Putting the 'Public' Back in Management: Seven Principles for Planning Meaningful Citizen Engagement
PM. Public Management › Vol. 86 Nbr. 7, August 2004
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Summary
Lukensmeyer describes the principles and tells how AmericaSpeaks staff applied them in designing the 21st Century Town Meeting project in Hamilton County OH, which was part of a larger project called the Community COMPASS that existed in Hamilton County from 2000-2003, where David Krings is the county manager. The project, part of the countywide planning process, clearly demonstrates how a typical public involvement process in a mid-sized county was transformed by careful planning and innovation.
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Putting the 'Public' Back in Management: Seven Principles for Planning Meaningful Citizen Engagement
Increasingly, public administrators are expected (often obligated) to engage citizens in key public decision-making processes. This encouraging trend may well help to reverse the public's growing sense of disconnection from and distrust of government. Yet, as many public administrators are discovering, most traditional public involvement tools fail to meet the demands placed on today's decisionmakers: rapid decision-making cycles, Internet-informed citizens, and increasingly multiethnic, multilingual communities. Without useful tools to meet these challenges, many public managers might fall short of meeting the underlying needs and goals of public engagement.
One of this article's authors, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, founder of AmericaSpeaks, has experienced firsthand the difficulties of accurately gauging and understanding public opinion in our current environment. During Lukensmeyer's term as chief of staff to Ohio Governor Dick Celeste from 1986 to 1991, she began to see that the current governance system was not structured to hear and respond to the concerns of general-interest citizens in a meaningful way. Believing that her experi...See the full content of this document
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