A Colorado city pilots a new way of gathering.
This is republished from the National Civic League. Photo via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
Boulder has worked closely with the Center for Democracy Innovation (CDI) since 2023 to better understand how to innovate aspects of their civic infrastructure, particularly how to better engage the public at official public meetings. CDI partnered with Boulder’s Community Engagement department and the City Council Subcommittee on Engagement and a Welcoming Council Environment to undertake a pilot starting with community-engaged research leading into recommendations and implementation of democratic innovation in Boulder’s official public meetings.
CDI conducted semi-structured interviews with various local stakeholders and implemented a civic engagement scorecard at city council meetings. The former involved charting local networks and opportunities to augment community participation, and the latter offered a baseline of public evaluation of existing public meeting formats. The culmination of this research led to a final report that was presented to the community of Boulder in February of 2024.
A core recommendation of that final report was to pilot an official meeting in such a way that inserted two-way dialogue and interaction between the public and elected officials. The recommendation for the insertion of public deliberation was to address public, staff, and council member concerns around contentious public meeting interactions during public comment portions of council meetings. The solution was to host a public study session that involved learning, active listening, and dialogue between the residents and officials, including:
- An atmosphere that leveled power asymmetries by removing the dais and microphone and instead having everyone sit together around a table in council chambers.
- Inviting a total of 20 residents to participate, 10 of whom were invited from groups traditionally less heard from, and 10 randomly selected residents from the general public who showed interest in participating at the meeting.
- A learning component including a plenary presentation on the topic of economic vitality by city staff.
- A series of 5 breakout tables where two officials and randomly assigned members of the public participated in facilitated small group conversations about lived experience around the topic, things to consider moving forward, and possible opportunities.
- Regrouping to share themes and further Q&A, and then a post-event evaluation.
Two of the initial findings of this project—gathered from the scorecard responses prior to the Community and Council Forum—were that members of the public wanted an opportunity to A) feel heard and B) have constructive civil dialogue. Fast forward to the post-evaluation scorecard, and there was an increase on nearly every indicator of the scorecard, including meeting efficiency, sentiments of feeling heard, and opportunities for civil dialogue. Even the council members responded on their own scorecard evaluations that any initial skepticism was transformed into wanting to see this process become a regularly occurring practice.
The community in Boulder has had a lively discussion on this topic. Here are a few local articles on the Forum:
Here’s a recording of the Forum plenary.
For more information about our Better Public Meetings process, please visit our website or contact us at democracyinnovation@ncl.org.
