June 02, 2003
(Updated) Awaiting the Convergence of Young Creatives and Public Involvement
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
Just over the mailing list of the New Leaders Council (part of the City Club of Portland) is a notice about one of the upcoming community focus groups on the Citywide Public Involvement Standards Task Force.
In this case, the event in question is aimed at obtaining input from 14-34 year-olds (you can view the invitation from the New Leaders Council) on ways in which the city can improve its processes and procedures for public involvement.
I've been following the Task Force on and off since its inception, but this particular focus group puts me in mind of the April panel discussion on "Portland's Creative Class" (see here, here, here, and here) and the brief conversation there about "young creatives" and political involvement.
So what we have here is the chance for two concerns I've been tracking here -- public involvement and young creatives -- to converge. It would no doubt be interesting and productive if some of the participants in that April panel were to attend this upcoming focus group.
Continuing the theme that "this town is too damn small" (and stealing a line from the New Bad Things) this upcoming focus group will be facilitated by Jake Oken-Berg, who in addition to being the youth representative on the city Task Force is also part of the New Progressive Network, whose recent event I also covered here recently.
If you're interested in attending this focus group and helping to converge young creatives and public involvement, be at the Lovejoy Room of City Hall (1221 SW 4th Avenue) at 6:00 PM on Wednesday, June 11.
An entire series of such focus groups, each intended to explore public involvement issues with different segments of the Portland community, begins in earnest this month.
While I have the entire list in an email, I am waiting to see if the Office of Neighborhood Involvement will post the full list to the Web for easier reference. Bizarrely, considering it's a Task Force about public involvement, none of this sort of material has been showing up anywhere on city websites, at least so far as I've been able to determine.
Update
Just received the following from Brian Hoop at the Office of Neighborhood Involvement:
The city is rolling out a new database driven web site next Monday that will make it much easier to create interactive calendars which we intend to start using in July or August.
That usage isn't quite soon enough to cover all the focus groups coming up this month, but at least things will be coming together in this regard over the Summer.
Meanwhile, I will soon have an events calendar of sorts (hosted offsite) for events related to coverage here. Items listed there won't necessarily be events I'll be able to get to (although some of them will be for sure), but at least I'll have a place to put some of these items myself.
For now, here is a pdf of the focus group schedule.