We like the Consultation Institute. Their courses are interesting and they've come from nothing to national prominence in just a few years, all impressive stuff.

But occasionally, when it comes to online consultation, they seem to miss a few tricks. Their newsletter this week is… read more

I'm now out of hospital (thankfully); however, the patient crowd-sourcing website I set up whilst in hospital – as a frustrated patient – is still up and running. helpusimprovekings.org has had mixed success since its launch and we've learnt a huge amount over the time we've been running it so we thought we'd share these learnings. From a practical perspective, the key learnings have been:

• Make it simple to use -

I'm excited by the current interest in both making government data available, and visualising it to help people make deliberative decisions. Jennifer Bell has posted a great set of slides about open government (produced by VisibleGovernment.ca). Visualisation is pretty shiny. Try a search for Government Data Visualisation for example - you'll find plenty of food for thought. I think this is a great way to involve people… read more

Part 2: projects and pragmatism

So in the previous exciting installment, I tried to briefly summarise how the current US administration has taken hold of the principle of participation.  The next part of our conversation was about the work of realising that principle in activity, about the challenges of actually adopting more participation into the process of governance. I'm not gonna pretend to have answers to these; I'm just gonna represent… read more

Take a look at our video about the National Dialogue we ran on Health, IT and Privacy, which asks the question "How should we expand the use of information technology and protect personal privacy to improve health care?". On the eve of the 2008 Presidential Election, citizens and stakeholders from across the US convened to create a vision for the future of America's health, IT and privacy policies. We worked… read more

Interesting story today from the government's Digital Inclusion Task Force, which is looking to get everyone in the UK online by 2012. The primary driver for this seems to be economic, predicting that doing so would save the government £1bn annually.

 

All well and good… read more

One thing government has got quite good at, especially over the last 10 years or so, is collecting data. Measurements of performance, incidents, activity, behaviour, travel, it's all getting logged on a daily basis. Whilst all this data has a primary purpose for the people that collect it, there are of course other uses for it beyond this sphere. … read more

A: A Robot. Simple.  Not my first thought either, and that's why it's great.  Here's a smart way from V-The National Young Volunteers Service to do just that.  It's a website where young people can take control of a robotic arm that is in the Houses of Parliament. The robot arm is equipped with a marker pen and a stack of paper and whatever you type is written out… read more

Chances are, if you're reading this, you're already somewhat sold on the whole idea of the internet and the opportunities it presents for better involving people in decision-making/governance – and that means you almost certainly know and are frustrated by someone who, for whatever reason, doesn't 'get it'. If that's the case, here's a few things from this month that might help change their mind: 1. Seattle suggests correlation between

It's been running for a bit now, but the Knight Foundation has just issued another call for ideas to be submitted to win funding from a pool of up to $5 million. It's always the way with these funding things here at Delib towers, calls come in, and we try to think of something truly new, genuinely never thought of before, before ending up using those ideas with clients rather than… read more