News & Comment

Archive for January, 2008

Disability and the internet

Posted by Gez Smith on Jan 31 2008 | Participation

As we've mentioned before, one of the biggest concerns for clients looking to take their work online is whether doing so is exclusionary to some groups. To a degree this misses the point, that if we believe we currently have a democratic deficit in the UK, then current methods are likely to be being exclusionary themselves. But more important than that, anecdotal evidence has suggested that amongst disability groups, the… read more

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Finally a council gets it!

Posted by Gez Smith on Jan 22 2008 | Good examples, Projects and client work, Social media, web 2.0 and other buzzwords

Great e-Democracy work is coming out of Northamptonshire County Council at the moment, along the lines we've been advocating for a while. First of all, they're one of the many clients using our Budget Simulator this year. Nothing unusual with that, it always just works wherever it's used. What is new is that they're promoting it through Facebook alongside more traditional channels, which is having a measurable impact… read more

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Password protected e-consultations – now even worse

Posted by Gez Smith on Jan 21 2008 | Advice, Consultation

It's a perennial theme for this blog perhaps, but last week we saw some online consultation sites that, once again, required you to register and log in before you could take part. As we've said before, unless you've got a really good reason for doing this, you're wasting your time, reducing your participation rates and doing nothing to make your consultation more secure. So it was interesting to
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It’s official – the internet influences politics (in the US at least)

Posted by ChrisQ on Jan 14 2008 | Democracy and government

Some new data from the Pew Research Center puts some numbers around the growing influence of the Internet on political campaigns. None of this is too surprising, but it quantifies what we already know: that the Internet is becoming more important in political campaigns, especially among younger people. Each election, the Internet grows stronger and stronger. This data suggests that in 2008 the Internet may still not be the deciding… read more

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‘Extra bank holiday’ campaign picked up as national ad

Posted by Ben on Jan 10 2008 | Delib news and events

I was more than a little surprised when I saw this on one of the billboards opposite our Bristol office this morning: Thomas Cook billboard: 'vote for a free day. Join us in our campaign for an extra bank holiday'* 'Extra bank holiday'? 'Vote for a free day'? That's our campaign! You may remember our whole 'Bristol Day' campaign from last year but if… read more

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Seth Godin on charity support and online engagement

Posted by Alex on Jan 10 2008 | Consultation

This post from Seth Godin about the opportunity and need for charities to engage people online is so spot on that all I can add to it is a word of recommendation... so: read it. It's right. Go! Link: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/i-gave-at-the-o.html…

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Wikipedia founder embarks on open-sourcing search

Posted by Ben on Jan 08 2008 | Democracy and government

The BBC has an article on Jimmy Wales's new open-source search venture, Wikia Search. It's not really our place to comment on the likely success of this as a web initiative and it's not the technology that particularly caught my attention (Google and others are all working on similar participation-search efforts anyway).  What stood out to me was, again, the ability and willingness of web initiatives to embrace… read more

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China censors YouTube

Posted by ChrisQ on Jan 04 2008 | Democracy and government

We've always advocated YouTube as one of the most effective e-democracy tools around, and it seems that the Chinese government has been listening to us (that's right!) as China has moved to censor and control online video websites under new measures that could block YouTube and other services in China. Under the new regulations that will be in place starting January 31, sites that provide video programming or allow… read more

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