Monday, February 09, 2009

Government and Public Policy in a New Collaborative Age

I have been following the conversations around how social media and collaboration are slowly making in-roads into citizens and government working together toward jointly-developed public policy. Not surprisingly, the road to "Government 2.0" is not always an easy one.

Recently in Toronto ChangeCamp was held to "Re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation." If that doesn't quite sink in, watch this quick promo video by Mark MacKay:


ChangeCamp '09 from Mark McKay on Vimeo.

Results from the one day are being tracked on the ChangeCamp wiki. Mark Kuznicki, one of the most influential leaders of the event, was interviewed by Nora Young for Spark over on CBC Radio. The full interview and blog post are here. Some additional impact on the media is also traced on the ChangeCamp blog here.

It is amazing to see change taking place, and it is not just Toronto. Social media professor of Stanford and Berkeley Howard Rheingold discusses the affect of the Internet Age on Public Policy in this video discussion:

3 comments:

Carol said...

Hi Connie,

I enjoyed both of the videos you posted today. Thanks!

carol

Connie Crosby said...

Thanks kindly for stopping by, Carol!

Cheers,
Connie

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words about ChangeCamp! Howard Rheingold's piece echoes that of some ChangeCamp participants who were seeing a lack of historical context about community organizing among the technorati.

The public sphere has been sadly in a state of neglect for a generation. In social technologies I'm seeing an avenue for its renewal.