Key Toronto Groups and Web Sites

Citizen Participation: The Key Player

Café Toronto

* * * * * * * * * * This important section is in process * * * * * * * * * *

The Key Players

We will take a bit of time to develop this critical section of the website and the program behind it. For now, let us open with the quick but heart-felt observation that this entire project is a true adventure in active democracy, one that is possible only in a climate of an educated and active citizenry, ready to do what it takes to define and realize the society that they want.

We can safely anticipate that this project is going to see some rather innovative new relationships growing up between individual citizens and their elected representatives, the citizen not only as a passive consumer to whatever it is that the existing institutions and purveyors chose or are able to offer, but also as an active participant and shaper of the city and its arrangements.

This is very much a twenty-first century initiative and it is certain to uncover quite a number of surprises, including some tough challenges. For sure it will at times be rather difficult to keep moving ahead, but the first challenge is to see if we can reach out and start to create the relationships, links and sense of collective action that will be required to get the ball rolling. Once the base has been firmly established, local energies and talents will take over -- which in Toronto are enormous if in nay ways still untapped -- and the process of remedial action and improvement will start to be fully engaged.

The first step for you, the concerned citizen, is to identify your self and start to make your voice heard. You will find here some tools for this, a toolkit that you can be sure will expand considerably as we move on.

The Guestbook and Commentary

This is intended as the first step in this process of bringing you into the project in a way which can start to shape the full process itself.

It should take you about ten minutes to read, ponder and reply to the dozen items inviting your comment. These take the form both of a series of choices wherein you are invited to express your views and evaluations, but also in the several open slots where you are invited to share more lengthy reflections and give us your guidelines and views on the matters under discussion.

Café Toronto

This is the interactive toolbox which is developed here in order to faclitate borad based discssoins, document sharing, bookmarks pointing to projects and sources tahat others whoud know about. All you have to do is sign in and the full toolkit is at your serice.

Specific comments, feedback and views

This site consists of a number of sections which set out information, suggestions and proposals, each of which is placed here to invite comment and clarification. Your comments will be appended in each case, so that the reader will be able to appreciate not only what we as organizers have initially put down on virtual paper to open the dialogue, but also your views and reactions to these.

Please bet in mind that we are not shy, and that we welcome other views and proposals. Indeed, if the Law of Unintended Consequences has its usual way, the final proposals coming out of this collective operation are going to look quite different from those that we started with. And this is because you and others have dug in and made your voices heard.