We recently set up our Google+ page and plan to start using Google’s video hang-out feature for product demos soon.

In the meantime, feel free to circle us. Thanks!

Just a quick note to let you know that Zilino will be in Austin, TX for SXSW ‘11.  We have made good progress over the past few months and are ready to run some projects. A number of meetings with potential clients are already being scheduled. Should get quite interesting.

If you’d like to meet, just look us up!

We just added Zilino to the collection of online tools for participation on ParticipateDB.

About ParticipateDB:

ParticipateDB is a collaborative catalogue for online tools for participation (often referred to as tools for web-based engagement, online participation, e-participation, e-consultation, online dialogue, online deliberation etc.).

The site aims to build a comprehensive guide to the many online tools for public participation and related forms of citizen engagement — large and small, commercial and open source, mature and experimental — as well as the context in which they are being applied.

Going forward, we will add projects, case studies and other references over there.

One challenge with public participation today is the fact that issues often tend to get fairly complex, even at the local level. In order for participants to be able to lead an informed discussion, they need to have a minimum understanding of the topics at hand.

To help achieve this goal, it has traditionally been the convener’s responsibility to provide the participants with “complete, unbiased information”.

Our alpha version already supports this basic requirement. A resource library allows the facilitator to share links to relevant online documents and websites and provide some context where needed.

Over time, we want to make information sharing and learning on Zilino a lot more collaborative and a lot more social. Here’s what I wrote back in March of 2009:

We often talk about the obvious shortcomings of e-participation as compared to face-to-face engagement. In this case, however, I see a lot of opportunities how web-based tools could be used to allow the participants to collaboratively improve the quality and completeness of the informational materials provided, in ways that could ultimately strengthen the credibility of the organizer/sponsor or convener organization.

Instead of being strictly a consumer of information, the new participant takes on additional roles such as researcher, editor, curator etc. in ways that help educate the group as a whole.

One of the first features we’re working on with Zilino is to give the facilitator the ability to break up large groups of participants into smaller units (let’s call them tables for now) and have the participants at these tables work on a specific topic or task for a certain period of time.

I leave the scientific details for another day, but most practitioners would agree that as a general rule meaningful conversation can only be experienced in small groups of anywhere between two and maybe twelve people (if that many).

Our prototype already supports this requirement, albeit a bit crudely. The table size is fixed (roughly ten participants fit at each table) and participants get randomly assigned. The table conversation takes place in the form of a non-threaded comment stream (asynchronous). Towards the end of the dialogue phase, table participants are asked to write up a brief summary of what they talked about.

While table conversations are by default kept private for now (participants only have access to the one table they have been assigned), their summaries are shared with the larger group.

Here are the parameters that currently make up our table conversations:

• Table size (number of participants)
• Duration (time between start and end date)
• Assembly mode (the algorithm by which participants are assigned to their tables)
• Table privacy (which elements — the list of table participants, the actual table discussion, the summary etc. — can be seen by whom?)
• Discussion format
• Summary format

To keep things simple during the prototype phase, most parameters are set by default and cannot be changed. Over time, however, we plan to give the facilitator more options in order to allow her to create a variety of small-group dialogue formats depending on the project requirements. As mentioned in our previous post, it would be really interesting if small groups could be assembled not just randomly but based on certain demographic information. Or maybe experiment with different table sizes and allow the participants to choose their tables based on interest. And for extended consultations, what about bringing the same small group together several times over the course of the project?

Those are just a few of the ideas we want to explore in the coming months.

What do you think? Does small-group dialogue matter for online consultations to be successful? What are the key ingredients we should include on Zilino?

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).