Lyons notes that the most often used tools “for top-down public engagement, since the Obama Administration came to office,” has been crowdstorming or ideation tools like:

• http://uservoice.com/
• http://ideascale.com/
• http://sites.force.com/ideaexchange

When I read the term crowdstorming my brain immediately drew connections to brainstorming and barnstorming–like a large cognitive flying circus being performed overhead.

These tools provide ways to organize and analyze participation allowing the organizers to see voter trending, average vote counts, user karma, and email analytics.

Lyons, a MA Candidate 2011 at the Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability @UBC, also shares two collaboratively developed catalogs of tools that are quite useful on this topic, particularly, the Participate database and the NCDD database that includes case studies of citizen engagement provided.

Finally, Lyons shares a host of examples of online public engagement, including:

• Minneapolis Seward Neighbors Forum Home
• The City of Vancouver’s Talk Green To Us
• The White House Live on Facebook
• Energy Choices: Speak Up for Change on Facebook
• The Maryland Budget Game
• Budget Puzzle:You Fix The Budget from the New York Times
• The Queensland Government’s Future Growth Challenge

These examples range from places to leave a comment to fully interactive simulations.

Hopefully you will find that these crowdstorming and ideation tools and examples inspiring. Lyons also teaches a workshop on this subject at Simon Fraser University which I encourage you to check out or share: DLOG752 http://www.sfu.ca/dialog/study+practice/certificate.html