Peak Democracy offers elected officials and governments turn-key services to integrate on-line forums into their repertoire of channels for public participation. No technical knowledge or IT resources are required; all support services are performed by Peak Democracy and hosted on Peak Democracy servers.

Open Town Hall enables individual elected officials to host their own on-line forums on www.OpenTownHall.com. There they post topics and relevant background information in order to get feedback from their constituents. Open Town Hall also enables elected officials to synthesize and analyze the feedback in ways that are not readily available using conventional public comment processes (such as email or the public comment process in town council meetings).

Open City Hall enables governments to augment their official public comment process with a public comment process on the government's website or on www.OpenCityHall.com. In both cases, the forum is physically hosted on Peak Democracy servers and requires no bandwidth from the government servers. Governments can use this service for public comment on any topics of interest to the community including topics that are formally agendized at their official city council meetings. Peak Democracy offers many features to help analyze and synthesize large amounts of feedback, as well as reporting tools to enter the on-line public comment process into the public record and archive it on the web.

Adding New Opportunities for Participation

Open Town Hall and Open City Hall aren't intended to replace conventional ways that governments interact with their constituents (e.g., via community meetings). Instead, these services augment and integrate with traditional approaches by increasing, diversifying and synthesizing feedback.

Likewise, Open Town Hall and Open City Hall aren't intended to subsume representative democracy with direct democracy; instead they strengthen the insights of elected officials so they can better represent the interests of their constituents and thereby increase public trust in government.

More specifically, Peak Democracy's on-line forums are highly complementary to conventional public comment processes. While the public comment process at a town council meeting is conducive to relatively small numbers of residents with strong views on a particular issue, Peak Democracy's on-line forums are conducive to probing and exposing the views of relatively large numbers of residents with moderate perspectives on that particular issue. (However, Peak Democracy's on-line forums are not discriminatory in that residents with both strong and moderate views can equally participate). Probing and exposing the moderate views of lots of constituents as well as the strong views of a few constituents can lead to better decision making and increased public trust in government.