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

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

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

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