Social Capital Review aims to cover the world of public engagement, collaboration in public spheres. We’ll look at how public bodies are dealing with their publics, and vice versa. We’ll be trying to keep an eye out for best practices, Government 2.0, and the real world – where citizen participants have limited time and want to feel their engagement is actually making a difference.

We hope you’ll join the many conversations here at the blog, and add your comments. Civil disagreement and full, open dialog is always welcome: we’d like to hear any and all insights you’d like to share on the topics of our articles. Are we getting it right, missing something, or just plain wrong?

Beyond adding comments to our blog, we’d welcome your suggestions and article submissions. What’s a good story idea? Is there an event or a public engagement effort we should know about? Do you have a story about community-building (and we define that term broadly) that you’d like to tip us off to, or share directly with our readers?

Article submissions are welcome: straight news, features, analysis or opinion. Length: anywhere from 250 to 750 words. Links encouraged, using standard HTML. Please send your submissions as plain text file attachment to this blog’s editor Matt Rosenberg: mattr@ddir.com

This blog stands on its own, but as part of its mission to cover public engagement, follows and reports on an important project based in King County, Washington called Countywide Community Forums, or CCF. If you live in King County and aren’t yet a “citizen councilor,” please register here. All data is kept confidential, and you’ll be notified when new “rounds” of the CCF process are unfolding, so you can specifically commit – at the user-friendly Web site – to attend or host a small meeting on King County policy issues. After a calm, considered discussion with your peers, you fill out an “Opinionnaire” survey so that your opinion will count, literally, in the final reports presented to the King County Council and King County Executive.