[Air-L] Advice on setting up a meaningful research and evaluation advisory group

[Steven Clift]

At E-Democracy.org we about to annouce a major expansion of our inclusive
online community engagement efforts.

We are going deep and working to better document what works (and doesn't)
to expressly share lessons with other communities and move the field so to
speak.

I am interested in your thoughts on two things (at least):

1. What makes a meaningful research and evaluation advisory experience
compelling to you?

We are going to create some sort of panel of experts to advise our use of
metrics, research, and evaluation. We are interested in how we best survey
our participants and make our findings more comparable with other efforts
and past research in the field.

2. What are some good ways to inspire independent academic research on real
life online communities?

We have GBs of online civic dialogue as well as comparative lessons
emergeing across many geographic communities and neighborhoods ripe for
qualitative analysis.

Note our forums list - http://e-democracy.org and specifically in the Twin
Cities http://tcneighbors.org

I look forward to your thoughts.

Thanks,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org