Rating the Effectiveness of Eight Approaches to Civic Engagement

Code for America has released an Engagement Standard that provides concepts for measuring the quality of new engagement platform technology—not a bad tool to have in the perpetual quest to increase the quality of engagement processes.

1 minute read

December 19, 2015, 7:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Civic Engagement

Cliff / Flickr

Shannon McHarg provides insight into a system for measuring civic engagement as created by Code for America. The volunteer problem solving organization has created an Engagement Standard comprised of five elements: Reach, Channels, Information, Productive Actions, and Feedback Loops.

The eight approaches to civic engagement announced in the headline here and in McHarg's article refers to eight different platforms, which are each easily evaluated by rating according to those five elements. The eight platforms, in order of how the perform according to Code for America's Engagement Standard:

  1. Participatory Budgeting
  2. Regulation Room
  3. Change.org
  4. Brigade
  5. We the people
  6. POPVOX
  7. Twitter
  8. Facebook

McHarg goes platform by platform, showing how each of them rate relative to the five elements.

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