Notes: You are invited to become an editor and contribute your own case study.  The purpose of this site is not to duplicate content that is elsewhere on the Web, but to serve as a useful directory to that content for open government pioneers in the public and private sectors.  You may also be interested in transparency or collaboration case studies and effective practices.

Index for this page:

Note: you may also search the entire OpenGov Playbook by keyword on the right side of the page.

• Federal Participation Initiatives
• State Participation Initiatives
• Local Participation Initiatives
• Participation Initiatives from outside the US
• General Participation Principles and Ideas
• (see also definitions of participation)

Federal Participation Initiatives:

• Engaging Citizens in Government: (General Services Administration) Discussion of deeper potential methods of citizen engagement

• Regulations.gov Exchange: (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and Environmental Protection Agency) An online forum allowing citizens to explore new innovative features proposed for Regulations.gov.  See also this presentation about Connecting with Public Stakeholders from Regulations.Gov Exchange.
• Citizen Engagement Platform: (General Services Administration)
• Expanding Participation in Regulatory Processes: (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
• CO.NX, X-Life, and the Growing Role of Social Media: (Department of State)
• Open for Questions: (White House Office of New Media) Open for Questions gave Americans across the nation a direct line to the Administration to ask exactly what they wanted to know about the Administration’s efforts to get the economy back on track.
• Healthreform.gov: (Department of Health and Human Services) The Online Home of Health Reform
• IdeaFactory: (Department of Homeland Security) Empowers the Transportation Security Administration’s large and dispersed workforce to submit and collaborate on innovative ideas to improve TSA and keep the nation’s transportation systems secure.
• Business.Gov: (Small Business Administration) First Government-Sponsored Online Community for Small Businesses.

• Development 2.0 Challenge: (United States Agency for International Development) Tech Competition for the Developing World

• Knowledge and Collaboration at the Department of State: (Department of State) Discussion of a range of innovative initiatives.

• Science Integrity Blog: (Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Executive Office of the President) Cultivating a Conversation on Scientific Integrity
• Consequential Public Engagement: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Discussion of case studies over the past five years
• TSA: A Social Media Success Story: (Transportation Security Administration) The TSA turns a potential social media crisis into an opportunity
• Drug Facts Chat Day: (National Institutes of Health-NIDA) High school students learn facts about drug use from scientists rather than experimentation
• The Conscience Unconference: (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) Harnessing citizen ideas for social good
• Wikified Army Field Guide: (U.S. Army, Department of Defense) Soldiers collaboratively update Army Doctrine from the field
• VBA Innovation Initiative: (Department of Veterans Affairs) Veterans Benefits Administration employees submit groundbreaking ideas to improve the claims process for Veterans.
• NCLB Listening and Learning Tour: (U.S. Department of Education) Across the country and online, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is seeking the best ideas for the next generation of school reform.
• IdeaLab: (Department of Health and Human Services) Connecting People to Make Good Ideas Better
• NRC Web Conferencing for Public Meetings: (United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission) Using Technology to Increase Public Participation in Nuclear Regulations

(Back to top)

State Participation Initiatives:

• CaliforniaSpeaks: CaliforniaSpeaks brought together nearly 3,500 Californians on August 11, 2007, for an all-day, non-partisan conversation on health care reform.
• City of Santa Cruz Offers Blueprint for Solving CA Budget Crisis with Social Media by Peter Koht (City of Santa Cruz)

(Back to top)

Local Participation Initiatives:

• Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program: The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) was established jointly by the Minnesota state legislature and the Minneapolis city council in 1990 to revitalize inner city neighborhoods. The NRP represented a procedural innovation, with a focus on empowering local residents to set priorities, design projects and undertake implementation.
• Transportation Priorities Project: A series of 32 smaller community meetings led to five larger community forums, all of which led to a community-wide all-day summit over a short, three-month time period.
• City of Philadelphia: "Tight Times. Tough Choices." A participatory budgeting project developed by the City, UPenn, and WHYY.
• City of Portland, Oregon (General Civic Engagement)
• City of Philadelphia -"Great Expectations" project (Planning)
• Envision Central Texas (Planning)
• Envision Utah (Planning)

(Back to top)

Participation Initiatives from Outside the US:

• Biobanking in British Columbia: (Canada) Researchers at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia (UBC), conducted two deliberative forums on the topic of human tissue biobanking.

• British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform: (Canada) The Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform was a body created by the government of British Columbia, Canada. The Assembly was charged with investigating and recommending changes to improve the electoral system of the province.

• BürgerForum Europa: (Europe) The Citizens’ Forum is a new form of participation developed by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Ludwig-Erhard Foundation and the Heinz Nixdorf Foundation. It is a 6-8 week online deliberation embedded in two live events, one at the beginning of the process and the other one at the end.

• Porto Alegre Participatory Budgeting: (Brazil) Established in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 as a means of involving ordinary citizens in the annual municipal budget decision-making cycle. By the turn of the 21st century, some 20,000 citizens participated in popular assemblies affecting the distribution of around $160 million in investment
• Wenling City Deliberative Poll: (China) A participatory budgeting experiment conducted by local government officials in the Zeguo Township of Wenling City, China.

(Back to top)

General Participation Principles and Ideas:

• Better Decisions through Consultation and Collaboration: (Environmental Protection Agency) A fantastic guide to help agencies improve their public engagement practices.
• Public Engagement Process: (EPA) An overview of effective public engagement practices for federal agencies.
• National Coalition of Dialogue and Deliberation's (NCDD) Principles of Public Engagement creates the conditions for authentic public engagement around complex issues.
• NCDD's Engagement Streams Framework helps public servants navigate the range of dialogue and deliberation approaches that are available to them and make design choices that are appropriate for their circumstance and resources.
• Creating Social Media Policy: (MiXT Media Strategies) How federal agencies can intelligently engage with social media.
• Plain Langauge: (Plain Language Institute) The importance and return on investment for engaging an audience in plain language
• Participant Selection: (via Participedia) Bringing the right people to the table in the right way is essential.
• Communication Mode: (via Participedia) A measurable dimension of participatory design that specifies how participants will interact with one another within a venue of public discussion or decision.
• Kinds of Influence: (via Participedia) A conceptual dimension of participatory design that gauges the impact public participation has upon the direction of public policy and other similar decision-making processes.
• Kinds of goods: (via Participedia) Participatory processes can, in part, be classified according to the kind of good or goods at issue. What "works" will depend, in part, on the nature of these goods.
• Participation and Open Government Web Sites: An article about the open government web sites that are required by the Open Government Directive.
• Civic engagement practitioners, Everyday Democracy, and the Kettering Foundation sponsored the report, "Sustaining Public Engagement" - a research study written by Harvard University researchers Archon Fung and Elena Fagotto. The monograph looks at a number of local public engagement efforts on a variety of policy issues.
• The civic engagement firm, Public Agenda, has published a report, "Promising Practices in Online Engagement", which covers a vast array of web-based public involvement processes on issues that are both local and national.
• "The Promise and Challenge of Local Democracy" - an excellent recent study on civic participation at the neighborhood and city levels across the United States. The report was written by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium's Matt Leighninger (scroll down to the report title for free PDF download).
• "The New Laboratories of Democracy" - a very thorough "inventory" of local level civic engagement efforts from planning to budgets to community dialogues. Features and lists a variety of methodologies and practitioners. This report was developed by PACE.
• "E-Consultation: Enabling Democracy Between Elections." Reports on online civic engagement in Canada. Produced by Canada's Institute of Research on Public Policy.
• "Civic Engagement and the Changing Transition to Adulthood" - studies youth civic engagement from the late teens through early 20's, evaluating the impacts of education, economics and other factors. Produced by CIRCLE. 
•  The UK's public participation organization, InvolveUK, produced the report, "Deliberative Public Engagement: Nine Principles", a great overview of what makes for legitimate civic engagement.
• "Its more than talk" - a "discussion paper about options for building knowledge, skills and values about effective community engagement" produced by the New Zealand Government's Office for the Community and Voluntary Sector (OCVS).
• Articles by Pete Peterson from Common Sense California (CSC is a public engagement organization): California Civic Health Index in SacBee, Gen X civic engagement in City Journal, health care "town hall meetings" in Fox & Hounds Daily, localized online civic participation in an essay entitled, "Canoes and Online Communities" for the tech/politics blog, Personal Democracy Forum, CSC’s participatory budgeting project in Salinas for the blog, NewGeography, civic engagement effort in Kauai for City Journal Online, CSC's participatory budgeting projects and the changing nature of the citizen/government relationship in Fox & Hounds Daily

(Back to top)