Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community
CSCW '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Netactivism: How Citizens Use the Internet
Netactivism: How Citizens Use the Internet
Discourse Support Systems for Deliberative Democracy
EGOV '02 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Electronic Government
Building sustainable community information systems: lessons from a digital government project
dg.o '05 Proceedings of the 2005 national conference on Digital government research
Information Polity - Government Information Sharing and Integration: Combining the Social and the Technical. Papers from the 9th International Conference on Digital Government Research (d.g.o.2008)
Public input for municipal policymaking: engagement methods and their impact on trust and confidence
Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference on Public Administration Online: Challenges and Opportunities
Information Polity - Government 2.0: Making Connections between citizens, data and government
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Cyber-optimists anticipate that electronic media will serve as an extensive public space, a virtual agora, that will re-engage the public with politics and the policies that affect everyday life. For three years we were involved in a U.S. National Science Foundation funded project designed to enhance the participation of citizens in government agency rulemaking processes using online public deliberation and Natural Language Processing technologies. Despite a promising approach in an important arena for direct and regular public engagement, the project was met with serious obstacles in trying to secure a partnership with a government agency or interest groups. This led us to consider the policy process literature for insights regarding the obstacles we faced. That literature, a mainstay in the public policy and public administration curriculum in the U.S. and an attempt to capture how policy makers actually make decisions, heavily focuses on institutional actors and their adversarial relationships. Yet, it provides for hardly any role for the public to participate in what ideally should be a democratic process. Important components of the literature imply that institutional actors should discourage direct public engagement. The analysis seeks to clarify leverage points and contexts that could be used to promote online public engagement as a regular component of government processes.