Community information should be made accessible to everyone.  There are concerns that having electronic means of sharing and communicating becoming dominant will result in a sort of technological 'elitism'.

One solution is to further use technology, solving the problem by providing the technology in a manner that it is in fact accessible to everyone (ie: doesn't require an expensive device).

Lethbridge is doing 'Plan your city' using discussion forums called 'City Circles' to encourage citizen conversation about their neighborhood and communities.  They should formulate proposals and solutions and these forums would in turn contribute to the city's plan.  The difficulty faced by the initiative was engaging the citizens.

There is also often a timing mismatch between citizens and government, in that many of the opinions don't emerge quickly or early enough in the processes to be properly heard or to move ahead with planning on schedule.  Can technology help speed these processes up and help citizens find issues of concern to them earlier on?

Too often government open houses are presentational style and not enough of a conversation.  The city did hold a long term planning session in a fashion similar to this camp (Vision Edmonton).  It was attended by about 100 people, which while respectable, is hardly a significant subset of any population.  How can technology better enable participation in these kinds of things.

One of the problems felt is the way government communicates opportunities and information to citizens.  Many do not find out about things that would be of interest to them.

Many community leagues do not have websites.  The community itself needs to be more accessible on both traditional and technological channels to reach out to a larger subset of the population.

Youth understand the tools fairly well, but understanding the community and how to be a part of one is more important.  How do we get people to feel like they are part of something bigger.

Some urban design concepts: Walkable_Communities Urban_Villages Suburbs Urban_Sprawl

There are those who oppose the idea of citizens engaging directly in their government, and prefer the status quo.

It's important for community groups, the City and other parties to get information out to citizens.

Once you attend a session or event, you're often opened up to much more of this information stream, but how do you get people to make that initial engagement?

Many government and community websites are poorly organized, and/or lacking in information.

Engagements must be styled appropriately for who you're trying to engage.  Some people come to forums, some to parties, some for food, etc.  Not everyone wants to engage in the same way.

Some groups do use technology such as Facebook to communicate with members, but it is still very difficult to reach out and find those who aren't yet engaged and bring in new participants.

There is more value in getting input from citizens not so much on direct policy decisions, but in vision and direction for urban design (walkability, transit oriented..), rather than extreme specifics (which road to tear up).

Using polls to determine values (density, transit) to determind direction may be better at capturing the desires of the population than direct engagement.  Lethbridge did such a poll (citation needed).

Need to find and communicate examples of good urban design from other cities.  Bring these ideas in the engagement of citizens.

Bring more ideas to the communities and discuss them rather than just fighting on the "not in my neighborhood" level.

Will people invest enough (learning and getting informed) to make good decisions?  How can we accomodate their values and goals, rather than directly relying on them for planning decisions. It might be more useful to have a conversation early in the process to allow citizens to tangibly build out their visions, and then more important find out why they would do things that way to draw realizable conclusions (e.g. more parks).

For example, give people some clay and tell them to imagine and design a neighborhood out of it, then analyze their decisions to determine values.

Is the government properly articulating its desire to include citizen input? How to help citizens feel like their input is being valued and included.

There must be care taken in looking at other cities, as it must be taken into context.  Not everything from another city applies well to the culture and specifics of our city.

The majority of the investment and design of the city is decided and controlled by private developers.  How do we keep them aligned with the public interest.

 Beth Sanders' Spontaneous Poem:  A2 Spontaneous Poem - Urban Design