From the Office to the Road

When I’m not at work, I’m busy finishing my graduate degree at the University of Alberta. Right now, I’m taking a course on public deliberation and am involved in a really interesting project called the Edmonton Citizen Panel.

The Edmonton Citizen Panel is a pilot project between the City of
Edmonton and the University of Alberta to bring together approximately
50 Edmontonians representing diverse backgrounds to:

* Learn about the City Vision and its ten-year strategic goals.
* Consider how we invest city resources to create the city we
envision
* Offer input to help the City of Edmonton prioritize future
spending in order to meet citizen wants and needs
* Offer their unique individual experiences and insights into city
spending priorities
* Develop recommendations about what they believe Edmonton’s service
priorities should be and how we use our collective resources to achieve
the City’s vision.

City Council has agreed to seriously consider the Citizen Panel recommendations in its 2010-2011 budget planning. For those people who get up early on Saturday morning, the Citizen Panel webcast will begin at 9 a.m. and continue until 10 a.m. It will then begin again at 3 p.m. until 4 p.m. The Panel will meet beginning February 27th for a total of six Saturdays throughout March and April.

http://citizenpanel.jitrjet.com/secure/live/livestream.jsp

This is an opportunity to view the plenary (large group) discussions of the Citizen Panel. Between times, the Citizen Panel will be meeting privately in small group discussion – not available for viewing. Whether or not you’re an Edmontonian, the process is a really unique way of bringing people of diverse backgrounds together in search of common ground and I’d encourage you to keep track of our progress.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Life in Edmonton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.