I am a town planner in Australia with strong interests in the interface between town planners at an institutional, local government level and stakeholder engagement.

In fact, I have have noticed little research has been done in Australia on this topic and intend to complete a research project addressing some issues raised on this page later this year.

Institutional resistance – my personal experience is that planners are reluctant to include the public through use of the internet simply because “anyone can participate.” They often express their anxieties in precisely that way, but rarely seem cognizant that they’ve just contradicted the expressed preference for public participation.

IT ignorance – the webpages you see put up by planning departments are like a history of the internet. Not on webpage I’ve seen has been cutting edge. Alta Planning, for the LA Bike Master Plan, put up a webpage which would be state of the art 7 years ago. LA DOT (not planning on the face of it, but in LA they’ve appropriated many of those responsibilities) put together a webpage at great expense that is almost entirely static, even though dynamic PHP powered pages have been SOP for several years. And planning departments continue to put up huge PDF’s rather than build more wieldy indexable pages with the same content.

BTW – I would say a judicious use of Wikis and SMF forums can solve the participation issues you outline above.

Anyhow – interesting blog, I like much of what you’ve written, and that which I disagree with is meaty enough to be worth thinking about. Keep it up.