RID is a citizen research / reasoning organization aiming at collecting, curating, and advocating for policies that will improve the lives of our residents.
We strive to help our government make informed decisions, assuming the welfare of the majority of residents is the criteria for a good policy. Our research AND position papers will be sourced / cited and publicly available for any to read.
Facts matter, and it is critical to show your work.
- Advocate for the best outcome for most residents
- Conduct research around policy questions
- Curate research from citizen contributors
- Marshal background research to provide facts and solid arguments before our local government
- Provide web presence that makes research and arguments accessible to decisionmakers
- Citizen-driven: Citizens ask the questions, conduct the research, curate the results, and present before the government
- Provide a point person to present RID point of view during city commission meetings
- Provide advocacy in Facebook comments / other social media venues
- Advocate for RID positions in social media, newspaper op-eds, etc.
- Collect research on specific questions underlying policies being considered, curated topically
- Research should be published via Facebook post, to be accessible
- Formatted FB posts will be curated and included in the website
- Domain Experts - experts on a topic who oversee research creation and curation
- Potential collaborations:
- Connect with universities to broaden our research
- Connect with other local advocacy groups to broaden research and coordinate work
- Organizational activities:
- Conversations prompting and during research is private to the group
- All research published under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, for anyone to read
- Feedback centralized to email / similar to moderate trolling activities
- Provide materials containing web links whenever representing the group in public
- Research presented for veto in the group
- RID Guiding Council can override veto on recommendation of Domain Expert
RID members will perform one or more of the following functions:
- RID Guiding Council - determines research / advocacy strategy for the group, and handles disputes
- Community Management - helps manage the maintenance of our organization by:
- Managing experts of different research topics
- Managing social media presence - eg. Facebook group, etc.
- Managing outreach to other organizations / speakers
- Topic Manager - guides / curates the research in a given topic
- Position Manager - guides / curates the argument marshaling research to a specific government proposal
- Media Promoter - provides our arguments / research on appropriate social media venues (comments, posts, etc.)
- Position Presenter - presents our arguments / research on government proposals at appropriate meetings (via public comment, etc.)
- Research Contributor - Asks research questions, conducts research
- Do we need funding? How will we know when we do?
- How to create Facebook presence?
- Structure
- Content
- Who will maintain it?
- How to conduct private conversations during research phase?
- How to handle content production process / make it accessible?
- How to delegate topic curation / management
- Who will do outreach:
- other groups
- local university
- high schools
- guest speakers?
- How to enable contributors to reference their work from resumes, etc.
- How to train citizens on:
- Research / content production
- Formatting
- Curation
- Social Media engagement
- Direct government engagement
- How to track progress on research / event execution?
- How to track progress on organizational development??
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
