CivicEvolution helps you transform your ideas into solutions

Whether you want to influence your community, your elected officials, or your club, you need more than a soundbite idea.

Solution = Idea + Actionable Proposal + Community Support

CivicEvolution's process of structured dialogue leads participants through the steps necessary to develop an actionable proposal, solicit public feedback, and build community support. Within each step participants engage in a process of dialogue, brainstorming, collaboration, and deliberation. Watch this video for more detail.

Introduction to CivicEvolution

Hows the CivicEvolution website works

Getting started with CivicEvolution

2029: Sustainable Future City Project

CivicEvolution has partnered with the City of Geraldton-Greenough in Western Australia for their Sustainable Future City Project. Their mission is to develop a sustainable future city and region plan by and for the community. CivicEvolution is providing tools and processes for engaging citizen participants in deliberative collaboration to develop ideas and proposals for the sustainable community planning project.

The 2029 project including CivicEvolution has been selected for the "short list" in the Reinhard Mohn Prize competition

We will listen to you

When a government agency or decision-maker reaches out to their constituents they are making an implied promise: "We will listen to you." But how can they realistically satisfy their constituents? Nearly everybody thinks public engagement is a good idea, but no one knows how to do it well. Government agencies of all types struggle to find ways to engage their citizens in a constructive and productive manner while protecting themselves from unrealistic and off-topic demands. Clay Shirky's concept of Promise, Bargain, Tool leads us to a solution.

Promise, bargain, process

• Make a plausible promise that you can deliver
• Never make a promise without setting clear expectations for the participants (the bargain)
• Choose the tools and processes that will allow the participants to realistically meet expectations and claim your promise

If you want to engage your constituents constructively in making community policy, ask them to develop and review actionable proposals with demonstrable community support. CivicEvolution is an innovative approach that provides the tools and processes to empower citizens to brainstorm ideas, refine them into actionable proposals, review them and present them to decision makers.

How it works

The public brainstorms ideas. Teams form around promising ideas and develop the ideas by discussing and collaboratively answering a predefined set of questions that structure their work into a detailed, actionable proposal. As illustrated in this diagram, these proposals are the catalyst for constructive and collaborative community engagement between the citizens and the decision makers. The public can read the team proposal questions and answers as it develops and provide feedback to the team. This feedback helps the team develop a better proposal with stronger community support and helps the decision-makers understand the public attitude toward the proposal as well.

Democracy in action

People with ideas that want to be heard now have the opportunity, and responsibility, to earn a hearing - in the court of public opinion and possibly before the decision-makers. Ideas and proposals illustrate their value through the team and public activity they engender. CivicEvolution avoids simplistic, anonymous internet ranking of ideas which is often gamed and can lead to unrealistic expectations for official response to soundbite ideas.

The unique structure and tools of CivicEvolution allow citizens to work together at their own pace and level of commitment, while clearly articulating the burden they bear for developing and promoting their proposals so they can compete in the marketplace of ideas that is democracy.

Our plans

CivicEvolution is pursuing additional sponsored engagements like the Sustainable Future City Project while simultaneously developing a grassroots public utility strategy that allows citizens to start their own proposals, build community support and get their proposals on the agenda. In addition to providing free citizen access to CivicEvolution, we will curate a collection of case studies and best practices. We hope to roll out a limited public version in August of 2010.

Contact us

If you would like to learn more about CivicEvolution, please contact us at info@civicevolution.org

Past CivicEvolution projects

CivicEvolution hosted the Australian Citizens' Online Parliament

The first ever Australian Citizens' Parliament was held February 6-9, 2009 in Canberra, Australia when 150 randomly selected Australians met for 3 days to answer the question: "How can Australia's political system be strengthened to serve us better?"

CivicEvolution designed and hosted an Online Parliament from mid-October to mid-January. Over 300 randomly selected Australians signed up and more than 100 were active through out. The detailed proposals they developed helped form the agenda for the February event. 11 of the 12 proposals developed online and deliberated at the Citizens' Parliament were adopted in their final recommendations to the Prime Minister, Parliament, and the media.

The Citizens' Parliament recevied a Special Recognition Award from the IAP2 in September 2009. Learn more in the video below and visit http://www.citizensparliament.org.au/

CivicEvolution designed and hosted an online engagement for the Countywide Community Forums in King County WA.

Countywide Community Forums is designed to make democracy more user-friendly and to bring the public forum to your kitchen table, neighborhood, and workplace. Over 1800 Citizen Councilors are registered and making their opinion count while building stronger connections to their community.

John Spady, Deputy Councilor Coordinator, approached CivicEvolution to give the citizen participants greater say in the development of the forums. He recently praised CivicEvolution:

Your CivicEvolution environment provided the opportunity for our Citizen Councilors to fashion statements and questions that have contributed to our final Opinionnaire® survey on the topic of Public Safety: Law and Justice. I am happy to recommend your environment to other organizations with a need to involve people at the front-end of a collaborative process. With earlier involvement comes a greater sense of personal investment in the final results.

CivicEvolution designed and hosted an online engagement for the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation in mid-2008

NCDD engaged in an innovative online dialogue at CivicEvolution to explore how can we leverage the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin to make some real progress on some of the major challenges facing the D&D community. Members of the greater NCDD community were invited to join together, using an online platform for dialogue, deliberation, and action planning, to determine how they can make progress on seven major challenges facing the D&D community.

CivicEvolution designed and hosted an 8 week online deliberation assignment for a Participatory Planning class at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.

Ninety-one students formed 16 teams to develop detailed proposals for Curtin University's Sustainable University City project. Students were tasked with developing proposals that address a planning problem or opportunity related to the Sustainable University City concept. Each proposal was required to define a problem or opportunity, consider options for planning a response, evaluate the pros and cons, and plan how to involve the public in deliberations on these options.

Over an 8 week period, 91 students made 2286 comments, brainstormed 1000 ideas, and refined their proposals to include 430 key points.

Contact us

If you would like more info, please email us at info@civicevolution.org