Technology offers a way for local government agencies to increase the reach of their public engagement efforts. The Institute for Local Government (ILG), the nonprofit research and education affiliate of the League and the California State Association of Counties, provides local governments with free resources and equipment on loan to enhance public meetings. ILG offers local agencies the use of handheld wireless devices for a process known as keypad polling. Typically these devices are used in a meeting to gather instantaneous responses from individual participants. The small keypads, which resemble a palm-sized calculator or TV remote, transmit each participant's choices to a laptop computer that tabulates the responses and quickly produces an easy-to-read graph of the aggregated data. When combined with dialogue, this technology allows participants to anonymously select or prioritize options and then immediately view the group's collective judgment or the opinions of different subsets of participants.
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