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Health & Fitness

News From Civinomics July 22nd

Robert Singleton, Neighbor

  1. New ‘Listener’ Feature: Closing The Loop of Civic Engagement

  • New Workshop: Regulating Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz

  • New Features And Bug Fixes

    • Find out what's happening in Santa Cruzfor free with the latest updates from Patch.

  • From The Blog: “Are You Receiving Me?” and “Marijuana: A Legal Gray Area”

  • Updates from The Gov 2.0 Space

    • Find out what's happening in Santa Cruzfor free with the latest updates from Patch.


    1. New ‘Listener’ Feature: Closing The Loop of Civic Engagement

    When we created Civinomics, our aim was to provide a space to generate and vote on new ideas while making it easier to learn about and engage with an issue. But this is only the first step in the civic experience. What good are new ideas if they don’t go anywhere?

    Civinomics is proud to introduce our new “listener” feature, which allows members to directly petition their local representatives and thought leaders to be a part of the online civic process.

    Ideally, listeners are experts on a workshop's topic or in a position to take action on a workshop's outcomes. A list of suggested listeners will be displayed prominently on each workshop homepage. Each member can then send a customized email invitation encouraging those listeners to participate. Once a listener has accepted, he or she will automatically be sent a daily email digest of all of the activity taking place within that workshop. Log on and invite your local leaders today!


    2. New Workshop: Regulating Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz

    According to a recent California Supreme Court decision, individual counties and cities may regulate medical marijuana within their borders. This brings up a number of questions about where and how legal grow operations can exist and what limits local residents want in place. Recently, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors moved to re-evaluate the existing regulations, which will be considered during their November session. In the meantime we’ve started the discussion with a workshop titled Regulating Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz. All the ideas and discussions will be shared with our local elected officials, so make your voice count today!


    3. New Features and Bug Fixes

    From the development team comes this update on features implemented since our last newsletter:


    • Listeners feature implemented. Now you can invite your reps to participate in public worksops! See the blog post: Are You Receiving Me?
    • Update to item author display to make bio and role more explicit (per member request)
    • Enhanced Facebook Connect
    • Facebook sharing

    Coming up in the next week or so:

    • More bug fixes, sigh
    • Member image uploads and slideshows
    • Enhanced search functionality

    And from the Dept. of Statistics:

    • As of July 21 Civinomics workshops had a total of 46 listeners, with 29 listener invitations pending. The most invitations sent to any one listener so far is 3.
    • Civinomics members have voted 1,886 times. The idea with the most votes, at 15, is “Agriculture Sustainability — Branding Component” from the workshop Monterey Bay Regional Branding
    • Members have posted 895 comments and 241 ideas.


    4. From The Blog: “Are You Receiving Me?” & “Marijuana: A Legal Gray Area”

    This week, Civinomics CTO Chris Neklason talks about the importance of the new listener feature and why it represents a turning point in the online civic experience in "Are You Receiving Me?" And Amanda Rothbard has contributed a blog summarizing her experience researching medical marijuana in Santa Cruz County. The issue is a legal gray area, with growers unsure of what will become of countywide regulations and hesitant to risk federal prosecution by registering as growers.

    Both can be found here.
    5. Updates from The Gov 2.0 Space

    Last week the White House unveiled its new and improved open data platform, data.gov. This means droves of federal data are now available for use by the private sector, helping to spur innovation and improve government services. The massive amounts of data cover everything from baby names to credit card complaints and national health trends. It’s housed in an easy-to-use online platform. So get to it, fellow civic entrepreneurs!

    The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

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