So, we’re happy to welcome our 40th Budget Simulator user, Nottinghamshire County Council, who are going to be going live with theirs in the next couple of weeks. That’s nearly one in ten UK local authorities who have used Budget Simulator to engage, inform and consult their local residents on spending issues.

It’s been fascinating to see how Budget Simulator’s been used in different ways by different organisations over the years, by local authorities from the UK to New Zealand, and by other public services as well such as Police Authorities. Adam wrote a great blog post on three different ways to use Budget Simulator to consult on spending issues a short while back, and we’re also working more now with local authorities around Participatory Budgeting online, such as our work with Bristol City Council recently.

We’ve got some more interesting projects in the pipeline around this area coming up over the next few months, so if you’d like to get in touch about how Budget Simulator could help you engage residents with the difficult spending decisions to be taken soon, then email adam@delib.co.uk or call 0845 638 1848.

It’s sparking real debate at the moment, and we’re pleased to say we’ve been able to open up even more information about the site through a custom Twitter feed we’ve implemented.

So now, not only can you take an RSS feed of the content people are submitting to the site, you can also see how many registered users, ideas, comments, ratings and tags the site has, updated on a regular basis.

At the time of writing we’re just coming up towards 18,000 registered users and have hit over 15,000 ideas submitted.

Keep an eye on the Spending Challenge Twitter feed for updates!

As ever, if you’d like to start your own online dialogue, then you can with your own free Dialogue App.

There’s been a lot of coverage and comment about the site already and I thought it might be useful (and fun) to collect together some of the pieces that have been written about it – from all sides of the debate.  There’s a pile of links below that you can peruse at your leisure.

Above all, I just think it’s really exciting and promising for the future of digital democracy that so many people take such an interest.  As @neillyneil observes in one of my favourite pieces so far, it’s ‘an obvious point but let’s spell it out: online participation in government policy has now moved from the fringes to the mainstream – it’s become the norm, no longer the domain of a handful of early adopters’.  I think that’s a very good thing.

• Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean
• Your Freedom: government asks well but can it answer well?
• Mirror: why isn’t it legal to marry a horse?  Disorder as 6,000 swamp Nick Clegg’s plea for new laws
• BBC Newsnight debate of the exercise (iPlayer)
• Your Freedom: serious or all for show?
• Daily Mail: Clegg’s great law reform turns to farce as people call for murder and marrying horses to be allowed
• The Coalition’s latest pointless scheme
• Your Freedoms, our opportunity
• Telegraph blog: Your Freedom: the Coalition Government proves it is ready to listen
• “Your Freedom” is a failure.  How to make it better
• Guardian: Clegg crowdsourcing site crashes in heavy traffic
• BBC Daily Politics (video): Clive Anderson on Clegg bid to repeal unnecessary laws
• Ban this sort of thing
• Coalition taps into the wisdom of the crowd
• Your Freedom, would you like it?
• Telegraph: Scrap Digital Economy Act, say public
• ‘Your Freedom’ – hit, miss or maybe?
• Crowdsourcing policy?  Politicians do this better than apps

Will probably update this post as more stuff appears.  Shout if you’ve seen something we should include

We’re excited to be working on this project, which really does look like it could be, as Nick Clegg said this morning, ‘the most ambitious online crowd sourcing exercise ever attempted by any British government’.

We’ve been monitoring the server logs, blogs, analytics, Twitter and news all day and, while we’ve done all we can within the time, this is a project that has really caught fire online and has seen unprecedented amounts of traffic so far.

The site’s been doing exactly what it’s supposed to do and collected piles of ideas and comments from a public who seem to be even more eager than was anticipated. There have been more than 2,000 ideas contributed within a day – and at peak, we were seeing 1600 active users at a second.

The traffic – and importantly, not just the traffic but the participation – has been such that the site has sometimes had to slow down to cope with it.  At a couple of points in the day, registration and comments even had to be temporarily disabled to allow users who were in to finish posting their ideas.  The status updates were published officially throughout the day on http://twitter.com/HMGwebstatus, which has been great, as it’s allowed our client to keep people updated throughout the day as events happened.

The site has, in one day, become a genuine place of conversation within the UK, as well as a subject of it: it’s received extensive coverage in the Sun, Telegraph and other newspapers, as well as from bloggers and online commentators.

As I say, we’re still working to make sure this demand, interest and massive appetite for public participation is fully accomodated – and while we wouldn’t necessarily choose to be in the office at 11pm, we’re thrilled that we’re still here precisely because the UK public are getting stuck into the chance to talk directly to their government and each other online about the laws that affect their every day lives.

Roll on tomorrow, and, as Nick Clegg says in his introductory video, a ‘totally new way of making policy, a totally new way of putting you in charge’…

So it’s nice to be able to talk about one project we’re doing at the moment that’s going really well. It’s an e-participatory budgeting pilot with the Bristol Partnership, which we’ve covered here before for those new to it, and it’s going great guns.

In essence, the Partnership had been, and indeed still is, running public meetings to decide what some of the neighbourhood budgets should be spent on across the city. However, they wanted to take that opportunity online, with a view to engaging the participation of more people, and ideally from a younger demographic too.

Results as of ‘half time’ for the project a few weeks ago show that both of these things have been more than achieved. 130 people had registered on the site by that point, and 30 ideas had been submitted, a participation rate that, whilst small in terms of the internet, is substantially larger than participation in offline public meetings held to date. Both figures have grown since this data was published too.

Interestingly, and perhaps as we might have expected, the site hasn’t seen a massive flood from the ‘young people’ (under 18) demographic, as the idea that ‘the internet = young people’ is as much of a myth as it’s always been. That said, the bell curve for age demographics has moved down about 20 years in age compared with attendees at meetings, showing the project has indeed worked to get ‘younger people’ involved.

Location was another thing that the site asked respondents to state, and this has shown a happy clustering of respondents from around the three wards in which the pilot funding will be spent. So people are engaging in their local area, but others are having their say too, just as intended, especially given one of the pilot wards covers the city centre, used by pretty much all Bristolians from time to time.

One final point to note, which may be of especial interest to local authorities moving to a more customer focused approach at the moment. A sizable proportion of the ideas submitted turned out not to need funding after all, and could be got on with more quickly. These ranged from ideas actually being issues that were able to be passed directly on to council officers for action, to users being able to help each other. In one instance, one user suggested it would be good to fund having bus timetables on your mobile phone, and another replied saying that they’d already worked out how to do it, and gave instructions on how to do so!

The council has thus benefitted both from opening another channel for listening to customer feedback and encouraging the wisdom of crowds, in addition to the intended benefits provided by the pilot project itself.

So, the project’s working, the client’s happy, and if you fancy having your say as someone who has ideas for improvements in Bristol, then head over to www.itsmybristol.org and sign up!

The project was based on the Dialogue App platform (albeit a pretty souped-up and customised version), and we’re immensely proud to see the work recognised.  Massive props should go to our friends at NAPA who oversaw and ran the entire project, and to DHS for stepping out and using this open, online approach.

A bit more info about the Intergovernment Solutions Awards:

The 2010 theme for the annual Management of Change conference is 30 Years of Collaboration. We have expanded that concept for the ISA competition to incorporate the three priority areas addressed in the President’s Open Government Initiative – transparency, participation, and collaboration.

A panel of judges, including senior executives from government and industry, reviewed all nominations and selected the  finalists based on the following criteria.

1. Operational Eligibility

2. Executive Summary and Project Description

3. Intergovernmental and Collaborative

4. Transforming the Business and Improving the Operations of Government

5. Advancing Open Government

Win!

Check out the promo poster here:

The brief for Crisis Point was along the lines of “come up with a teaching aid to help citizenship teachers teach European Citizenship more easily and effectively”. So – as always – we wanted to give a bit of Delib’s patented *engagement zing* to the project and came up with the concept of the Crisis Point game – a kind of Hollywood Blockbuster disaster movie meets teacher resource ; – )

Pitched with the line “Europe has reached Crisis Point. A contagious pandemic is spreading fast. Can you make the right decisions to save lives?”, the idea of the game is for school children to play out the roles of a citizen, MEP and European Commissioner to experience how the EU works at first hand – albeit in the context of impending disaster.

Check out some photos of the school teacher packs here:

A big thanks to all the team involved in this, including Craig H, the nice people at Play Nicely and of course our lovely clients Daniel + Vera at the European Parliament.

Council Leader Barbara Janke at the launch of www.itsmybristol.org on Friday

Here’s a fun little project we’ve been doing for Bristol City Council over the last few months. Participatory Budgeting, especially doing it online, is a hot topic at the moment, with lots of conferences, discussion papers and ponderings going on.

True to the sort of form that’s seen them become the UK leader for online participation work though, Bristol have just gone and got on with it.

They’ve set aside £15,000 for the wards of Clifton, Clifton East and Cabot to be allocated for spending via an online discussion. For those that don’t know Bristol, Cabot is basically the city centre, and the two bits of Clifton are up on the hill by the Suspension Bridge and thereabouts. If you want to check out where they are, there’s a handy ward finder here.

To carry out the project, the council’s using our Dialogue App, which will enable people to suggest ideas for what the money should be spent on, and allow others to vote for the ideas they support. Whilst the final decision on spending can’t legally rest with ‘the internet’, the council has committed to stick by the decisions made by participants, so long as they are legal. Vox Populi, Vox Dei then.Top stuff.

One interesting thing about this pilot too, is that the authority is reasonably relaxed about who participates in it. Given that Cabot in particular, being the city centre, is a ward thats used by far more people than live in it, the council just wants to know where people are from when responding, rather than trying to enforce a rule that only residents of those wards can take part, which would in practice be pretty unenforceable anyway.

So, check out the site at www.itsmybristol.org, and read more about it here.

The awards, which are hosted by the U.S. General Services Administration, recognise innovative citizen outreach efforts by government offices. The Quadrennial Homeland Security Review was an initiative by DHS to engage their huge audience of stakeholders and staff, as well as the general public, in providing input on their four year homeland security plan.  As the entry to the Citizen Service Award says:

The National Dialogue on the QHSR was one of the largest, most complex stakeholder consultation efforts that the federal government has undertaken. Rather than set policy internally and implement it in a top-down fashion, DHS undertook the QHSR in a new and innovative way by engaging tens of thousands of stakeholders and soliciting their ideas and comments throughout the process.

Read the whole DHS QHSR entry on the Citizen Service Award blog.

There’s always pride to be had when a project you’ve been involved in is up for formal recognition – but just as exciting to me has been reading the user comments alongside the entry; things like:

It was truly a pleasure to participate in the “Dialogues on the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review”. It was very helpful for us as citizens to be allowed to voice our opinions on the problems we see here in the trenches and provide input on focal points we believe should be addressed.

The format of posting ideas and allowing others to voice their opinions on those ideas was interactive and informative to both our government and its citizens.

In some ways, it’s so simple but it’s still always satisfying when projects work for the client and their end users and people looking for best practice.  Hopefully, each one is also another step towards this kind of success story becoming the norm.