Pope Francis: “The great threat in today’s world is the loneliness of hearts oppressed by greed.”

So what does the evidence about citizen engagement say? Particularly in the development world it is common to say that the evidence is “mixed”. It is the type of answer that, even if correct in extremely general terms, does not really help those who are actually designing and implementing citizen engagement reforms.

This is why a new (GPSA-funded) work by Jonathan Fox, “Social Accountability: What does the Evidence Really Say” is a welcome contribution for those working with open government in general and citizen engagement in particular. Rather than a paper, this work is intended as a presentation that summarizes (and disentangles) some of the issues related to citizen engagement.

Before briefly discussing it, some definitional clarification. I am equating “social accountability” with the idea of citizen engagement given Jonathan’s very definition of  social accountability:

“Social accountability strategies try to improve public sector performance by bolstering both citizen…

A few of my clients call it the Look. They direct the Look at someone, not in order to see a person, but because they want a ‘hit’ or a ‘fix,’ a way of escape from pain or boredom or drudgery. Another client uses the term Body Parts. He looks at a woman, and what he sees could be legs, or breasts, or feet. He might occasionally remember something as personal as a voice or a smile, but more often he is focused on the anticipated pleasure of being swept away into a fantasy world where he ‘gets what he wants.’ In various branches of academia over the last 60 years we know the Look as the ‘objectifying gaze,’ and it is a means of exerting control over others. People can be unpredictable and unreliable, but not if we objectify them, not if we break them down into things like…

Lately Jim Harris made a thought provoking post on the Mike2 blog. The post is called A Contrarian’s View of Unstructured Data.

Herein Jim wrote:

“My contrarian’s view of unstructured data is that it is, in large part, gigabytes of gossip and yottabytes of yada yada digitized, rumors and hearsay amplified by the illusion-of-truth effect and succumbing to the perception-is-reality effect until the noise amplifies so much that its static solidifies into a signal.”

Indeed, the sound of social data may be like that. Yesterday I wrote a post called Keep It Real, Stupid. Herein I mentioned an apparently fake quote by Albert Einstein saying:

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.

Today I tried to see how the fake quote was doing on Twitter.

OMG: Going on more than one tweet per minute along with some mutations of the quote saying:

“If…

One wintry day last fall I was going through my Facebook News Feed and came across story after story of God’s miraculous work: God rescued, God provided, God saved, all in seemingly supernatural ways. We’ve all heard those stories of how a cheque comes in the mail for the precise amount of an impending bill that wouldn’t have been paid, or how an unintended schedule change saves a life. I have a few of them myself, stories that talk about God’s power and love revealed in apparently undeniable ways.

I actually like those stories, although more often than not I feel like I’m walking a knife’s edge when I hear them (or even when I tell them), the suspense lying in whether I would let myself believe that God had much to do at all with the ‘miracle.’ People tell these stories in order to affirm or encourage faith, but…

In the fall of 2013, I took a risk and experienced something that profoundly changed me. It was exciting, terrifying, and fueled by adrenaline. No, I did not go skydiving or F1 racing. I attended Startup Weekend.

Here’s What Happened

On November 8th, I attended Startup Weekend Women’s Edition, the first Women’s Edition in Canada. In a nutshell, Startup Weekend is an immersive 54-hour event where participants pitch, form teams, develop, and present an entrepreneurial venture in an adrenaline-saturated blink of an eye. There is a reason why the phrase, “No talk, all action” is the motto of the weekend! Here’s a short explanation of what it’s all about.

Why I Went

As a former teacher who currently works on a district edtech implementation and professional learning team, I have had plenty of opportunities to work with teachers, administrators and students and explore how to apply existing edtech…