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

Back in the good old days of the internet, just as it was taking off, some people made a bit of cash from buying other companies’ domain names and then selling them back to them at a profit. Eventually a few court cases pretty much put paid to this idea, as people asserted their right to domain names over those that had initially bought them.

But now, with blogging… read more

You may have seen recently the furore over ‘Beacon’, a new application introduced by Facebook. Beacon is a tool which tracks, when you’re signed into Facebook, what you do online and posts it to your Facebook profile. The idea behind it being that people trust what their peers are doing more than advertising messages from big business, and are thus more likely to buy say, a book, if they see… read more

I set up a new blog on wordpress about a week ago, not work related, but a handy opportunity to have more of a play with wordpress. I’ve spent the first week working on it, populating it with content ready for launch, all the usual stuff. As I did so though, something reasonably unexpected happened, I started getting a fair bit of traffic to the site, and even people commenting… read more

Interesting article on the BBC News site about the need for small businesses to get online and get marketing their sites. Not an e-democracy article as such, but the analogy about the need for online marketing is excellent, and very much applicable to the e-democracy world at the moment.

“Unless you have a well recognised brand name you need to have some way for people to find your site.”

“If you haven’t… read more

Spent yesterday at the Consultation Institute’s ‘Technologies for Participation’ conference in Birmingham, and what a marvellous day out it was. I’ve spoken at a good few Consultation Institute events over the past year or two, and this was their first formal venture specifically into our home turf of e-participation.

Lots of interesting speakers at the event: Nick Hewson gave an interesting talk on the market for e-participation at the… read more

It’s taken as a given over here, or at least should be, that when a politician says ‘we need a national debate on X’, generally nothing of the sort happens. Perhaps as a result, we often look to the USA for real national debates, especially in the online sphere.

So this story is a bit of a wake up call, Hilary Clinton fielding soft ball questions planted in

As mentioned before on this blog, I wrote an article for Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging on using blogs as consultation platforms. Whilst the idea of online discussion seems to have taken root in the government sphere, people have unfortunately got stuck on the idea of discussion forums, which actually miss a good number of possibilities and create needless barriers for engagement.

So, we’ve now had a chance… read more

Yesterday we enjoyed a day out at the Headstar e-Democracy conference 2007. This was, I think, the third time we’ve been to this event, and every time it gets better and better. The new venue this year really gave the place a more professional feel, but more interesting than that was the demographics of the delegates.

Perhaps of necessity, this event sort of emerged from the National Project on… read more

At the e-Democracy conference in London on Thursday, there was as ever lots of talk of ‘innovative’ ways of connecting people and government, although pleasingly there was a different mood around this year on the idea, of which more later.

Anyway, came across this lovely website recently that makes the point really well that ‘the medium is not the message, the message is the message’. You can build the most… read more