civic engagement deliberation guides

Everyday-Democracy has an Issue Guide Exchange for folks who write deliberation guides. There is also a forum for discussion. And there is an online tool to walk you through creating a guide.

And while I'm on the topic, ALA has a blog on Civic Engagement and a listserv called Deliberate and a Member Interest Group.

I highly recommend this community engagement role for libraries. I think I can guarantee no Google will come along to bump us out of it. Moreover, by nurturing the civic capacity of our communities, we create a better climate for support of libraries and understanding or their value.

Testing a new gadget

Nicole alerted me that Blogger offers a voting gadget so I've added it. Please vote so I can see how this works! Also, Google Gadgets offers a polling gadget, but it is many screens in so use search to find it.

still here, with new goodies

I have found some fine new toys: Many Eyes and Wordle. Many Eyes offers ways to visualize data sets. Some of the graphs would probably strike Edward Tufte as having too much ink, but they are a definite step above the hideous 3-D bar graphs that come out of Microsoft products. Wordle is a word or tag cloud maker and it can be used on Many Eyes. And Many Eyes is definitely a social network for people who like to look for patterns in numbers.

thanks, David!

Flickr refinished

I had to get a Yahoo account for something else entirely, so it seemed foolish not to set up a Flickr account too. Have a look at my photos. Here's a place I'd like to be right now:

certified 2.0 genius

Got my certificate, button, MP3 player. But stopping now would invalidate the learning, right? Let me recommend Halting State by Charles Stross. Set about 10 years into the future, it is a mashup of IT security risks, infowar espionage, and ARGs. Imagine that people participating in a sort of role-playing game are being used unwittingly as tools by a foreign government.

The book got me thinking about other possible uses of ARGs, so I did some surfing and found World Without Oil. Don't know how I missed this last year. But maybe before Learning 2.0 I wouldn't have appreciated it? Anyway, it integrates many of the tools from L2 to create a simulation of a social policy crisis and invites everyone to play along. It calls this wisdom of crowds but I think it is closer to civic engagement. I think the wisdom of crowds is simply Adam Smith's invisible hand - the cumulative effect of the self-interest of many. World Without Oil, however, invites imaginative participation with no advantage to self interest - in other words, what's good for the community. I am thinking this may be a better model for civic engagement in the future than sitting around in deliberation groups, National Issues Forum style. It seems like there ought to be some sort of game that would cultivate information skeptics as well.

freebees for working groups

I read Michele Boule's "Changing the Way We Work" in Library Technology Reports. It was less than I'd hoped for. All her examples are software/applications development workgroups. She does review some interesting free applications.

One of the case studies is http://about.scriblio.net/ "open source OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress." See http://tamworthlibrary.org/ for a public library application.

http://www.dimdim.com/ claims to be "web conferencing service which is free to consumers and extremely easy to use, as there is no software to download or maintain." More web comferencing hosts are http://www.yugma.com/, http://www.zoho.com/ and http://vyew.com/site/.

http://www.37signals.com/ has free project management tools: Basecamp, Campfire group chat, Backpack, and Whiteboard.

In addition to pbwiki and wetpaint, she reviews http://www.seedwiki.com/. A booktalk use is http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/hallahan_library_book_talk/hallahan_library_book_talk.