Civic Engagement Meets the Internet:Palma Joy Strand, Faculty 
 
The City of Omaha recently introduced a new way to hear from the public.  At www.engageomaha.com, citizens can now offer suggestions and make comments online.  The initial focus is budget priorities, but the website is designed to tap public ingenuity and gauge public support on various topics over time.
Engageomaha uses a software platform developed by local business Mindmixer, whose own website features a brief video touting how e-engagement allows civic participation without long and drawn-out public meetings.  The idea is that people who couldn’t or wouldn’t attend meetings can weigh in via the Internet at their convenience.
Now I’ve attended and conducted my share of public meetings, and I see both an up side and a down side to engageomaha.
As to the up side, I’m all for increasing people’s interaction with government and with each other on public issues.  If engageomaha brings voices into the conversation that weren’t there before, that’s a good thing.  Bravo to the City of Omaha (and bravo to Mindmixer)!
The down side is a little less obvious, but it relates to the demographics of Internet users.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently documented  significant demographic disparities in who uses the Internet:

• 80% of Whites compared to 69% of Blacks and 66% of Hispanics
• 90% of 18- to 29-year-olds compared to 46% of 65+-year-olds
• 96% of those making more than $75,000/year compared to 63% of those making less than $30,000/year
• 93% of those with at least a college degree compared to 40% of those with less than a high school degree

These numbers say to me that engageomaha is a great civic engagement approach for young, relatively well-off professionals (who are relatively likely, perhaps, to be White?).  
That is certainly a demographic that we want to hear from!  Public decisions should reflect public sentiment that is as broad-based as possible, and I know from experience that young adults are tough to pull into the civic engagement net.  If this new approach helps reach that group, it’s an exciting step forward.
I also know from experience, though, that civic engagement is not one-size-fits-all.  Some people participate in the standard large-public-meeting-downtown format.  Many do not—some for time reasons and some for other reasons:  Many people, for example, are more forthcoming at a meeting in their neighborhood, in their children’s school, in their faith community, in their first language.  
Similarly, some people will use engageomaha; many won’t.  The down side, then, is that by undertaking engageomaha the City might forget that this is only ONE way to reach out and listen, not the ONLY way.
The core principle of civic engagement, after all, is figuring out how to reach out and listen to ALL the distinct groups that make up our community.  
Oh, and by the way, what is the plan for getting all the different groups in Omaha talking to each other?

Other links:

http://www.pewinternet.org/Trend-Data/Whos-Online.aspx

(image from) http://www.mindmixer.com/

http://www.engageomaha.com

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Palma Strand
Assistant Professor of Law
palmastrand@creighton.edu

Professor Palma Strand has a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Stanford University, a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Strand clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Byron R. White on the United States Supreme Court. She most recently has been an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and previously was an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. Professor Strand was a Hewlett Fellow in Alternative Dispute Resolution and Legal Problem-Solving at the Georgetown University Law Center from 2002-2004. She was also the co-founder and principal of the Arlington Forum, a civic organizing initiative based in Arlington, Virginia, that worked with community institutions to broaden and deepen civic engagement in the area of schools, land use, youth, and government processes generally.