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Citizens League’s Minnesota Anniversary Project
The MAP 150 Project held a meeting today at Citizens League offices with the journalism students who will working on the project this summer. Left photo, L to R: Hao Sun, Rhonda Loverude, Alan Butterworth, Laurie Stern.
Center photo, L to R: Laura Dusek, General Mills; Kathleen Hansen, University of MN, Erin Sapp, Rhonda Loverude, Hao Sun, Alan Butterworth, Sean Kershaw, Stacy Becker, Laurie Stern, Bill Morris, Decision Resources LTD.
We’ll be including lots of photos here on the MAP 150 Project weblog as activities kick into gear this summer. I’ve learned the importance of blogging photos in my leadership blogging work, as well as with Northfield.org and the civic blogosphere project.
I took the photo on the left of Stacy Becker and Sean Kershaw in Sean’s office a few weeks ago when we first met to discuss my possible involvement in the project. Last week, I took the photo on the right of (L to R) Stacy, Sean, Erin Sapp (Erin Sapp Consulting), and Ann Kirby McGill, Deputy Director of the League. Click to photos to enlarge.
Tomorrow (Tuesday, May 30), I’ll be at the League offices for a MAP 150 Project meeting, which will include the journalism students who will be working on the project this summer. Photos to come!
On the left sidebar is the RSS feed for this weblog. We’re using Feedburner for the feed since it provides additional features over the WordPress feed.
On the right sidebar, we’re aggregating the five most recent blog entry headlines from the Citizens League weblog’s RSS feed. In the coming weeks, those items will increase as we add feeds from the journalism students’ blogs as well as from other sources.
Some of the blog entries will have the comment feature turned on — this one does — and others won’t. It’ll be up to the author to decide whether or not they want to embrace comments for that particular post and if so, for how long.
In addition to blog comment threads, we’ll likely have other online tools for engaging site visitors in conversations. Under consideration: web forums (message boards), both time-limited and ongoing; real-time chat forums; real-time audio forums (eg, Skype conferencing); straw-polls; and whatever else we/you can think of.
So go ahead, attach a comment here to experiment.
On May 11, the 148th anniversary of Minnesota’s statehood, the Star Tribune ran an editorial titled: Sesquicentennial can be a year of renewal: A Citizens League project is showing the way.
As typifies the nonpartisan Citizens League, MAP 150 is being built from the grass roots up. This summer and fall, the League will convene focus groups and survey thousands of Minnesotans to identify their shared needs and concerns. That information then will be sifted through the League’s patented process of broad-based, citizen-driven study, to arrive at proposals for meeting those needs and addressing those concerns.
The Citizens League issued a MAP 150 press release (PDF) earlier this month. 
It includes this quote from Board Chair Tom Horner:
“The starting point for MAP 150 isn’t a policy agenda being advocated by one interest or another. MAP 150’s starting point will be conversations with Minnesotans about the values and goals we share. MAP 150 will focus on what joins us, not where we have differences. MAP 150 isn’t creating a Citizens League agenda. It’s creating a Minnesota agenda.”
The initial results (May, 2006) of the MAP 150 survey are now available in a PDF. The document is also linked from the left sidebar.
The MAP 150 survey may still be completed online.
My company, Wigley and Associates, has been hired by the Citizens League to help with various technologies for the MAP 150 project.
First up: a website up with the WordPress platform.
Second: a web-based project management tool using Basecamp.
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