Our own Dr. Mark is teaming up with the Open Gov NYC meetup! http://iyear.us/2009/04/21/anyone-can-be-a-wonk/
Join us if you are in the area, and please spread the word. Thanks, Matt Anyone Can Be A Wonk If you saw Pixar’s* Ratatouille* you’ll remember Remy the Rat’s unyielding belief in Chef Gusteau’s motto that “anyone can be a chef”. By the end of the tale, Remy convinces even the harshest of critics that you don’t need a traditional culinary pedigree to make an excellent dish. [image: remy] Writing government policy is even more specialized and arcane than cooking, but citizens can still play an active role. After all, citizens often have more knowledge and expertise about needs of their communities and industries than policy-makers. President Obama, our own Chef Gusteau of government, made this explicit in his January 21, 2009 directive on Transparency and Open Government<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/> : *Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information.* President Obama further asked for agencies to “solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.” The Open Government meetup offers the concept of the “policy sprint”. From our most recent blog post: “Techies will be familiar with the idea of a coding sprint, at which coders will choose a particular project on a particular day and code like hell until it’s done. We want to do the same thing with policy, so that by the end of the day we’ll have something that we can present to Albany or City Hall.” [image: Dr. Mark Elliot] Dr. Mark Elliot The Open Government NYC meetup group will begin exploring this idea at our next event, a *Collaborative Policy Building Workshop on April 28th* (RSVPhere<http://www.meetup.com/opengovnyc/calendar/10234024/>). The workshop will be led by *Dr. Mark Elliot*, who conducted his doctoral research on mass collaboration <http://mark-elliott.net/blog/?page_id=24>and founded the innovative open-government-focused consulting firm CollabForge <http://www.collabforge.net/>. (Read his full bio here<http://www.collabforge.net/drupal/node/17> .) Dr. Elliot is already focused collaborative policy building, and ran the successful Future Melbourne <http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/> project to crowdsource city planning. He will give a brief presentation of his previous work, and then will facilitate the workshop. Dr. Elliot will help the group arrive at a framework and a toolset for conducting policy sprints and extended online policy collaborations. This workshop will help the Open Government NYC group to plan for a proposed larger event in late Spring 2009, at which we hope to combine policy sprints with coding sprints and other open gov goodness. So join us<http://www.meetup.com/opengovnyc/calendar/10234024/>next Tuesday. You too can be a wonk. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CooperationCommons" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CooperationCommons?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
