I discovered this fascinating local debate site on my Google travels the other day: http://www2.harrogatetoday.co.uk/tesco/tescohome.asp.

There’s all kinds of things to examine and weigh up here, far too many to meaningfully comment on briefly now — the binary nature of the argument, the combination of new and traditional communication methods, the specific features of the site, the central involvement of a media outlet, the matter at hand, the… read more

Following Chris’s post about English Heritage’s ‘Your Place or Mine’ the other week, we were pointed in the direction of a subsequent English Heritage social media project, the aptly-named ‘Our Place’.

‘Our Place’ describes itself as ‘…for people who work in broadening access to heritage. It is an online space where you can network with peers, share and be inspired by project case studies, and… read more

‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ is an extension of Squidoo, a site that lets users collect content on a particular topic from all around the web in one place.  We’re not particularly enamoured with Squidoo itself (to put it politely) but, having first seen it yesterday, I think ‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ looks far simpler, cleaner and with a stronger proposition.  The idea is that you set up two opposing ideas… read more

Over the last few years, e-Democracy has generally focussed on what ‘tools’ you have available for your online work, and far too little on how these tools are actually used.

One interesting discussion I’ve been involved in recently is around the persona that should be adopted when undertaking online activity. It’s not an area that’s really considered much, if at all, but it could be important.

It’s taken as granted that from… read more

Interesting venture here from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, promoting their budget cuts and council performance through Youtube in the form of a brief music video. Read the full media release here.

It’s not consultation as such, but the comments on the video have been left open, and in this case they don’t seem to have been used for genuine debate. Initially, the… read more

I was pleased to read Kablenet’s piece on OGC ‘open[ing] the door for feedback’.

The government’s procurement standards body, the OGC, has launched a supplier feedback service ‘invit[ing] suppliers of public sector goods and services to comment on contentious issues and poor practice in public sector procurement, with the aim of helping the government become a better customer’.

Excellent. Putting aside for a moment the fact that… read more

Big American corporations get a lot of stick for their old school approach to business and communications. The commonly held perception (which is 99% true) is that corporations are still stuck in the broadcast model of communications, where multi-million pound media budgets force messages home. The “don’t talk back” school of communications.

And one of the biggest offenders in the past has been Coca-Cola. So it’s nice to… read more

There’s a lot to spark interest and further discussion in this Kable summary of the New Local Government Network’s paper 21st Century Democracy: e-petitioning and local government.

Leaving aside the debate about e-petitioning as a method in itself, I thought there were two general points made in the paper that were worthy of further consideration…

Firstly, that ‘the paper identifies four key advantages for councils to introduce e-petitioning:

• Widening participation

We may not have given $30 billion away to charity, however Delib and Microsoft have more in common than meets the eye.  Yesterday, Bill Gates was in London giving a speech to the Institute of Directors about the internet, and how it has democratised the world - with things like blogs empowering individuals and helping give people a voice.

It so happened that at the exact same time, I… read more