Bega Valley Shire Council launched its latest online consultation yesterday. They are asking their community to talk about introducing smoke free outdoor areas. Council have put two questions to community. First, “do you agree that Council should restrict smoking in outdoor areas” and second, “do you agree with all of areas included in the draft [...]
On a visit to South Australia last week I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing when told that the Government had moved to ban anonymous comments in online forums. This post is possibly old news to some of you (I know Craig Thomler blogged about it a while ago) but I wanted to write [...]
The City of Red Deer, in Alberta Canada, this weeks launched its online community engagement portal, Let’s Talk Red Deer, by asking the community to talk about parks, specifically the the parks that make up its Draft River Valley & Tributaries Park Concept Plan. The City of Red Deer is the second local government Bang [...]
Bankstown City Council (Sydney) yesterday launched its first online community forum as part of the community engagement strategy for its ten year community plan. The Plan will identify the social, environmental, economic and civic leadership issues that are important to the community. These issues will be reflected in Council’s future planning as well as in [...]
The NSW Government has launched a series of forums for the community to have direct input to important issues. First up are discussions related to the Metropolitan Transport Plan and the Health Reforms. The platform is called Shape Your State and it seems likely that all sorts of other key NSW issues will be added [...]
Simon Adcock is the project manager for Lismore City Council. Since taking up the position, he’s been keen to get the community engagement ball rolling using an online system. He’s taken the opportunity of a proposed rate rise to do just that. And in terms of community usage, the consultation has been wildly successful – [...]
One of the foundational principles for setting up Bang the Table was, and remains today, a fundamental belief that decision-making and governance transparency is critical to any successful democracy. While the field of community engagement has a fifty year plus history of considering this question, the advance in internet based technologies is taking the transparency [...]
Legend of international community engagement practice, Dr Wendy Sarkissian, has been kind enough to blog about little old us on her blog, Kitchen Table Sustainability. I am very happy to return the favour and recommend three books Wendy has been working on feverishly over the past two years. All are published by Earthscan, and the [...]
As some of you may be aware, Bang the Table was subject to intense interest from the NSW media over recent weeks. This followed a security lapse that allowed the early release of elements of the NSW Metro Transport plan. Given there has been a lot of interest in this event, we have taken the [...]