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

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

There’s not a lot that can be said alongside this story, as it just seems so weird. Apparently all forms of online campaigning in elections in Japan are against the law, so all candidates (and by inference presumably political parties generally) are now forbidden from creating new websites or updating existing ones until July 29th.

Read the article for more on this, and wonder at the oddity of… read more

The new Department for Children, Schools and Families are running an e-consultation on the use of physical punishment. The e-consultation system doesn’t seem too bad in the scheme of government e-consultation, there are things that could be improved with it as ever, but at least it’s not just a downloadable pdf masquerading as e-consultation.

More amusing though is the banner from the front page linking to… read more