Inside P2

Catherine Rockandel has played a leading role in guiding IAP2 Canada over the past six years, first as a regional chapter leader, then as as Vice President of the national organization and, for the past three years, as President of IAP2 Canada. She sat down recently with Joseph Thornley to talk about her time as the head of IAP2, leading through Covid, how the practice of public participation (p2) has evolved, and how p2 practitioners benefit from participating in IAP2 Canada. Following the conversation, Joe is joined by co-hosts Allison Zupan and Elizabeth Thornley, who discuss the aspects of the conversation that stood out for them A transcript of the interview and our discussion can be found on the Inside P2 podcast website. We welcome your suggestions for topics you'd like covered or questions you'd like answered. Send your questions and suggestions via InsideP2podcast@gmail.com or @InsideP2podcast on X Twitter.

On this bi-weekly episode of Inside PR, Joe Thornley, Martin Waxman, and Gini Dietrich discuss the plumbing of the internet, from Feedburner and its replacements to how marketing automation works in the deep dark areas of the web and how video continues to evolve as we adapt

On the show today, an interview with the Global Chair of the International Association for Public Participation, Kylie Cochrane. IAP2 is a federation of regional IAP2 organizations such as IAP2 USA and IAP2 Canada. Kylie Cochrane is the Chair of the overarching federation. And while we were both at the IAP2 North America Conference in Victoria, she sat down with me to talk about IAP2, its changing structure, major issues in the P2 practice and a look into the future. Our discussion covered: • The change process IAP2 is going through • The areas of greatest activity. • The enhancement of credibility and respect that has been accorded to the practice of public engagement that has resulted from the establishment of the Open Government Partnership • The need for P2 practitioners to evolve our practices and tools to keep up with the interconnected activist groups' sophisticated use of social media and technology

EngagePhase Weekly is the only newsletter that covers the public participation industry in North America and around the world. And today, EngagePhase Editor-in-Chief Tim Bonneman joins Joseph Thornley to talk about what it took to get EngagePhase going, how he covers the industry and what to expect from EngagePhase in the future. Linkworthy Check out these sources that provide context for this week's discussion. Tim Bonnemann on Twitter and LinkedIn EngagePhase IAP2 USA IAP2 Canada IAP2 Australia National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) Engage2Act It's your turn Inside P2 is produced by Joseph Thornley. I'd love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you'd like me to cover in future podcasts and people you'd like to hear from. Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post Join the Inside P2 Facebook Group Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast Email InsideP2Podcast@Gmail.com Subscribe Subscribe in Apple Podcasts Subscribe in Google Play Music Subscribe in Spotify Reviews help others to find this podcast. If you like this podcast, please review Inside P2 on Apple Podcasts. EngagePhase Editor Tim Bonnemann on covering the public participation industry (Inside P2 011) by Joseph Thornley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Integrating real world facilitation with online engagement Rebecca Sutherns, CEO of Sage Solutions, co-hosts this week's podcast. Rebecca shares her insights into the value of facilitated conversations with stakeholder groups and the challenge of facilitation in an era in which people are more focused on the screens of their mobile devices than to the people who may be sitting only feet away. She talks about integrating the richness and value of in-person experiences with online experiences that will reach larger numbers of people. This presents not only the challenge of asking questions to obtain useful responses across media, but also the challenge of interpreting data sets that will vary in both number and richness of data. Let's Talk IAP2 Last September at the IAP2 North American conference in Denver, IAP2 kicked off an examination of its organization and business model. This has been underway at an elite level, driven by a "Change Committee" drawn from North America, Australasia, Indonesia, Southern Africa and Latin America. This week, IAP2 sent an email to members like us inviting us to provide our input on a set of strategic directions that were established by the Change Committee. The intent is to gather member input via the Let's Talk IAP2 website for the next few weeks and then for a consensus decision from national and regional affiliate boards at IAP2 in Victoria. Both Rebecca and I are looking forward to providing our input. However, for me, the fact that IAP2 is consulting members so late in the process, and only consulting members, as opposed to the groups that it is "involving", such as trainers, or empowering (both of those terms are defined in the IAP2 spectrum) elevates my puzzlement at the top-focused nature of IAP2. It is the only membership-based organization that I have participated in that treats members as peripheral to decision-making. That's ironic, when you think about the mission and mandate embodied in the organization's name - the International Association for Public Participation. IAP2 is important to me -- I hope they get it right. Let's Talk IAP2 launched August 8 and runs to August 27. Find out more information at Let's Talk IAP2. Sidewalk goes off the rails? Sidewalk Labs is planning to build a model smart community in Toronto. But their approach to community relations and public participation has undermined trust and raised opposition in the community. Linkworthy Check out these sources that provide context for this week's discussion. International Association for Public Participation Let's Talk IAP2 Sidewalk Toronto scrambles to prepare for public meeting, as criticism mounts, James McLeod Google affiliate's grand ambition runs into Waterfront Toronto's reality, Jennifer Wells Rebecca Sutherns on Twitter Sage Solutions It's your turn Inside P2 is produced by Joseph Thornley. I'd love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you'd like me to cover in future podcasts and people you'd like to hear from. Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post Join the Inside P2 Facebook Group Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast Email InsideP2Podcast@Gmail.com Subscribe Subscribe in Apple Podcasts Subscribe in Google Play Music Subscribe in Spotify Reviews help others to find this podcast. If you like this podcast, please review Inside P2 on Apple Podcasts. Inside P2 009: Nothing About Us Without Us is For Us by Joseph Thornley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Don Lenihan is a Canadian thought leader who has spent several years focusing on public engagement and open government . His 2012 book, Rescuing Policy: The Case for Public Engagement, provides a primer on public engagement, consultation and deliberation. This year, he is publishing a series of three articles examining issues related to open government and public engagement. The first article, co-authored with Tom Pitfield, The Rise of Civil Analytics: How Big Data is About to Explode Policymaking As We Know It, developed the concept of civil analytics as "a holistic approach to data, the tools that can be used to analyze it, and the various people who should be engaged to examine it." The second paper in the series, "What is 'Open Dialogue' and Is It the Answer to 'Post-Fact' Populism?" looks more deeply at open dialogue and deliberation. I think that Don's papers are a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how government and institutions can engage the public in discussions of policies, values and public issues. It's about much more than simply assembling and publishing facts. It requires a recognition of the value of lived experience and the power of narrative and storytelling, as well as a process to ensure transparency, inclusion and a sense of fairness. Don agreed to sit down to discuss his papers with me. Among the things we discussed: Different groups of people coalesce around a concern for open data, open information and open dialogue. Each of these groups has a different set of objectives, interests and skills. We must bring these three groups together to realize the full potential of open government. Consultation is the simplest form of seeking public input. It draws in public views in a variety of forums. However, once the input has been provided, government makes the decision, often in secret, and then informs the public of the decision that has been taken. Open dialogue begins with the government asking the public for its input. However, instead of government deliberating and deciding on its own, it brings a representative group of people to the table to assist it to make decisions, in the open, in a transparent process. An open dialogue process will incorporate three stages: consultation, deliberation, and validation. Everyone gets to speak in the consultation stage. This sets the agenda for deliberation, which takes into account the issues advanced in the first stage. Deliberation will be conducted under a set of rules that everyone agrees to and that will yield an outcome that everyone can live with. And what of elected politicians and government decision makers? If consultation works, don't do deliberation. If government can explain the decisions it made following a consultation and demonstrate that the decisions took into account the consultation input, then this may well suffice. Open dialogue is an effective mechanism to air differences in values and incorporate them into the thinking that contributes to decisions. We need open dialogue and deliberation in an age in which complex problems require tradeoffs that will not be seen as valid if made behind closed doors by a small group of officials. We need a representative group making decisions in a transparent, open and representative way in which the tradeoffs being made are perceived by the group as being fair. Evidence-based decision making must encompass lived experience as well as raw data and facts. Lived experience is conveyed in narratives, which bring facts, values, priorities and our lived experience together in a way that we can share with one another. For complex issues, we need to engage the public through a variety of mechanisms so that they can relate to the narratives being developed. A classic consultation process favours people who are "in the policy business" - business, lobbyists and those familiar with government and the consultation process. They know what government wants and they "talk the policy language." Our first instinct is to educate the public to help them participate in this way. We should approach this differently. We should recognize that the public has different expertise, in priorities, values and the scenario-building about what they want their community to be. The vision that should shape our interpretation of the facts. We should create a narrative space to give citizens a real voice and the opportunity to shape the outcome based on the things they know and have views about. Digital is central to the future of public engagement. However, we have not yet become adept at scaling open dialogue involving deliberation. Today's digital tools do support bringing people into the discussion to shape narratives. We should aim to make the digital tools better at supporting deliberation. We must design processes that show continuity and transparency in moving from the consultation phase through deliberation to decision. This will enable participants to see their views represented and understand how their input was dealt with. The acid test is whether both participants and observers judge that, even if their views did not prevail, they were considered and treated fairly. Is open dialogue an antidote to post-fact populism? It could be, if it is designed to incorporate narrative with facts. Narrative is powerful and moves people. Fact-based narrative would indeed trump fact-free narratives on which contemporary populism often relies. It's your turn Inside P2 is produced by Joseph Thornley. I'd love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you'd like me to cover in future podcasts and people you'd like to hear from. You can contact me in several ways Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post Join the Inside P2 Facebook Group Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast Email InsideP2Podcast@Gmail.com Keep listening. Keep considering what you hear. Keep responding. Subscribe Subscribe in Apple Podcasts Subscribe in Google Play Music Reviews on iTunes help others to find this podcast. If you like this podcast, please review Inside P2 on Apple Podcasts.

IAP2 USA President Leah Jaramillo talks about the IAP2's National Dialogue initiative, its focus and objectives, its origins, where it will happen and its culmination at the IAP2 North American Conference in September. We seem to live in times in which the volume has been turned up and the listening has stopped. In the wake of the US election, opposing camps have built polarized world views based on conflicting arrays of alternative facts. The members of the US chapter of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) experience the disfunction of public discourse on a daily basis in their work promoting and facilitation public engagement with government. Now, IAP2 USA is organizing a National Dialogue among its members and interested community groups to discuss the current environment for public participation. The dialogue will take the form of meetings across the summer culminating in a discussion at the IAP2's North American Conference in Denver in September. In this episode of Inside P2, IAP2 US President Leah Jaramilo talks to Joseph Thornley about this initiative. One more thing I neglected to ask Leah in the interview who had contributed to the development of the concept. She send me a note after our interview to let me now that, "The IAP2 USA Board members who were involved in developing this as a program for national distribution are Kit Cole, Cathy Smith and Wendy Green Lowe. Thanks are also due to IAP2 USA Executive Manager, Amelia Shaw & Staff for all their assistance and to Lewis Michaelson who co-facilitated the pilot event in San Diego with Wendy Green Lowe." Thanks all round to these folks for making this initiative happen. Resources IAP2 USA IAP2 Canada IAP2 North American Conference Download the National Dialogue organizer's guide It's your turn Inside P2 is produced by Joseph Thornley. I'd love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you'd like me to cover in future podcasts and people you'd like to hear from. You can contact me in several ways Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post Join the Inside P2 Facebook Group Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast Email InsideP2Podcast@Gmail.com Keep listening. Keep considering what you hear. Keep responding. Subscribe Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in Google Play Music Reviews on iTunes help others to find this podcast. If you like this podcast, please review Inside P2 on iTunes.

On this week's Inside P2, we talk about the shutdown of open.gov, the opening of the Canada School of Public Service armchair sessions to the general public, the IAP2 North American Conference agenda, and P2 learning opportunities you can participate in. Farewell Open.Gov The news coverage focused on the Trump administration's decision to not publish Whitehouse visitor logs. But what fewer noticed was the announcement that Open.Gov would be shut down. And fewer noticed that open.whitehouse.gov has turned into Whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures. A URL can speak volumes about mindset. Canada School of Public Service opens Armchair session to the general public For those who wonder how public servants are being trained to embrace the culture of open government, we had a chance to peek behind the curtains at the Canada School of Public Service Webcast its armchair session "Open Government Starts with you." Check out the Twitter Moment to get a sense of the discussion. See you in Denver? The IAP2 North American Conference agenda has been announced. We'll profile different sessions and interview presenters in future episodes of Inside P2. Learn P2 online IAP2 USA has announced two new online courses - Choose the Right Tools and Participatory Budgeting. When in Ottawa Learn how to engage with indigenous peoples at the next IAP2 Third Tuesday #3tYOW session with Bob Joseph. It's your turn Inside P2 is produced by Joseph Thornley. I'd love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you'd like me to cover in future podcasts and people you'd like to hear from. You can contact me in several ways Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post. Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast Email InsideP2Podcast@Gmail.com Keep listening. Keep considering what you hear. Keep responding. Subscribe Subscribe in iTunes Reviews on iTunes help others to find this podcast. If you like this podcast, please review Inside P2 on iTunes.

Why the Inside P2 podcast Welcome to Inside P2, the podcast for public participation practitioners hosted by me, Joseph Thornley. Each week I hope to talk to you about best practices, case studies, and research in effective public participation. Sometimes I'll be on my own. Sometimes, I'll have guest hosts. And sometimes, I'll post interviews. The format of the show will include both a discussion of a principal topic or interview along with one or more brief #IP2Noted items, quick hits on things P2 that I've noticed around the web. I'm also hoping to be joined from time to time by guest hosts who have a unique perspective on on P2. So, if you have some insight or experience that you'd like to share and are willing to illustrate it with case studies or original research, I'd love to feature you either as a guest host or as an interviewee. If you're interested, please email me at insidep2podcast@gmail.com or tweet to @insidep2podcast. #IP2Noted Finally, this week's #IP2Noted segment covers: The IAP2 North American Conference is being held September 28-30 in Montreal. I attended this conference in Portland last year - and found it to be the best conference of the year. It's smallish - 250 people - with two full days of speakers with practical experience. I learned a lot last year and I'm looking forward to attending again this year. The early registration fee is in effect now. Check out the conference Website. If you are a public participation practitioner looking for an opportunity to meet other practitioners and learn from them, this conference may be what you are looking for. The Mandarin has launched All Things P, an online hub dedicated to news and insight about public engagement in Australia. The Australians have been at the P2 game for some time. In announcing the launch of All Things P, Mandarin Publisher Tom Burton writes: All Things P recognises the need agencies have to rapidly develop their engagement and campaign management skills. We are bringing together some of Australia's best practitioners in the fields of communications, user and interface design, engagement, clear communications, marketing, campaign design, analytics, brand management, stakeholder management and modern public affairs management. Their insights, from the practical to the strategic, will help build a strong community of practice around public sector engagement. Australia has been a P2 hotspot. So, this site should be useful to anyone interested in P2. It's your turn I'd love to know what you think about the topics in this podcast, topics you'd like me to cover in future podcasts and people you'd like to hear from. You can contact me in several ways Leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post. Tweet to @InsideP2Podcast Email InsideP2Podcast@Gmail.com Keep listening. Keep considering what you hear. Keep responding. Subscribe Subscribe in iTunes Reviews on iTunes help others to find this podcast. If you like this podcast, please review Inside P2 on iTunes.