Here is our strategic direction for the next two years as adopted at our November Board meeting.
2013-2015 Strategic Plan
Mission
Harness the power of online tools to support participation in public life, strengthen communities, and build democracy.
Goal 1 – Inclusive Engagement: Strengthen, broaden, and stimulate diverse engagement through effective, meaningful, and informed online discussion and exchange on public issues
- Strategy 1.1: Actively engage people from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and less-represented groups to raise unique community voices, as well as increase listening, understanding, respect, and civility among all
- Strategy 1.2: Strategically expand the number and geographic distribution of local online groups (e.g., Neighbors Forums, Issues Forums) and next generation online engagement opportunities
- Strategy 1.3: Improve effectiveness, reach, and sustainability of civic online engagement and social media activities
Goal 2 – Active Citizenship: Empower people through interactions, experiences, and online skills to have an impact on their communities and governments
- Strategy 2.1: Build capacity of people to participate in more effective ways
- Strategy 2.2: Collaborate with other organizations that bring people together around issues and places
- Strategy 2.3: Create face-to-face opportunities for people to collaborate in addition to online platforms
- Strategy 2.4: Increase the use and relevance of information resources about governance, elections, the media, and public affairs to help address public challenges
Goal 3 – Effective Practices and Tools: Develop, leverage, and disseminate online practices and tools from around the world to promote engagement and active citizenship
- Strategy 3.1: Collect, curate, and disseminate relevant effective practices
- Strategy 3.2: Help practitioners, volunteers, and organizations make use of effective e-democracy practices, tools, and lessons
- Strategy 3.3: Create and implement metrics and evaluation tools for all our projects and share results
- Strategy 3.4: Provide education and training for local leaders and community members on online engagement and public transparency, and provide strategies, models, and tools
- Strategy 3.5: Use open source tools to the greatest extent possible and work to ensure that major investments in our primary software platforms are released under common open source licenses