Public Engagement Through Web 2.0

Eric Fredericks • Tuesday October 23, 2007

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation with Dustin Luther of Move.com and Rain City Guide at the annual conference of the California Chapter of the American Planning Association. Last week, I gave a similar presentation for the Caltrans Division of Transportation Planning. The topic: Public Engagement Through Web 2.0. I have uploaded my presentation from the CCAPA Conference in PDF format for download here (2 MB). I will also share the original PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org presentation file upon request.

I really enjoyed giving the presentations, as I had never spoken in public on this particular topic before. I think it is something that I’ll likely continue doing considering the positive feedback we received. Communities and agencies are constantly looking for new ways to reach out to the public. I figured that the Web 2.0 topic would scare many people away, or that we’d only attract a 20-something aged audience. This was not the case. We had several planning directors and heads of private companies in the room. That tells me that agencies and individuals that are not necessarily technology savvy are ready to take the next step in internet public engagement.

Dustin Luther did a fantastic job presenting. He brought a really interesting perspective to the presentation—from the real estate angle—demonstrating how much of an overlap there is between industries when it comes to Web 2.0.

Dustin discussed our presentation in a recent article: social networking around geography . In this article, Dustin brought up a question that came up during our question and answer session— if we set up a blog to communicate to our constituents, how do we reach the 30% or so that do not have access to the internet? I think the easy answer to this question is that blogs and internet public outreach should only comprise one part of your public outreach. In fact, I wouldn’t want to be the agency that only used the internet as its form of outreach… and was consequently sued. They’d probably have a strong case against us. Any public process should have multiple methods of outreach. >>Continue Reading This Article>>