web – also known as citizensourcing – is quickly becoming a one of the most reliable and effective ways to achieve this because it allows government agencies connect to a broader audience online, listen to their feedback, prioritize and make better decisions without requiring a ton of time and resources.

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Local Governments Achieve Cost Effective Disaster Recovery for their Data

Data, unlike anything else, have the unique property of being able to be pre-evacuated before a coming disaster is even detected. In the planning stages of disaster preparedness, setting up data redundancies through multi-geographic clouds in secure data centers moves your data into multiple safe zones that will provide the ultimate in data protection.

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Digital Community Collaboration Becomes All-in-One Tool

Connecting government to citizens is the most effective way to bring about better communities, better societies, and better government. Offering a website and a phone number is not nearly enough. As a result, we created an all in one tool for governments to take advantage of crowdsourced ideation, focused conversation, and agenda item feedback.

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Becoming a Leader in Civic Technology: Webinar Recap

We hosted a webinar yesterday to help government agencies become leaders in civic technology. The event attracted more than 300 people! I wanted to share a quick recap of some of the core themes we discussed to hopefully help your organization harnesses online technologies that can help you govern more effectively—this means with higher levels of public trust, accountability, and cost savings.

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Fort Lauderdale Uses Social Collaboration for City Visioning

The City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida just made its city visioning process more collaborative with two new ways to engage the public. They attracted 9,000 participants to a Telephone Town Hall Meeting and they unveiled a powerful new social collaboration platform to encourage their community to get involved in their “Our City, Our Vision” initiative.

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