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
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
I was pleased to read Kablenet’s piece on OGC ‘open[ing] the door for feedback’.
The government’s procurement standards body, the OGC, has launched a supplier feedback service ‘invit[ing] suppliers of public sector goods and services to comment on contentious issues and poor practice in public sector procurement, with the aim of helping the government become a better customer’.
Excellent. Putting aside for a moment the fact that… 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
This post from Seth Godin about the opportunity and need for charities to engage people online is so spot on that all I can add to it is a word of recommendation… so: read it. It’s right. Go!
Link: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/i-gave-at-the-o.html… read more
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
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