This is just a quick post to welcome back some Councils who have renewed their Budget Simulator licenses in the last few weeks.

A tip of the hat to Oldham, Maidstone, Slough, and Suffolk Coastal, who have once again recognised the importance of online outreach and engagement on budgetary issues. Not only does the Budget Simulator use an engaging format for making budget allocation more accessible, but it educates… read more

After finally getting an errant fax machine to work Delib have become the newest member of PEP-NET!

PEP-NET offer an online forum for European-wide e-democracy stakeholders to share ideas, disseminate best practice, and generally learn more about all the different e-participation projects and research that is going on.

Its all very well me describing it, but they do a much better job, so check out http://pep-net.eu/wordpress/

Delib look forward working with… read more

As those who keep up with the Team Rubber blog know, we have just launched a very shiny Ideas Forest and Blog for DIUS at http://ideas.iagreview.org.uk/

This marks an exciting step forward for our Ideas Tree platform, by creating a forest of subjects to add ideas to, tied in with a blog to really facilitate deeper discussion of those ideas.

Personally I think its a thing… read more

Thanks to Ed Mitchell for pointing this one out to us, an interesting event that basically works on a Participatory Budgeting model, but as more of a fun evening of games and debates.

The idea is that the audience for the event get their entrance money for it pooled together, then get to vote on how it’s spent. Unlike PB though, they also get to vote on pretty much… read more

It’s becoming a bit of a mantra round here, but time and again we’re telling clients to use Youtube for their video content, unless they’ve got a genuine reason for not doing (such as wanting to restrict the content to a small group). Not making use of a channel that is a) free and b) has a massive existing user base just seems like utter madness.

Of course, Youtube in a… read more

There’s an enlightening post on the official Google blog which shares some of the data trends from the search engine during last week’s American vice-presidential debate: candidates, questions and queries.

I love this kind of data where people’s intentions are so clear (everybody ’straight talks’ into Google) and present in such large numbers.  I was especially pleased to see this as it’s… read more

It’s been a year in development, and some of you will have heard about it already, but today sees the formal launch of our new e-Consultation and online opinion research platform, Opinion Suite.

Opinion Suite is a new approach to online consultation and opinion research software, and we’re really excited about it. Here’s why;

1. Opinion Suite is open source

We’re getting rid of the idea of license fees or costly restrictions… read more

Had an fun evening out the other week for the leaving do of my former colleague Carol Hayward at Bristol City Council. She’s off to New Zealand now, and despite working in the virtual world where location is more meaningless, will be missed.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be a Bristol City Council do without various suppliers being there alongside people from the council, and it was really interesting to chat to them… read more

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

We’ve just put together an interesting little package for North East Connects, aimed at informing elected members about what e-Demcracy can do for them, and encouraging them to take up some or all of the benefits it can offer.

When we got the brief, it soon became apparent that the key objective in this project was presenting information in a clear, usable and engaging manner. So, we decided to dispense with… read more