Can you imagine your community without a public park? No. What about the lack of "any time, anywhere" community participation through an active, civil, agenda-setting online forum dedicated to local public issues? Where citizens using their real names raise issues, elected officials read and sometimes respond and topics are picked up by the local media all the time.

While it is hard to imagine something that doesn't exist, we want the answer to also become "no - of course we have a local public space online." This is our goal for all communities and our reality in 8 local communities across Minnesota, England, and as of April 1st in the Canterbury region of New Zealand.

E-Democracy.Org created the world's first election oriented website in 1994. People kept talking on our e-mail forum when the election was over. In 1998, we went local with the Minneapolis Issues Forum. As an all volunteer intiative we spread slowly. Then we were "discovered" by the UK government and imported to England. With a 60 page guidebook, open source GroupServer technology (the "equitable" e-mail list/web forum "holy grail"), informational videos, and new pilot forums interest is growing in our model: http://e-democracy.org/if

WHAT WE NEED:

 

Technology for New Forums - We've focused on solid technology for operational forums - now we need tools that assist our start-up process. This includes a tool that allows people to say, "My name is X, I live here, and I want to participate in my community" that allows us to determine where there is growing interest. As people cluster locally, additional technology would guide the -group- through the steering committee, charter drafting (forum scope), forum manager selection, and the intensive recruitment process we require.

We also want to encourage more investment and developer contributions to the GPL GroupServer tool- http://groupserver.org .

Location