Open involvement

Open involvement is proposed as a style or standard of community involvement, with the idea of a similar relationship to that between open source and software.

It is intended to be of relevance to two main situations, involvement of ordinary citizens and community groups with


 * 1) government - at any level
 * 2) civil society - any group, network or  organisation

Civil society groups treating others as they would wish to be treated themselves
The more any civil society group pracitices open involvement, the more moral authority it has to advocate similar involvement with government.

Features
Open involvement should include

Open design
The design stage of any project, program or process should be open to involvement

Open to all
Open involvement avoids being tokenistic. Instead it is on-going, valued, meaningful, provides extensive opportunity and is genuinely and extensively influential.

Transparent
As a matter of course all involvement via electronic recording is permanently open, valued and so properly and helpfuly organised.

Open evaluation
Rather than measures of success being foisted upon the community, or worse still simply being ignored, open invovlement gives a primary role to the community in judging how successful a project or programme has been.

Content available for reuse

 * All content, including any design process, is freely avialable for reuse, via some sort of copyleft type licencse.

Implicaitons

 * Some situations, for example involvement between civil society and government about climate change, are likely to be best if there is sufficient openness for continuous dialogue
 * Citizen to citizen communication is the norm rather than the exception
 * Transparency, comprehensiveness and permanance of the electronic record encourages responsibilty over contributions, for example enabling the wisdom of crowds to counteract control freakery from wherever it might come
 * where meetings or gatherings are invovled and there are calls for an agenda, the agenda specifically is open to be influenced by all

Examples

 * this wiki!
 * Wikipedia (?)

Related topics
(to follow)

Related Wikipedia content

 * Co-Design