Santa Clara City Desk
By Carolyn Schuk
Santa Clara Launches E-Town Hall Pilot
Santa Clara is dipping an exploratory toe into the waters of e-democracy with last week's launch of the Open City Hall pilot project using Peak Democracy's (www.opentownhall.com) Open Town Hall Internet-based public forum service - similar to online social networks, marketplaces and bulletin boards. Available through any standard Web browser, the system is currently used by Berkeley, Palo Alto, Salt Lake City, UT, and Ashland, OR.
"The forum continues the City's efforts to provide more opportunities for citizen interaction and engagement," said a Dec. 22 press release.
Open City Hall offers a forum for people to post comments on topics of interest, with comments fully visible to site visitors. However, the system isn't currently integrated with Santa Clara's online SIRE Agenda system. An integrated system would allow comments to be linked directly to City Council agenda items and other city documents - making it simpler to read all the comments associated with a topic, and to comment on public issues.
To try out Open Town Hall point your Web browser to santaclaraca.gov/OpenCityHall. You'll see the welcome screen shown below:
You'll be asked to register, or to sign in if you've already registered:
Once you sign in, you can read what other people are saying, vote your support of their comments, and post your own comments:
The pilot topic is: What do you love about Santa Clara? The three writers posting answers that generate the most comments from other residents will win a Santa Clara coffee mug or reusable shopping bag.
You can see how Open Town Hall works for Berkeley and Palo Alto respectively at www.opentownhall.com/portals/30/596 and www.cityofpaloalto.org/knowzone/open_city_hall/default.asp?pd.
Collaborating Online for More Than Chat
By Carolyn Schuk
Santa Clara's Open City Hall is part of a larger trend called "crowd-sourcing." Reportedly coined in 2006 by Wired writer Jeff Howe, crowd-sourcing describes mass online collaboration to solve problems, capture and analyze information, design processes and systems, or execute a task. While the collaborators aren't paid directly, there is often an incentive or reward for the chosen solution.
The familiar online encyclopedia, Wikipedia - visited by some 400 million people every day - is a crowd-sourced project. It's written collaboratively by volunteers - about 80,000 of them working on nearly 20,000,000 articles in 270 languages.
In a crowd-sourced project, a question or problem is broadcast to a public audience as an open call for solutions. That audience - the "crowd" - submits, evaluates and refines solutions.
Over time, communities of interest grow up around specific topics. Crowd-sourcing opens the opportunities to get information and help from far more sources than are known to any one person or organization.
The U.S. federal government started crowd-sourcing a wide variety of projects about two years ago via the website challenge.gov. Current challenges include apps to help small businesses and entrepreneurs navigate the Federal Government more easily, design for a rugged terrain transport that can operate at night, and visualizations of labor data.
