Austin is great at community engagement, and my personal philosophy is that we should do more engagement in more ways. When this council first took office in early 2015, we had some groundbreaking community engagement exercises and taskforce work, some built around council meetings, and I would love to see more people get engaged. The key is going to where people are and not asking them to come to us. That means going to grocery stores and other places where people routinely are, more
online communication and more solicitation of responses instead of just hosting meetings. Some of the city’s innovative approaches involve knocking on doors, holding online forums, and calling residents to pre-arrange opportunities for them to give telephone feedback during tele-town halls by calling during broadcast meetings. As to parks specifically, we should go where the people are — the parks.