Most of you reading will know about the Consultation Institute, and if you don’t, you should. Every other Tuesday they send out a ‘Tuesday Topic’ email to members, a short article with some thoughts, facts and ideas on an issue of relevance to consultation.

Today there was one on ‘The Online Only Pitfall’, how it’s a bad idea to run a consultation only through online mechanisms without any opportunity… read more

They’ve been a long time coming, but the civil service guidelines for participation online have been published recently.

They’re either pretty light touch, or perhaps just deliberately loosely defined for whatever purpose, but they largely make sense.

They are;

1. Be credible
* Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
2. Be consistent
* Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
3. Be responsive
* When you gain insight, share it… read more

A colleague pointed this out to me today, a new site ‘Politics and the City’, ostensibly run by television presenter June Sarpong. It’s designed to engage women more in the political process by presenting a regular mix of political news and celebrity gossip. It will also feature a range of guest bloggers, celebrities in the main, and the bulk of the main content at the moment seems to… read more

We’ve just put together an interesting little package for North East Connects, aimed at informing elected members about what e-Demcracy can do for them, and encouraging them to take up some or all of the benefits it can offer.

When we got the brief, it soon became apparent that the key objective in this project was presenting information in a clear, usable and engaging manner. So, we decided to dispense with… read more

Some of you will have been following this on other blogs anyway, and there are good conversations on them to join in with about all of this if you want, but would be foolish to ignore the news that the government, after a little delay, has finally pulled the plug on the International Centre of Excellence for Local e-Democracy.

A shame in a way, as there is clearly a role for… read more

According to this story, Gordon Brown is going to be launching an online version of Prime Minister’s Question Time In June. It’s an attempt to ‘reconnect with younger voters’ according to the BBC (isn’t everything online described as that now?) and will be a regular event.

It’s going to be run through Youtube, so absolute top marks for going where the people actually are and not reinventing the wheel… read more

It’s been talked about for a while now, but last week saw the launch of ICELE’s new ‘Blog in a Box‘ platform/toolkit.

A follow on from the ‘Read my Day’ project, Blog in a Box is meant to make it really easy for councillors and other local authority figures to put together a blog, get guidance on how to make it work, and have their blog listed… read more

A few months ago now, I was invited to take part in a two day workshop on ‘Designing for Social Justice’ run by Futurelab. It was a really enjoyable set of sessions, bringing together a wide mix of people from different sectors, and showed once again the strength of many minds coming from varying perspectives working together.

The results of the workshop has now been excellently written up, and contains lots… 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