Portland's 'Vision Vessel'

"What is this thing? Essentially, the Vessel is a mobile recording studio crossbred with a ballot box, commissioned by Portland, Oregon mayor Tom Potter as part of a wide-ranging initiative to reform the city’s vaunted urban-planning process. The city’s “visioning process,” a year-plus-long effort, has made ample use of hoary old citizen-involvement strategies: round-tables, neighborhood meetings, focus groups, questionnaires printed in a Babel of languages. The Vision Vessel, though, is designed to rocket democratic discourse into the podcasting age by fusing racy design and dirt-cheap technology."