This post by Tim Bonnemann was originally published on the Intellitics blog on March 19, 2009. It gives a nice preview of the general character we have in mind for Zilino and includes some ideas that are already part of the prototype, which is why we re-post it here.
I feel like sharing a few of the ideas that have accumulated on our wiki over the past couple or so years.
Most of these are related to the hosted e-participation service we’ve been working on, and hopefully some will see the light of day very shortly.
First, though, one general note on what has been driving a lot of our thinking. Public participation can often be fairly dry, especially when it boils down to a public reading exercise where participants are required to work their way through tons of briefing material. And while the work aspect is probably something that’s not entirely avoidable, I believe better efforts need to be made to make participation fun and entertaining and to create a more engaging user experience.
Let’s assume for a second that you’ve already figured out a process that allows you to conveniently split up a larger group into smaller teams, define a certain time frame, and assign specific tasks and deliverables related to the issue at hand that these teams can then collaborate on.
Now, if you also captured some basic demographics (e.g. age or age group) then that would allow you to assemble some teams according to certain demographic criteria. In the case of 1771, the idea is to bring together the fresh views of participants who are still young and foolish (17 years or younger) with the life experience of those wise and of old age (71 years or older) while leaving out everyone in the middle.
The outcomes from a 1771 team dialogue or deliberation could be nicely juxtaposed against those from the other, more randomly assembled ones.
Used in the right context and for the right purpose this could potentially provide quite a bit of community insight (and be entertaining at the same time, depending on how you phrase it).
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