How Online Civic Engagement Can Increase Public Trust in Government

Online civic engagement has the potential to dramatically improve a government's interactions with its community, and thereby increase public trust – but only if the online engagement augments participation, increases insights and avoids challenges related to the issues of undue influence, transparency, open data, privacy, responsiveness, civility and free speech.

The UC Berkeley spin-out, Peak Democracy Inc was founded in 2007 with the mission of providing online civic engagement services – in ways that increase public trust in government. The company's cloud-based service, called Open Town Hall, has been used by hundreds of government agencies to power about 2,000 online forums that have attracted about half-a-million constituents.

This talk will feature at least a dozen live, case study examples from counties, cities and towns across North America.

Speaker: Michael Cohen, UC Berkeley