New tools have made it easier than ever to set up a project website, fast . . . → Read More: Some very good local government online engagement advice from urban planner Scott Doyon]]> Scott Doyon is Director of Client Marketing Services for PlaceMakers, an urban planning firm. He published a post to his Better Cities blog last week titled Public process: Don’t botch your online engagement (also on their Placeshakers blog here):

New tools have made it easier than ever to set up a project website, fast and cheap, for just about any endeavor. So easy, in fact, that people often assume the task of populating it with content is equally so.

It’s not. Instead, what you end up with is city staffers with limited time and limited resources, and who already engage with the public regularly in person, suddenly presented with the task of doing so electronically as well. Not surprisingly under such circumstances, whenever they find themselves in possession of any piece of information even remotely related to the project, their response seems obvious: Put it on the web.

Raw information. Posted. Done.

That’s a problem.

The City of Northfield, MN where I live has a history such failed project web sites, some done by the city staff, some by consulting firms. Some recent examples:

• 4th St. construction
• Safety Center (two sites, here and here)
• Northfield Business Park
• Northfield Transportation Plan

Doyon writes:

Think of the parallel: You’re in a traditional public meeting and someone asks a question about why the city is doing something. Do you provide a concise rationale, spelling out its benefits and role in larger community goals, or do you hand them a binder with 300 pages of reports and memos and tell them to have at it?

What should local governments do instead with their project sites?

Provide however much content it takes to express, up front and at each step along the way, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how people can participate. No more. No less.

Exactly.  Unfortunately, Doyon doesn’t provide examples so here’s one I’ve worked on for the past 9 months: the GrandView District project blogsite for the City of Edina, MN. 

In that time, the project blog’s been updated 36 times with many dozens of photos and has nearly 300 comments attached. It includes all the files, Powerpoint presentations, archives of the webinar, and links to meeting videos.

Doyon also points out that local governments are unwitting victims of the “Blank Slate” dilemma:

Another common fumble is confusing the difference between collecting ideas and building consensus around community goals. A variety of new tools have made it easier than ever for cities to engage citizens in a discussion of ideas. “What would you like to see?,” they ask. “Provide your ideas and rate the ideas of others.”

That is, when presented with a blank slate, people naturally assume that anything is possible. But as you know, it’s not. Avoiding problems is all in how you ask the questions. For example, you’ll often find questions like this: “How can we improve Founder’s Park?” Sounds empowering, right? Unfortunately, it also sets a foundation for failed effort.

Instead, the question should be posed this way: “The city has budgeted $4 million towards renovations for Founder’s Park. Keeping in mind that further land acquisition isn’t an option at this site, what improvements, initiatives or recreational options would you like to see prioritized?”

That’s the exact approach the City of Edina took with another engagement project, the 2012 budget.  Working with the Citizens League, the areas of the budget that citizen input was sought were very narrowly defined. Ultimately, the process proved to be very effective and will be repeated again this year.

For background, see all my blog posts about my work with the Edina Citizen Engagement project.

For the past three years, the potential readership for Park Nicollet CEO David Abelson’s blog was 8,000 Park Nicollet team members. Now, however, his potential audience is . . . → Read More: Another hospital CEO blogger: Dr. David Abelson]]> A short StarTribune article on Saturday alerted me to the blog of Dr. David Abelson, CEO of Park Nicollet Health Services. From the Feb. 22 press release:

For the past three years, the potential readership for Park Nicollet CEO David Abelson’s blog was 8,000 Park Nicollet team members. Now, however, his potential audience is limitless. Abelson’s CEO Blog is now available worldwide on the internet as DrAbelsonConnects.

“My blog began as a direct communication to our team members and existed only inside our computer servers here at Park Nicollet,” he recalls. “It didn’t take long for people to start sharing the blog with friends and family and soon the entries were circulating far beyond our system.  Everyone is affected by health care on a personal level, and, whether they’re aware of it or not, on a political and policy level. The universality of these issues makes the blog relevant far beyond the walls of Park Nicollet.”

I’m encouraged by what I see so far, as most of his blog posts include a story. He appears to be as a good a blogger as Paul Levy, former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Levy has continued to blog since his departure but he now calls it Not Running a Hospital.

You can also follow Dr. Abelson on Twitter.

The broad theme was "Community 2.0" in which participants tried to answer these questions:

He’s asked me to talk about my civic leadership blogging coaching, as well as my current citizen engagement consulting . . . → Read More: Social Media: Engaging Democracy and Communities Online]]> Steve Clift, founder and Executive Director, E-Democracy.org has asked me to do a presentation tonight for a class he’s teaching at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs titled Social Media: Engaging Democracy and Communities Online.

He’s asked me to talk about my civic leadership blogging coaching, as well as my current citizen engagement consulting work. I plan to take the class on a web tour while I speak to them about both.

Civic leadership blogging

1. July, 2004: UK e-gov delegation visits Northfield
2. Feb, 2005: Trip to the UK
3. July, 2005: field trip to Northfield for the International Symposium on Local E-Democracy
4. Fall, 2005: Guide to Civic Leadership Blogging (U.K. edition) How to use blogs as an effective local leadership tool
5. Oct. 2008: UK CivicSurf booklet
6. Featured civic leadership bloggers
• Edina City Manager Scott Neal
• Northfield City Councilor Betsy Buckheit
• NDDC Executive Director Ross Currier

Citizen Engagement Online

1. Northfield.org (since 1994)
• Blogosphere aggregator
2. Locally Grown Northfield (since 2006)
• 3,400 blog posts
• 40,700 comments
3. Webinar on social media use by local government (Nov. 2010)
4. Edina Citizen Engagement (since May, 2011)

I chose Google Moderator . . . → Read More: Using Google Moderator as another tool for citizen engagement]]> I installed Google Moderator ("Helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size") last week on the blog site for Edina Citizen Engagement.  We’re testing it out as a way to solicit questions from Edina, MN citizens about four projects during the month of October, 2011.

I chose Google Moderator because I think it could help to address some common citizen engagement problems:

• Many people don’t feel comfortable or have the time to ask questions of local government leaders about important issues, whether it’s using email, the phone, or open mic at City Council meetings.
• Many people are reluctant to engage in online discussions
• City leaders can’t easily gauge which questions are most often on the minds of citizens
• City leaders are often faced with having to answer the same questions over and over

I think that the tool provides a simple and inexpensive way to gather and prioritize the questions.

  
I don’t have a catchy name for any of this yet so for this month it’s just October Q&A. I’ve created an FAQ page, as well as a Google Moderator how-to video/screencast.

When we’ve collected the prioritized questions, we’ll select a time and method for city leaders to provide answers online, either via:

• a live online event (chat, webinar, teleconference)
• a recorded audio or video session
• a written/text response

I’m learning my way into this and so I expect to make mistakes and improve.  I’m also assuming that it’ll take a while for Edina citizens to find out about this and get comfortable using it.

I got together with Curtis Johnson and Jay Walljasper for lunch at Muffuletta’s in St. Paul last week. I spent much of the 90s at Utne Reader when Jay was editor and I was the new media guy. I’ve been doing blog-related projects for Curt and his Citistates colleagues since 2004, where Jay . . . → Read More: A new project with the Detroit Revitalization Fellows Program]]>

I got together with Curtis Johnson and Jay Walljasper for lunch at Muffuletta’s in St. Paul last week. I spent much of the 90s at Utne Reader when Jay was editor and I was the new media guy. I’ve been doing blog-related projects for Curt and his Citistates colleagues since 2004, where Jay is one of the associates.

The occasion? We’ll be working together with the Detroit Revitalization Fellows Program at Wayne St. University, funded in part by the Kresge Foundation.  The program is:

… designed to attract, develop and retain promising young professionals who will help lead the economic revitalization and development of Detroit. This talent pool is being cultivated in order to build the capacity of public, for-profit, nonprofit and quasi-public organizations, including Detroit’s anchor institutions.

We’re doing this project under the Citiscope umbrella, a Citistates Group project. I’ll provide more details in the next few weeks as our work gets going.

I attended the 2011 MN Blogger Conference Saturday at Allina Commons (administrative headquarters for Allina Hospitals and Clinics) in the Midtown Exchange in Minneapolis. Everything about the conference was terrific. Props to the main organizers Arik Hanson and Melissa (Missy) Berggren.

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor/blogger at . . . → Read More: 2011 MN Blogger Conference: a first-rate experience]]>    

I attended the 2011 MN Blogger Conference Saturday at Allina Commons (administrative headquarters for Allina Hospitals and Clinics) in the Midtown Exchange in Minneapolis. Everything about the conference was terrific. Props to the main organizers Arik Hanson and Melissa (Missy) Berggren.

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor/blogger at MarketingBlog.com (that domain name redirects to toprankblog.com) gave the keynote: Blogs to Riches: A Journey from Blogging Luddite to Successful Business. Alternate title on his cover slide: 5 Lessons Learned from 7+ Years of Blogging.

(I happened to meet Lee just before his presentation when he saw me taking photos with my Sony NEX-3. He said something to effect of "I loved that camera until a wave in Hawaii took it away from me."  I told him new versions were due soon, ie, the NEX-5N and the NEX-7.)

Lee’s a terrific presenter. I was delighted to hear him stressing the importance of having your blog be the centerpiece of one’s content marketing strategy, and not just your social media strategy.

I don’t have a link to his presentation but slide #15 from this recent Social Media and SEO Slideshare presentation of his is similar to what he used on Saturday.

The break-out sessions I attended were all very good:

• The Pictures With Your Thousand Words: Supporting Your Blog with Photos by Mandy Dwyer
• Vlogging: Lessons to Learn from TV by Erica Mayer 
• 15 Essential WordPress Plugins (blog post with his presentation slides) by Mykl Roventine
• Blogging from mobile devices by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Unbelievably, the conference was free, including lunch and parking, thanks to the sponsors, TopRank Online Marketing, Allina, and KARE 11.

"I’m excited to see what [the website] will yield because I know Edina has a pretty active online community. People want to interact that way," [City Manager Scott] Neal said.

I used CoverItLive to host the chat and it worked well. The only glitch was that I couldn’t get a photo of Scott . . . → Read More: Live chat with Edina City Manager Scott Neal]]> Yesterday I moderated a one-hour live chat with Edina City Manager Scott Neal about all things related to the economic development of Southdale Center, part of our Edina Citizen Engagement project.

I used CoverItLive to host the chat and it worked well. The only glitch was that I couldn’t get a photo of Scott to appear with his comments.

We had 21 different people attend over the course of the hour, with up to a dozen at any one time.  Seven people submitted questions and comments.

This was our first online event. I blogged the rationale for it here.  Scott blogged about it here.