Every year I help run a course on “e-governance” for the Royal Institute of Public Administration.  The course runs for 2 weeks over the summer, and my class is an assortment of civil servants from an assortment of countries - this year we had guys from Oman, India, Nigeria, Zambia and Ghana.

As part of the course I take the class on a magical mystery tour of e-governance projects across the… 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

We’ve said it before, but online consultation and engagement isn’t just taking offline work and replicating it online. Asking for someone to write you a letter, or print out and post back a pdf document doesn’t mean you’re doing online consultation.

So this site is odd. It’s taken the notion of a letter or large free text response and put it online, but just in the shape of… read more

I wrote a mega-blog late last night about the problems of project measurement and evaluation in e-democracy, but it’s in need of some polishing before being put out for comment.

Odd then, that Whitehall Webby yesterday links to this interesting piece about measuring the impact of social media, wondering if it can really be done. The premise of my blog was that there’s too much… read more