Looking for Participatory Politicians

This post originally appeared on the Intellitics blog: Looking for Participatory Politicians

We know there are a lot of (online) tools for participation available today, and we find out about more examples of how they are being used almost every day.

About three weeks ago, someone asked me if I knew of any politicians strongly committed to voter participation who “have started to use these techniques sincerely and effectively.” I thought my answer wasn’t good enough (frankly, I couldn’t come up with any examples), so here’s a call for a bit of community research.

Some of the use cases I think would qualify:

• Inform constituents about decisions or votes that have already been made
• Collect constituent feedback with regard to certain policy proposals with the goal of helping the politician make a more well-informed decision
• Collaborate with constituents on crafting a policy proposal
• Allow constituents to decide a certain issue with the politician being committed to carrying out that decision

In essence, any kind of examples of politicians using social media and other online tools to engage their constituents in their decision-making processes is what I’m looking for.

If you have any leads, please leave a comment below, shoot us an email or use hashtags #edem or #opengov on Twitter. Thanks!