[open-government] Fwd: [CivicAccess-discuss] Announcing Open North, a non-profit to improve democracy

[Jonathan Gray]

FYI


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James McKinney <james at opennorth.ca>
Date: Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 8:43 PM
Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] Announcing Open North, a non-profit to
improve democracy
To: civicaccess-discuss at civicaccess.ca


I’d like to introduce a project I am now pursuing full-time: Open
North, a Canadian non-profit whose mission is to build online tools
for a better democracy. Open North believes good governance requires a
strong democracy and a strong democracy requires an engaged citizenry.
We believe in using the Internet to provide a platform for citizens to
connect with each other and their elected officials, to open the door
to new models of consultation, and to help governments involve
citizens in decision-making. (I’m sure most everyone on this list is
familiar with these ideas.)

Jonathan Brun of Montreal Ouvert and Bernard Rudny of Apathy is Boring
are my co-founders in this initiative. You may have already heard of
some of our projects (http://opennorth.ca/work/), such as the
interactive budget app built for the Montreal borough of Plateau
Mont-Royal.

Many of you are probably familiar with Visible Government, a
non-profit from 2009 with similar goals. The major difference would be
one of focus. Open North concentrates almost exclusively on building
tools to improve government transparency and to support citizen
participation in government.

If you would like to follow Open North’s development, I invite you to
sign-up to our newsletter from our homepage. I will from time-to-time
announce new projects of interest to this list, as well.

http://opennorth.ca
http://nordouvert.ca

Thanks,

James
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-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg