Alexandra Samuel
Vancouver, Canada
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com
http://www.dialoguenetworks.com

Biography:

Alexandra Samuel is the Managing Director of the Dialogue Networks practice at Angus Reid Consultants , a practice specializing in online dialogue and public engagement. Dialogue Networks offers strategic advice, research services and technology implementation services to governments, NGOs and businesses seeking to increase citizen, member and employee participation in dialogues and decision-making. Dialogue Networks works in partnership with Vision Critical to offer Panelogue, a panel-based solution for online consultation and public engagement that offers scaleable workbooks, surveys and online discussion.

Alex’s writing on technology and society has appeared in the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, Business 2.0 and CBC Radio. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where her dissertation examined the phenomenon of hacktivism, or politically motivated computer hacking. Alex blogs at http://blog.angus-reid.com (about online dialogue and civic engagement), http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/blog (about e-democracy, RSS, and other tech-related topics) and http://www.tagsonomy.com (a group blog on tagging).

Alex lives in Vancouver, Canada with husband Rob Cottingham and their daughter, who is almost two but still doesn't have her own web site.

What's a recent movie you've seen and enjoyed and why?

Walk on Water, a really amazing German-Israeli coproduction that worked as a relationship movie, a political film and an action movie. It's the best thing I've seen (or probably read) about German-Jewish relationships and does an amazing job of taking on huge issues like Palestinian-Israeli relations and the Holocaust without being either superficial or heavyhanded. One of those rare movies that seemed completely flawless- great acting, great story, totally unpredictable and ultimately quite profound.

What is "community" and why is it important to you?

Community is the web of relationships that create collective capacity -- a capacity greater than the sum of its parts. I think community is generally important because it grounds our individual identities and gives us (implicitly or explicitly) a sense of who we are and how we want others to see us; a lot of political participation is motivated by the desire to acquire identity by affiliating with a particular community. For me personally, working at the community level offers a way of encouraging people to be more politically engaged -- by offering them online community as an incentive and context for participation -- and also offers the tremendous personal rewards of connecting with people who fundamentally value human relationships and interpersonal connection.

Pick your favorite technology and explain how it
makes the world a better place?

These days I'm evangelizing tagging and social bookmarking tools, which combine knowledge sharing and social networking in interesting and effective ways. (If you're new to the tagging concept, you can look up my article on the subject.

What interests me about tagging is the way it converts individual self-interest into a collective good, but not in a 1:1 way....rather, it takes what is mostly a self-interested motivation ("I'm going to tag this bookmark with the keyword e-democracy so I can find it again") and encourages people to do just a little bit more work for the good of others ("And while I'm at it I'm going to tag it Europe, too, in case other people are looking for European e-democracy sites.") By making it easy for people to do tiny acts for the collective good, social bookmarking and tagging create a habit of acting for the good of others as well as for good of self.

2-3 questions or issues that you hope we'll address at the "Deepening Online Deliberation" meeting?

How can we establish standards for benchmarking/evaluating online deliberation projects, and encourage practitioners/researchers to build standard assessments into their projects and experiments?

How can the ODDC help to aggregate or network the wide range of practitioners and organizations working in the online deliberation, offline deliberation and e-democracy space?