Complementary to the “Champions of Participation” report that I mentioned yesterday is a project to identify the principles of public engagement. The authors are leaders in the “dialogue and deliberation community,” organized by the NCDD. Their main audience is the Obama Administration and others who want to help implement the president’s requirements for “transparency, participation, and collaboration.” They begin: “We believe that public engagement involves convening diverse yet representative groups of people to wrestle with information from a variety of viewpoints, in conversations that are well-facilitated, providing direction for their own community activities or public judgments that will be seriously considered by policy-makers and/or their fellow citizens.”

NCDD is open to comments on the draft, but I’m happy to endorse this as is.