Citizen Engagement

This past Thursday I attended a Public Action thru Civic Engagement (PACE) conference in Peoria on the topic of Authentic Public Participation.  The conference began with an overview of the theories behind public participation from Dr. Anne Udall and Dr. Marty Rozelle.  We learned about the spectrum of public participation that extends from Informing citizens to empowering them and which techniques achieve each level of the spectrum.  We broke into two sessions in the morning and afternoon that enabled us to learn about and directly participate in the techniques.  I participated in the Samoan Circles and Interactive-Decision making technology.  I liked the approach during these breakout sessions to allow participants to learn by doing and ask questions throughout the process in order to anticipate any issues that might arise when replicating the techniques in our communities.  The only unfortunate part of this conference was that it covered seven different techniques, yet each participant could only partake in two of them during the two breakout sessions.  Hopefully I can gain a better understanding of the other techniques from my City of Maricopa colleagues that attend the other breakouts.