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21st Century Town Meetings
21st Century Town Meetings combine features of small scale face-to-face discussions with large scale group decision making – combining talking with technology. They tend to be used to bring together large groups of people to discuss local, regional or national policy issues and often garner media attention due to their scale.
Mystery Shopping
Mystery shopping enables services to be tested anonymously. It uses trained volunteers to pose as service users and assess the nature and quality of typical experiences or interactions. Compiling the results of multiple mystery shopper sessions enables on overall picture of the user experience of a specific service.
Citizen Science
Citizen Science is research conducted by amateurs or non-professionals in order to increase public participation in scientific research and raise citizen awareness of particular issues, often relating to the environment. Ordinary people, often without formal training, are enabled to contribute to scientific research in their spare time. The range of involvement varies from people donating idle time on their home computers for use in solving problems to people contributing small bits of data about themselves or their environments.
Local and Global Civic Innovation Tools
Top Tips For Civic Innovation
Don’t throw people in at the deep end
Other approaches can be used to lay the groundwork for civic engagement. If people are already actively involved in their community then they are more likely to want to, and feel able to, engage with decision-makers.
Follow up
Ensure that those you have involved in your processes are kept informed of what progress is (or is not) being made. Even if there is no news, let people know. Follow up is essential for keeping people interested and willing to engage further.
Involve key stakeholders
Ensure you involve your key stakeholders