Author Archives: Gez Smith

What Is The Big Society, And What If It Isn’t?

Interesting briefing paper out from the Consultation Institute today on what the Big Society might be, and how the government needs to issue more specifics on it, which reminded me of a point I’ve been pondering for a while. What … Continue reading

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Online Engagement With Youtube

I remember blogging about this sort of thing more than once back in the day, here and here for example, but this story in the e-Government Bulletin has left me really shocked. It’s a no brainer that if you want … Continue reading

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Shiver Me Timbers, It Was Pugwash Time!

I tweeted on the Delib Twitter account last Wednesday that we were about to play the Captain Pugwash theme tune on the development floor here at Delib Towers, and that an explanation would be on the blog soon, so here … Continue reading

Posted in Delib news and events, Democracy and government, How we work | 1 Comment

More Budget Consultation, Budget Dialogues and Participatory Budgeting!

Everyone’s talking about spending and budgets at the moment, changes that are going to affect everyone’s lives. As well as the Government’s Spending Challenge Dialogue being run with our Dialogue App, it’s not surprising that we’re also getting tons of … Continue reading

Posted in Consultation, Democracy and government, Engagement, Projects and client work | 1 Comment

Online engagement – does design matter anymore?

When people buy our apps, we usually spend a while talking with them about designs and the look and feel of the system they want. Generally, people’s needs are pretty light, most likely due to the amount of time we … Continue reading

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Government Spending Challenge Data Opened Up Further

We launched another Dialogue App for UK Central Government last week, this time called the Spending Challenge, which is asking for people’s ideas on public spending and how money might be saved, be it from a small issue or a … Continue reading

Posted in Apps, Conversations, Debate, Democracy and government, Ideas-sharing, Projects and client work, Social media, web 2.0 and other buzzwords | 2 Comments

Local Authorities, Government And Social Media

It’s funny how some ideas stay hidden for a long time, and then get mentioned by separate people in separate places all at the same time isn’t it? This idea’s one of those, and it’s a quick one really. Traditional … Continue reading

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Looking after ‘Your Freedom’ site as it’s strained by intense demand

So at Delib towers, we’re still here, looking after the http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk website we set live earlier today. We’re excited to be working on this project, which really does look like it could be, as Nick Clegg said this morning, ‘the … Continue reading

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Data Security Vs Data Freedom, How Does That Work Then?

It’d be hard to claim that things haven’t moved on in the field of e-participation since we started out all those years ago. People now get what it’s about, realise it’s not just about ‘young people’, and are even getting … Continue reading

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Bristol e-Participatory Budgeting Pilot Working Well

As we’ve mentioned before, we do far more interesting work here at Delib than we can talk about, due to client sensitivities. Even more important though, we rarely get to talk about the results of what we do in terms … Continue reading

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