Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.
Empowerment is the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities. This enables them to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority. It is the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Empowerment as action refers both to the process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and to recognize and use their resources.
Advocacy is an activity by an individual or group that aims to influence decisions within political, economic, and social institutions. Advocacy includes activities and publications to influence public policy, laws and budgets by using facts, their relationships, the media, and messaging to educate government officials and the public. Advocacy can include many activities that a person or organization undertakes, including media campaigns, public speaking, commissioning and publishing research. Lobbying is a form of advocacy where a direct approach is made to legislators on a specific issue or specific piece of legislation. Research has started to address how advocacy groups in the United States and Canada are using social media to facilitate civic engagement and collective action.
Development communication refers to the use of communication to facilitate social development. Development communication engages stakeholders and policy makers, establishes conducive environments, assesses risks and opportunities and promotes information exchange to create positive social change via sustainable development. Development communication techniques include information dissemination and education, behavior change, social marketing, social mobilization, media advocacy, communication for social change, and community participation.
Program evaluation is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs, particularly about their effectiveness and efficiency. People who regularly uses program evaluation skills and techniques on the job are generally known by the title Program Analyst, while people who's positions combine administrative assistant or secretary duties with program evaluation are generally known by the title Program Assistant, Program Clerk, or Program Associate, positions that in addition add lower-level project management duties go by the title Program Coordinator. In both the public sector and private sector, as well as the voluntary sector, stakeholders often want to know whether the programs they are funding, implementing, voting for, receiving or objecting to are producing the intended effect. While program evaluation first focuses around this definition, important considerations often include how much the program costs per participant, how the program could be improved, whether the program is worthwhile, whether there are better alternatives, if there are unintended outcomes, and whether the program goals are appropriate and useful. Evaluators help to answer these questions, but the best way to answer the questions is for the evaluation to be a joint project between evaluators and stakeholders.
An ally is a person who is associated with another as a helper; a person or group that provides assistance and support in an ongoing effort, activity or struggle. In recent years, the term has been adopted specifically to a person supporting one or more marginalized groups. A straight ally or heterosexual ally is a heterosexual and cisgender person who supports equal civil rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ social movements. Individuals may meet this designation through their actions without actively identifying as an ally.
Youth empowerment is a process where children and young people are encouraged to take charge of their lives. They do this by addressing their situation and then take action in order to improve their access to resources and transform their consciousness through their beliefs, values, and attitudes. Youth empowerment aims to improve quality of life. Youth empowerment is achieved through participation in youth empowerment programs. However scholars argue that children's rights implementation should go beyond learning about formal rights and procedures to give birth to a concrete experience of rights. There are numerous models that youth empowerment programs use that help youth achieve empowerment. A variety of youth empowerment initiatives are underway around the world. These programs can be through non-profit organizations, government organizations, schools or private organizations.
Public awareness of science (PAwS) is everything relating to the awareness, attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole to scientific knowledge and organization. This concept is also known as public understanding of science (PUS), or more recently, public engagement with science and technology (PEST). It is a comparatively new approach to the task of exploring the multitude of relations and linkages science, technology, and innovation have among the general public. While early work in the discipline focused on increasing or augmenting the public's knowledge of scientific topics, in line with the information deficit model of science communication, the deficit model has largely been abandoned by science communication researchers. Instead, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding how the public chooses to use scientific knowledge and on the development of interfaces to mediate between expert and lay understandings of an issue. Newer frameworks of communicating science include the dialogue and the participation models. The dialogue model aims to create spaces for conversations between scientists and non-scientists to occur while the participation model aims to include non-scientists in the process of science.
Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to protect public values or make a change in a community. The goal of civic engagement is to address public concerns and promote the quality of the community.
Data and information visualization is the practice of designing and creating easy-to-communicate and easy-to-understand graphic or visual representation of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and information from a certain domain of expertise with the help of static, dynamic or interactive visual items for a broader audience to help them visually explore and discover, quickly understand, interpret and gain important insights into otherwise difficult-to-identify structures, relationships, correlations, local and global patterns, trends, variations, constancy, clusters, outliers and unusual groupings within data. When intended for the general public to convey a concise version of known, specific information in a clear and engaging manner, it is typically called information graphics.
Public engagement or public participation is a term that has recently been used to describe "the practice of involving members of the public in the agenda-setting, decision-making, and policy-forming activities of organizations/institutions responsible for policy development." It is focused on the participatory actions of the public to aid in policy making based in their values.
Science communication encompasses a wide range of activities that connect science and society. Common goals of science communication include informing non-experts about scientific findings, raising the public awareness of and interest in science, influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors, informing public policy, and engaging with diverse communities to address societal problems. The term “science communication” generally refers to settings in which audiences are not experts on the scientific topic being discussed (outreach), though some authors categorize expert-to-expert communication as a type of science communication. Examples of outreach include science journalism and health communication. Since science has political, moral, and legal implications, science communication can help bridge gaps between different stakeholders in public policy, industry, and civil society.
Civic intelligence is an "intelligence" that is devoted to addressing public or civic issues. The term has been applied to individuals and, more commonly, to collective bodies, like organizations, institutions, or societies. Civic intelligence can be used in politics by groups of people who are trying to achieve a common goal. Social movements and political engagement in history might have been partly involved with collective thinking and civic intelligence. Education, in its multiple forms, has helped some countries to increase political awareness and engagement by amplifying the civic intelligence of collaborative groups. Increasingly, artificial intelligence and social media, modern innovations of society, are being used by many political entities and societies to tackle problems in politics, the economy, and society at large.
The term digital citizen is used with different meanings. According to the definition provided by Karen Mossberger, one of the authors of Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation, digital citizens are "those who use the internet regularly and effectively." In this sense a digital citizen is a person using information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government.
Inclusive management is a pattern of practices by public managers that facilitate the inclusion of public employees, experts, the public, and politicians in collaboratively addressing public problems or concerns of public interest.
Action civics is a modern and alternative form of civics education in the United States. Action civics is an applied civic education process in which participants learn about government by examining issues in their own community and then select a focus issue for action through a process of debate, research the issue and learn advocacy strategies, develop civic skills such as public speaking, formulate a plan, mobilize, educate, then evaluate, and reflect on their experience. Participants' voices are encouraged, valued and incorporated. Participants learn by doing, with a focus on collective action. Action civics can encompass a number of different actions from community service to electoral engagement and from talking about concerns with public officials to creating peer education campaigns.
Global citizenship education (GCED) is a form of civic learning that involves students' active participation in projects that address global issues of a social, political, economic, or environmental nature. The two main elements of GCE are 'global consciousness'; the moral or ethical aspect of global issues, and 'global competencies', or skills meant to enable learners to participate in changing and developing the world. The promotion of GCE was a response by governments and NGOs to the emergence of supranational institution, regional economic blocs, and the development of information and communications technologies. These have all resulted in the emergence of a more globally oriented and collaborative approach to education. GCE addresses themes such as peace and human rights, intercultural understanding, citizenship education, respect for diversity and tolerance, and inclusiveness.
The Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) - is a Georgian non-governmental organization which tends to support the development of an informed and empowered society for democratic governance. IDFI promotes human rights and good governance by raising civic awareness through sound informational reports, research and recommendations; Advocates for initiating & implementing reforms of policies, laws and practices to enhance democratic governance.
The Networks of Mediterranean Youth (2014-2017) was a three-year project implemented by UNESCO and funded by the European Union for young people in the Mediterranean area of Europe.
