I am proud to live in a city that has a bold vision, relevant for our challenging times. Most people know Vancouver's agenda is to be the greenest city in the world. What you may not know is the civic government also wants to among the most open, collaborative, and community-minded in how it does governing.
And they are willing to try out new ways to get there.
Vancouver's innovative crowdsourcing project – Talk Green To Us, launched this summer. The goals are twofold:
- Share the goals and themes their blue ribbon sustainabilitly panel came up with (education)
- Ask citizens to suggest new ideas, and vote for and comment on others, to help us get there (engagement)
This is, from what I can tell, the first use of an open "idea portal" from a government in Canada (other stories of companies using listening / engagement portals are the original – Dell IdeaStorm, MyStarbucksIdea, and, just for fun, SaraLee's Open Innovation campaign). I've had a small hand in advising their team along the way, and I can report they are really doing everything right, and pushing the bounds of what public participation looks like.
I think it's working for a few reasons. It's built around an inspiring vision (let's be the greenest city), asks a big and relevant question (how to do it???), it's grounded in a physical community (a city) and that place is crawling with a real community of practice (professional and armchair sustainability advocates). They used the User Voice platform, which has been great for them, but there are many others out there, that all seem to do the same thing, so as usual the technology is not the hardest part, by a long shot.
The team behind the project are all social entrepreneurs, working full tilt to make the campaign a success. Far beyond thinking their job was done after building a cool website and running a few ads, they have hosted a dozen or so events with different communities – including one for social media / tech folks on Sep 20 at SAP's offices in Yaletown – are growing the campaign on Facebook and Twitter, and constantly asking others for advice, support, re-tweeting, and help to succeed. Ultimately, they get the digital mantra: listen, learn, adapt – and are constantly adjusting their campaign plan to follow opportunity and flow.
As of this week, they have some strong metrics to show for their efforts:
- almost 500 new ideas submitted
- over 3,000 social media followers, including a very active Facebook page where a lot of "off-site" engagement happens every day
- over 2,000 people reached directly through real-world events (!)
What they need now is more people to go and vote up ideas! Why not take 5 minutes to do that right now? It's open until Oct 9.
Vancouver's not the only example of innovation in social media for public participation and engagement. Next week I'm on a panel with Mary Pat Barry, Communications Director from the City of Edmonton. She has led a neat campaign called Edmonton Stories, which is nicely executed, has harvested hundreds of great stories from citizens, has a strong social media following for a campaign, and seems to have strong engagement metrics in the form of comments and new stories. I'll learn more on lessons learned next week and post an update.
It's great to see cities expirementing with using web values to bring some innovation to the traditionally staid world of community participation campaigns (let's host a public meeting!). The whole "Gov 2.0" movement, which Obama's administration has put the after-burners on, is a welcome trend that will continue to produce some surprises and deepen citizen's engagement in – and ideally the trust we have for – large faceless institutions.
