RELATED LINK:
http://www.newenglandnews.org/gambling
Democracy Online researcher Steven Clift (clift@e-democracy.org) reports on an effort to fuse online and in-person meetings to explore the question of expanding legalized gambling into New Hampshire.He says: "Folks at the University of New Hampshire approached E-Democracy.org with an interesting challenge -- how to leverage 10 in-person local deliberations across New Hampshire into a statewide online conversation."
Clift adds: "We are providing our basic online groups infrastructure and they are providing the facilitator and content. The goal of the overall effort is to summarize diverse public views in a report to Governor Lynch's Study Commission on Expanded Gaming in New Hampshire."
Clift says the "I wonder how this will work" experiment here is first bringing all the in-person folks online (we had an opt-out phase) and then inviting whoever else is interested to join us as well. While lots of conferences have online exchanges after in-person events, I am not aware of any participatory democracy exercises involving everyday citizens that have done this before (there probably are some out there, so tell me about them).
A NEWS RELEASE FROM UNH IS HERE:
http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2010/feb/bm23gambling.cfm
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