Comment 64651

By lawrence (registered) - website | Posted June 06, 2011 at 16:54:30

Great article, Adrian. I loved that old Pearl Street bridge when I lived in that area. It was one of the little things that made an area so unique. Of course, that general area of our city is not lacking of those features.

I think we engaged citizens well or gave them the tools to be engaged where the Pan Am Process was concerend. By we I mean RTH and folks like Joey Colemen being the leaders, but The Spec and others got onboard when they realized it was something they had to either finally do or do better.

There are so many public meetings that I would love to attend but as you put it, time is of the essence. Ustream and the likes, go a long way in making it easier and quite a few times I had the Livestrem going on my second monitor. Doesn't help me much in my travels but podcasts could possibly help that - at least getting caught up with particular proceedings.

I was thinking about how to combine the ideas that float around the Cats forum on this site, and on the Save Ivor Wynne site as one common place where citizens and fans can trhow around their ideas. Somewhere that opens it up for all of Canada or North America for that matter, to chime in with their ideas, concerns, what worked for them and what didn't. One singular outlet.

Perhaps an RTH article that is always updated, where the comment section is the live idea-stream and those ideas are periodically placed into the text of the main piece/article that summarizes all the issues and the many ideas that have surfaced. Maybe just point form in the article body with a hyperlink to the context of the comment to avoide duplication/a lot of extra work.

One or two editors/citizen editors could be in charge of monitoring/updating it, with perhaps weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly updates depending on how active the planning is around any particular issue - we don't just have to be talking the stadium here.

Bump up the article often so it's fresh in everyone's mind and isn't lost down the list or off the list of recent articles.

I have done this to an extent on my site but I am not sure a WordPress blog is the best place to manage this kind of data? Should the ideas come flowing in, I am also not sure one person can really handle making sure all ideas are read and brought forth.

As I said in my piece, perhaps if we can test the waters on these ideas of citizen engagement on a large scale project like this one, people will see what a difference their voice, attendance, and involvement can make and we can also learn a great deal about how engaging others and being engaged ourselves and how even the slightest amount of our time can make a difference.

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