Great roundup of the Community Conversation process in the Achieving the Dream initiative. 

This is the first post in my new Tool Tips series, hopefully a weekly best-of with tools that I found helpful to support eParticipation efforts. 

Today I want to introduce a small but interesting web app that allows you to quickly visualize results of workshops or online dialogues - Wordle.net. While summarizing dialogues will always be a human task, Wordle parses text or web pages and quickly outputs a nice graph of the most frequently used words, thereby highlighting emerging themes.Very useful for on-the-fly report-outs and easy to embed on your web site ( I also found it works quite well with our TextTheMob.com message boards ).

A similar alternative is TagCrowd.com, less visually compelling, but doesn't require Java.

I stumbled over a Chevy ad on the front page of the New York Times today, announcing a dialogue about alternative energy with the headline "We share a planet, why not share a dialogue".  While I appreciate the offer to talk openly about their alternative fuel efforts (and realize I have to do some more research about the seriousness of their efforts), I disagree with their choice of words. After navigating to the microsite, I had to realize all they offer is a Q&A section. The answers seem to be pretty open and address the issues, but technically a Q&A doesn't qualify as a dialogue:  Users can only submit questions, neither are they able to respond to the answer nor are other visitors able to leave their response to the answer or the initial question - Chevy has the final word!
 

­Since we launched TextTheMob I'm keeping my eyes open for good case studies and best practices on how to use mobile technology to support eParticipation efforts. I recently discovered MobileActive.org, a great network of practitioners that has put together a quick guide of How to Run a Text-to-Screen Campaign:

Text to screen can function as a unique way for advocacy groups to use interactive media to

• build a database of mobile phone numbers for future use
• show the opinions and demands of a constituency/the public to decision makers in a highly visible manner
• generate media and public attention.

Last weekend I participated in DrupalCamp Colorado. Some very interesting presentations and amazing to see the Drupal community grow so fast.

I know I'm kind of late to the game, but I'm finally warming up to Twitter. So during the conference I started live twittering and I liked it. Does anyone care? I'm not convinced, but other participants discovered me and ended up being a discussion starter.

Also, Beth Kanter's thoughts and experiences with live twittering at conferences keep me thinking - there's something to it, even though I feel like it's not quite there yet.

Digiactive, a site devoted to digital activism, has released a guide called A DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism. It's a quick read with insights and case studies of how Facebook can be used for campaigns. Many of the tips are helpful for anyone looking to use Facebook to support their eParticipation efforts.

[via Beth Kanter's Blog] 

I'm excited to announce that I recently started to work for Public Agenda as a consultant. I'm coming on board as a Public Engagement Associate and will help them identify online strategies to support their choicework approach.
 

One of the biggest takeaways from the fabulous book Groundswell - winning in a world transformed by social technologies, which I just finished reading, was the POST Method as a simple framework of how to approach social software:

Is your company [organization] doing its social strategy backwards?

If you started by saying "we should do a blog" or "we should create a page on a social network" or "we should create a community" the answer is probably yes.

I've been there and am confronted with this approach pretty often in our work. Following the POST Method seems obvious, but it's important to remind ourselves frequently to go through the steps one after the other:

P is People. Don't start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you're targeting college students, use social networks. If you're reaching out business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Forrester has great  data to help with this, but you can make some estimates on your own. Just don't start without thinking about it.

O is objectives. Pick one. Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objective before you decide on a technology. Then figure out how you will measure it.

S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you're done. Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint and you'll know where to begin.

T is Technology. A community. A wiki. A blog or a hundred blogs. Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.

This may sound simple to the sophisticated readers of this blog. But it works. Try it. Think your strategy through. Even if you're just clarifying your own strategy, this should help you explain it to your boss.

You can find more information about the book and its authors on their blog >>

From the OneWebDay website: 

OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

The idea behind OneWebDay is to:

• focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy)

• focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills)

• create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet

We’re building towards September 22, a Monday this year.

Curious to see what activities around online participation in democracy will be offered.