Community engagement : exploring a relational approach to consultation and collaborative practice in Australia

Community engagement is increasingly being employed by Australian organizations as a key strategy to incorporate representative community opinions into decision-making. This trend is reflected by Australian local and state governments legislating for community consultation in major infrastructure projects and the increasing role of public relations practitioners to manage these programs. This study explores community engagement founded on relational theory and proposed a typology of engagement employing a relational framework. An exploratory study of 20 Australian infrastructure projects with a mandatory consultation component is analyzed applying this framework. Results indicate little discrimination between the terms engagement, consultation, and participation; however, a range of tactics supported both collaborative and advocacy approaches. The implications for adopting a relational framework for community engagement programs are discussed.

Dismantling worker categories: the primary duty of care, and worker consultation, participation and representation, in the model Work Health and Safety Bill 2009

Late in 2009, the Australian Workplace Relations Ministers' Council endorsed the model Work Health and Safety Bill 2009, which is to be adopted by all Australian governments (federal, state and territory) from 01 January 2012. This paper describes and analyses two key sets of provisions in this model legislation. The first establishes a 'primary' duty of care imposed not on 'employers' but on persons conducting a business or undertaking, and owed to all kinds of workers engaged, directed or influenced by the person conducting the business or undertaking. The second encompasses broad duties on all persons conducting a business or undertaking to consult with workers who carry out work for the business or undertaking and who are directly affected by a work health and safety issue, and to facilitate the election of health and safety representatives representing all workers who carry out work for the business or undertaking. These provisions arguably make a significant contribution to solving a problem faced by occupational safety and health regulators around the world – modifying regulation to accommodate all forms of precarious work.

Women's participation in the Australian Digital Content Industry : initial case study findings

An exploratory case study which seeks to understand better the problem of low participation rates of women in Information Communication Technology (ICT) is currently being conducted in Queensland, Australia. Contextualised within the Digital Content Industry (DCI) multimedia and games production sectors, the emphasis is on women employed as interactive content creators rather than as users of the technologies. Initial findings provide rich descriptive insights into the perceptions and experiences of female DCI professionals. Influences on participation such as: existing gender ratios, gender and occupational stereotypes, access into the industry and future parental responsibilities have emerged from the data. Bandura’s (1999) Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is used as a “scaffold” (Walsham, 1995:76) to guide data analysis and assist analytic generalisation of the case study findings. We propose that the lens of human agency and theories such as SCT assist in explaining how influences are manifested and affect women’s agency and ultimately participation in the DCI. The Sphere of Influence conceptual model (Geneve et al, 2008), which emerges from the data and underpinning theory, is proposed as a heuristic framework to further explore influences on women’s participation in the DCI industry context.

Citizen consultation from above and below : the Australian perspective

Citizen engagement and e‐government initiatives in Australia remain somewhat underdeveloped, not least for a number of fundamental structural reasons. Fledgling initiatives can be divided into a number of broad categories, including top‐down government consultation through blogs and similar experimental online sites operated by government departments; bottom‐up NGO‐driven watchdog initiatives such as GetUp!’s Project Democracy site, modelled on projects established in the UK; and a variety of more or less successful attempts by politicians (and their media handlers) to utilise social networking tools to connect with constituents while bypassing the mainstream media. This chapter explores these initiatives, and discusses the varying levels of success which they have found to date.

Participation and e-democracy how to utilize web 2.0 for policy decision-making

This paper investigates in how to utilize ICT and Web 2.0 technologies and e-democracy software for policy decision-making. It introduces a cutting edge decision-making system that integrates the practice of e-petitions, e-consultation, e-rulemaking, e-voting, and proxy voting. The paper demonstrates how under precondition of direct democracy through the use this system the collective intelligence (CI) of a population would be gathered and used throughout the policy process.

2 Hour game jam at SLQ Garage Gamer - Live performance with crowd participation

The 2 hour game jam was performed as part of the State Library of Queensland 'Garage Gamer' series of events, summer 2013, at the SLQ exhibition. An aspect of the exhibition was the series of 'Level Up' game nights. We hosted the first of these - under the auspices of brIGDA, Game On. It was a party - but the focal point of the event was a live streamed 2 hour game jam. Game jams have become popular amongst the game development and design community in recent years, particularly with the growth of the Global Game Jam, a yearly event which brings thousands of game makers together across different sites in different countries. Other established jams take place on-line, for example the Ludum Dare challenge which as been running since 2002. Other challenges follow the same model in more intimate circumstances and it is now common to find institutions and groups holding their own small local game making jams. There are variations around the format, some jams are more competitive than others for example, but a common aspect is the creation of an intense creative crucible centred around team work and ‘accelerated game development’. Works (games) produced during these intense events often display more experimental qualities than those undertaken as commercial projects. In part this is because the typical jam is started with a conceptual design brief, perhaps a single word, or in the case of the specific game jam described in this paper, three words. Teams have to envision the challenge key word/s as a game design using whatever skills and technologies they can and produce a finished working game in the time given. Game jams thus provide design researchers with extraordinary fodder and recent years have also seen a number of projects which seek to illuminate the design process as seen in these events. For example, Gaydos, Harris and Martinez discuss the opportunity of the jam to expose students to principles of design process and design spaces (2011). Rouse muses on the game jam ‘as radical practice’ and a ‘corrective to game creation as it is normally practiced’. His observations about his own experience in a jam emphasise the same artistic endeavour forefronted earlier, where the experience is about creation that is divorced from the instrumental motivations of commercial game design (Rouse 2011) and where the focus is on process over product. Other participants remark on the social milieu of the event as a critical factor and the collaborative opportunity as a rich site to engage participants in design processes (Shin et al, 2012). Shin et al are particularly interested in the notion of the site of the process and the ramifications of participants being in the same location. They applaud the more localized event where there is an emphasis on local participation and collaboration. For other commentators, it is specifically the social experience in the place of the jam is the most important aspect (See Keogh 2011), not the material site but rather the physical embodied experience of ‘being there’ and being part of the event. Participants talk about game jams they have attended in a similar manner to those observations made by Dourish where the experience is layered on top of the physical space of the event (Dourish 2006). It is as if the event has taken on qualities of place where we find echoes of Tuan’s description of a particular site having an aura of history that makes it a very different place, redolent and evocative (Tuan 1977). The 2 hour game jam held during the SLQ Garage Gamer program was all about social experience.

Open-ended art environments motivate participation

In this research we observe the situated, embodied and playful interaction that participants engage in with open-ended interactive artworks. The larger project from which this work derives [28] contributes a methodological model for the evaluation of open-ended interactive artwork that treats each work individually and recognises the importance of the artist intent and the traditions from which the work derives. In this paper, we describe this evolving methodology for evaluating and understanding participation via three case studies of open-ended interactive art installations. This analysis builds an understanding of open-ended free-play non-narrative environments and the affordances these environments enable for participants.

Young people, participation and public space

Young people are major users of public space, White (1990,1998) Loader (1996). * Young people are constructed as ‘problem’ and ‘non citizens’, Brown (1998). * Young people report feeling unconsulted, not part of community life, Measor & Squires (2000), Article 12 (2000), Tyler et al (1998). * Young people and citizenship/participation is a major issue. * Public Space issues affect others also such as the homeless, aged, women, Indigenous people and people of middle eastern appearance.