WRITTEN ON May 31st, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Political engagement, What do we want?

John Thakara points out Mass LBP, a promising-looking family of feedback mechanisms in Toronto:

Governments, public sector agencies, and businesses all spend a ton of cash trying to connect with members of the public. They use focus groups, hold meetings, conduct extensive polling, spam citizens with online surveys, and talk endlessly about social software. Their efforts either achieve unusable results, or they ignore them anyway, or both. In Toronto, Peter MacLeod has started a new company, MASS LBP, that takes a new approach. “We like to talk about ‘creating a seat at the table, a hand at the wheel and a turn at the mic’ says Peter, who argues that better, more durable decisions are made when decisions become shared with the people they affect.