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
They’ve been a long time coming, but the civil service guidelines for participation online have been published recently.
They’re either pretty light touch, or perhaps just deliberately loosely defined for whatever purpose, but they largely make sense.
They are;
1. Be credible
* Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
2. Be consistent
* Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
3. Be responsive
* When you gain insight, share it… read more
A colleague pointed this out to me today, a new site ‘Politics and the City’, ostensibly run by television presenter June Sarpong. It’s designed to engage women more in the political process by presenting a regular mix of political news and celebrity gossip. It will also feature a range of guest bloggers, celebrities in the main, and the bulk of the main content at the moment seems to… read more
One of our contacts at the European Parliament has set up a Facebook group entitled ‘I’m going to vote in the Euro elections in 2009′ and is looking for interesting and exciting things to do with it to take its membership beyond the current (very respectable) 260-odd and counting.
He’s keen to stress that this is a personal endeavour, not an official European Parliament initiative, but… 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
On Friday we published our latest Opinion Tracker analysis of what people are saying around the internet about the Mayoral elections. To read the full report, check out our internet opinion analysis here.
Quick snippets of insight include:
Big American corporations get a lot of stick for their old school approach to business and communications. The commonly held perception (which is 99% true) is that corporations are still stuck in the broadcast model of communications, where multi-million pound media budgets force messages home. The “don’t talk back” school of communications.
And one of the biggest offenders in the past has been Coca-Cola. So it’s nice to… read more