The City of Decatur along with 9 other local governments throughout the US are acting as pilot sites for a program called “Open City Hall”.  The idea behind the project is to provide a way to         increase and diversify citizen engagement in important community issues.  “Open City Hall” will provide feedback through a specially structured internet-based service that will present position statements followed by “Yes/No” questions and an opportunity to comment.

If it works, we would hope it would augment and diversify civil, civic engagement, and more specifically: (a) facilitate easy and convenient participation in community issues, (b) impede a single voice from dominating the public discourse, and (c) improve the efficiency of decisions makers to synthesize large amounts of diverse feedback.

The goals of this Open City Hall Pilot program are to assess the extent to whether this suite of services can:
Assist local governments in addressing important problems with the key stakeholders;
Increase and diversify the amount of public participation on important community issues;
Augment the tools that government leaders and decision makers use to analyze and synthesize the opinions of citizens; and,

Improve the quality of citizen participation and the public’s perception of government-led decision processes.
We will pilot the program for approximately three-months.  There will be a link from www.decaturga.com to the site.  We will be able to get reports that synthesize and collate the results and provide a geographic map of responders.