Dec 13, 2016 | Advisory committee, Citizen committees, Collaborating, Community Governance
End 2016. Time to assess where we’ve been, and how it’s gone. How did our approach to key areas of work go? Thinking to the we, the group, the team, the partners, the citizens, how did collaborations go? If they’re going nowhere, how could they be improved?...
Sep 21, 2015 | Advisory committee, Citizen committees, Community Governance, Local government, People, place & governance, Planning, Terms of reference
When you’re a council searching for a workable, enduring approach to place-based governance, it’s too easy to find yourself back where you started. In research on community governance I learned there’s no one way, no right way. Every place expresses itself...
Aug 11, 2015 | Community Governance, Deliberative, Local government, Participatory budgeting
Nobody would pretend the insistent and persistent don’t influence local government. At a council meeting you see the lady in the front row you saw at the last meeting, and at the one before that. She takes out her crochet. You put a strategy out to consultation and...
Apr 23, 2015 | Citizens' juries, Community Governance, Deliberative
The US Deliberative Democracy Consortium … Recently published an article on an issue close to my heart, deliberative publicity. Say a Council has a wonderful deliberative event – it could be the Darebin Participatory Budgeting Jury for example. It makes...
Sep 17, 2014 | Advisory committee, Citizen committees, Community Engagement, Community Governance, Local government, People, place & governance, Terms of reference
In early September, I presented on improving the functioning of citizen committees’ at the SA Community Managers’ conference in Adelaide. The conference is for local government managers and the theme was ‘Active Citizenship’. I proposed three...
Nov 12, 2013 | Advisory committee, Citizen committees, Collaborating, Community Governance, Deliberative
I’ve just come back from a month in the US, and loved getting into the New York Times each morning. Read a great column by Nicholas D. Kristof giving Twitter a serve in the lead up to its launch as a public company. You may know that Twitter, symbol of out-front...
