The plans of top agencies have been assessed by both the government and advocacy groups to see if they met the requirements laid out in the directives, often with an emphasis on the degree to which they increase transparency.  This report focuses on how well these agency plans increase public participation and collaboration.  

The authors compare what the large agencies say they plan to do, against the criteria used by professionals who conduct high-quality public participation initiatives in the non-profit world.  The authors find most plans fail to define what constitutes high-quality public participation, but do “display an admirable willingness to experiment.”

The report provides details of best practices being applied by federal agencies in engaging the public on-line, face-to-face, and through formal mechanisms, as well as what agencies are doing to change their cultures to support greater participation by the public.  It also offers a series of specific recommendations for what next steps the White House and agencies might take to spread these best practices across the government.

Read the Federal Times article about this report.

3 comments

Cheryl Honey

This is an invaluable resource and will help inform public officials on effective ways to engage citizens in public policy decisions. There are many tools and techniques to choose from. This will be very informative and help lead the way for "high-quality public participation." Thank you for taking the initiative to publish this report.

08/23/2011 - 00:15

Cheryl Honey

This promises to offer communities insight into a variety of ways to engage citizens in public policy issues. There have been a myriad of tools and techniques developed over the past 4 years that include citizens in "decision-making" and "choice-creating". It's exciting to see the shift from random selection to large group engagement processes like the Community Forum that was a citizen initiative passed into law in King Co., Washington. The more people involved in learning about issues and sharing their opinions the more educated they become to make wiser choices to benefit the broader community.

08/23/2011 - 00:24

Owen Ambur

The recommendations set forth in the report are now available in StratML format at http://xml.gov/stratml/drybridge/index.htm#AS or, more specifically, http://xml.gov/stratml/carmel/APPOGEwStyle.xml

Findings One and Four are closely related to the purposes of the StratML standard: http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#DefinitionPurposes

08/24/2011 - 15:47

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