The City of Oakley announced Friday that it will soon begin partnering with Peak Democracy to provide an additional mechanism to communicate with and receive input from the community.
Peak Democracy is a website in the form of an online town hall forum.
According to its mission, Open Town Hall allows governments to maintain control of the public engagement process, focus on feedback from constituents, keep the dialogue civil and legal, and also not overwhelm staff in ways that can frustrate residents.
In addition to monitoring forums for uncivil activity and reconciling problems, Open Town Hall provides a suite of real-time insight and reporting tools — including geographic and demographic analysis. Open Town Hall also supports social media integration, multiple languages, and a range of mobile access on smart devices and simple texting devices.
Per their website, Peak Democracy admits they do not allow multiple comments in a single topic. In their “Town Hall” forum, they limit people to just one comment per topic so one cannot dominate, argue or attack each other.
No timeline as to when Oakley will launch its Peak Democracy page was provided. Since the platform is under the cost of $25,000 the Oakley City Council does not have to approve or discuss the decision by City Manager Bryan Montgomery on the purchase.
Peak Democracy was founded in 2007 and headquartered in Berkeley CA.
7 comments
This is typical of Oakley, claiming they want pubic input and then only limit that input to one comment. What a joke this City is. Has Bryan Montgomery’s finger all over this. Anything to pretend to care what the public wants when it reality its Montgomeryville business as usual.
LOL one comment. Come on Oakley, You can’t fool us, this is not democracy. I could be wrong, but this is a control thing as Oakley has no control what is said no social media or the internet about its staff and council.
That;s one comment per person, not one comment period. Perhaps they’ve been watching some of the boards like this one where one or two posters will do everything they can to “shout” those who don’t agree with them down?
The company that started the comment site is in The People’s Republic of Berkeley; that has to count for something.
Hey, ECT…
Any chance of getting an edit function (SFGate allows 5 minutes for posters to edit)? I meant an apostrophe in the first word above and somehow got a semicolon without catching it before hitting Post.
Anon Too — repost your comment, I’ll delete your original.
We live in Oakley. One comment, huh? I agree. It is a control thing. I’ll leave 1/2 comment.
Actually, Peak Democracy Inc’s Open Town Hall platform enables a topic to be configured so that it allows a single person to post multiple comments – but that’s only used for ideation topics, not survey and poll topics. You can see the numerous ways that topics can be configured by looking at how the platform is being used by over 40 cities in Northern California and hundreds of cities nation-wide.
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