Keynote: The Myths About Virtual Public Engagement

From the inception of social media and smart phone technology, public involvement practitioners have been encouraging the use of virtual engagement to bring forward the voices of the people that typically don’t engage traditional public meetings. And it worked. Over time we have shown a strong business case that proves more people from minority and disadvantage populations engage when it is easy, accessible, and at their fingertips.

Fast forward to 2020. Public involvement practitioners where prepared more than any other discipline in the transportation industry to deliver our work online. But through the pandemic, we learned a lot about how our approach to virtual public involvement needs to change to a digital first strategy keeping equity at the forefront of our approach.

At this year’s VPET conference Theresa will show how using data and lessons learned through the pandemic can help practitioners leap over the digital divide to implement digital-first community engagement that puts people first in transportation planning and infrastructure development.