Purpose and benefits

The site is designed to enable rewarding public engagement on issues related to community development and governance. Open, constructive discourse is practical on many levels. For better and more affordable political outcomes, better tools can help us make better use of the intelligence distributed among the entire population; it is a characteristic of open source environments that ideas come up, are fleshed out quickly, analyzed, and realized or set aside.

Efficiency may be an outcome to community engagement, but is not necessarily its cause.The tools here can be used to help us recognise and respect each other, which is rewarding on a personal level, and can only strengthen the fabric of our community. These positive results can only feed back into clearer and more effective political outcomes.

For the general public, Bowen Island Ourselves can offer

• A platform – not tied to set time and place - to share and clarify ideas
• A platform that supports greater regonition of each other, and co-operation
• An opportunity to see other points of view in a moderated environment
• An opportunity to participate in policy development
• Access to facts and arguments in a clear, reviewable and accountable form
• Tools for forming loose groups on issues that matter
• An accessible, affordable medium for policy development

For Council, Committees, and Municipal Hall, the site can bring:

• Access to expertise that is not always available in regular committees and scheduled meetings
• Access to initiatives and volunteer support, also not tied to set time and place
• Opportunity to interact with an informed public in a focused environment
• Access to enhanced citizen input to policy and decision making
• Low overhead extensions to committees
• A testing ground, providing improved policy due diligence
• Traceable dialogue; no more “This is the first we heard about it!”
• An accessible, affordable medium to assist policy development

“Increased levels of collaboration will result in enhanced service delivery through all operational and policy-making functions of government. This will allow tomorrow’s government to do more with less. But delivering on that promise will take more than good intentions. The Internet’s next generation of online collaborative tools and platforms will be critical to unleashing this potential.

“The days of governments at all levels, state/provincial or local – operating primarily as singular entities are over. Tomorrow’s governments cannot deliver the policy outcomes that society expects if they continue to hold on to yesterday’s monolithic-leadership model.

“More widespread deployment of Web 2.0 applications would help government realize the following three fundamental improvements to policy outcomes:

1. Improve citizen input to policy making
2. Improve interaction among governments
3. Improve policy due diligence."

Quotes pulled from Change your World or the World will Change You: the Future of Collaborative Government and Web 2.0 by Deloitte, www.deloitte.ca