Nov 19, 2013 | Advisory committee, Citizen committees, Deliberative, People, place & governance, Sustainability
After two years focused on the workings of citizen committees I joined a community advisory committee myself. Melbourne’s Greater Metropolitan Cemetery Trust (GMCT) services a huge community. That’s Altona to Lilydale and Fawkner. The diversity of its...
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...
Sep 27, 2013 | Citizen committees, Community Governance, People, place & governance
A reader of my report ‘The Role and Future of Citizen Committees in Australian Local Government’ says: ‘It’s given me ideas already … like upping the profile of our committees on the council website. The case study material is really...
Sep 27, 2013 | Community Engagement, Planning, Sustainability
Show me the money! When a property owner values something highly, will offering an incentive change their view? In Los Angeles, with its huge need for water savings, the Water & Power Department will pay the homeowner over a thousand dollars to get rid of their...
Sep 16, 2013 | Community Engagement, Stakeholder engagement, Tech tools for engagement
Ever used Dotmocracy? # Note Dotmocracy is now known as Ideas Rating Creator Jason Diceman, describes it as a simple method for recognizing points of agreement among a large number of people. I’ve used the dotmocracy sheets in large and small groups, in...
Sep 4, 2013 | Deliberative, Planning, Stakeholder engagement, Sustainability
Sydney bus drivers and bike riders came together at a workshop devised as the final stage of social research on their experience of road use, as small and manoeuvrable and large less manoeuvrable forms of transportation which travel at very different speeds. Material...
Aug 22, 2013 | Citizen committees, Community Engagement
In a recent discussion on re-purposing standing citizen committees on LinkedIn, a contributor suggested that an organisation should have no more than 3 such council committees, with everything else done by time-limited work groups. Say that number was 5 … as a...
Aug 4, 2013 | Joint effort - climate adaptation, People, place & governance, Planning, Sustainability
A great afternoon with the University of Melbourne Planning Student’s Association out in the rainy streets of the CBD on Friday. The objective? – To facilitate exchange between recently enrolled students, those in second semester and final year of study....
Aug 2, 2013 | Collaborating, Community Governance
Volunteer committees are often short on numbers and uncertain about how to recruit new people. Imagine a collaboration between local bike enthusiasts or bicycle user group, a local government community development area and a non-profit that runs a community centre....
Aug 2, 2013 | Community Engagement, Deliberative, It's cultural!
A month or so I spoke at a great community engagement on Future of Identity. An initiative of the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages, it was put together by Doing Something Good. With huge changes around identity and social media, the Office wanted to hear from...
