This has been a great project for many reasons, not least the incredible professionalism and ability of our stateside clients, but I particularly liked the way they described the project:

In late October, just before a critical presidential election, citizens and stakeholders around the nation will join a unique experiment in 21st century democracy. The National Academy of Public Administration, on behalf of the Federal CIO Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration, will host an online national dialogue that demonstrates a fundamentally different approach to the work of government.

This national dialogue will engage a diverse group of voices in tackling one of the key issues confronting the nation’s health care system: How can we use information technology to improve the way patients interact with the healthcare system, while safeguarding their right to privacy? Participants will
have an opportunity to discuss challenges, generate breakthrough ideas, and recommend principles that will be presented to the next Administration.

‘A fundamentally different approach to the work of government’?  ‘An opportunity to discuss challenges, generate breakthrough ideas, and recommend principles that will be presented to the next Administration‘?  Now those are the sorts of exciting, ambitious we like to be able to say about our projects!

NAPA were commissioned to find a topic and method to make this online experiment work; they brought on board all kinds of capable advisers and companies, such as citizen engagement specialists AmericaSpeaks, and, I’m pleased to say, had a look at several different options for the technology supplier before deciding to go with us.

The brief was essentially to gauge the opinion and hear the ideas of stakeholders and the American public around this topic of healthcare, IT and privacy.  Between NAPA’s vision and our recommendations, we decided to build an ‘ideas and comments’ site with social consensus-building add-ons like tagging and rating systems, and to roll out an Opinion Tracker.  The time-limited dialogue has now closed but you can have a look at the site at thenationaldialogue.org.

The results and analysis of the dialogue are currently being put together and turned into a full report but you can have a look at NAPA’s initial round-up slideshow below:

I really can’t overstate how much we enjoyed working on this project, despite a busy studio and tight turnaround time.  Here’s hoping for more, similar opportunities in future.

The chants and screams seemed largely dictated by the presence of TV cameras.  Every time a camera light was switched on the baying crowds erupted on cue with either “Yes we did” or “U - S - A”.

To borrow a cliche the atmosphere really was electric - and given that 90% of thousands of people gathered were under 20, it was clear why Obama won - having successfully mobilised the youth vote.

Whilst out in the US before the election (I was there for a couple of weeks) it was interesting to see US campaigning in action - especially the commercialism of the whole event.  I’ll be posting a couple of more posts on this over the coming week . . .

We’re excited about this new phase as it provides a really simple way for people to take part in the online debate, and also provides a way for users to see what other people think.  As an organisation we’re always keen to 1) create low barriers of entry for debate 2) create conversational debate -  and we think that this latest phase ticks both of these boxes.

It was also great to hear on Radio 4 earlier today that the Care and Support debate is now spreading into wider public discussion, off the back of the Archers’ storyline on old age related social care issues.

To check out the care and support website, click here

In addition we are running a workshop entitled “Open source in e-Democracy -  How good can it be if it’s free?” Not only is this pithily titled workshop addressing the issue in e-Democracy at the moment, but we are going to engender a real discussion with a panel of varied perspectives. Our panel includes Chris Quigley and Gez Smith from Delib, Steph Gray from DIUS, and Dave Briggs an independent consultant. So if you have a burning desire to debate opens source, or simply want to learn more, it is essentail that you attend this workshop.

Delib have fully embraced all things open source with our new  Opinion Suite, and are looking forward to seeing what the rest of the E-Demoracy world thinks of the future of open source.

Look our for a blog on what happened at the Conference next week!

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 as well, in allowing respondents to see the reality of balancing the books, and how tough a job that is.

We are proud of Budget Simulator and really like to see it in action, so it’s great to see councils using it once, and then coming back again.

But this article was interesting in the Guardian yesterday, a claim that this election was the ‘Twitter Election’, with people, especially yesterday, sharing voting related information quickly and easily through twitter.

Now, to me, Twitter’s always seemed a 2.0 too far really, at least for a mass market. The functionality is essentially limited, and can’t at the moment see its hook to take it usefully into the democratic sphere. That said, there’s a lot of hype about it, Radio 4 claiming the other day that blogging was over and that it was now all about Twitter, apparently because there are so many blogs out there and so few good ones. A bizarre statement, there are lots of restaurants out there too now, and very few good ones, but you wouldn’t say the restaurant was over now would you…

Think the Guardian article flags up a good point for Twitter though, the ability to gather and focus information quickly and easily around a single event or occurrence. Having people Twitter their thoughts and experiences during a distinct process can be a really useful way of pulling together and evaluating collective knowledge. It’s also free to sign up to, which is great, and a convention for content tagging and collation is also growing within the community at the moment.

Only downside remains though the user base for it, which you’d have to be sure was got right. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the article quotes a Twitterer from yesterday, “Twitter is Obama country”.

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 the folks at PEP-NET, and will keep our dblog up to date with our take on the important PEP-NET news on e-consultation.

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 it is a thing of beauty (especially when the Tree shakes as you pass your mouse over it), but it also has serious e-consultation clout. The Ideas Tree has always been an intuitive platform for eliciting top line responses (through ratings) to questions. In addition the process of adding an idea is not intimidating due to the collective nature of adding your leaf to the tree, already populated by other leaves. The exciting thing about the Ideas Forest is that this is now extended to a Forest of questions, and with the inclusion of the blog, we can add extra layers of deliberation over and above the top line interaction with the Tree. So those who want to pop in and out and leave their idea can, and those who want to discuss the topics in more detail can too. Everyone’s a winner!

So there you go Ideas Tree morphing into an Ideas Forest…where next? An Ideas Rainforest possibly?!

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 every aspect of the event, even down to what the rules themselves should be.

It seems to have come up with some pretty amusing occurrences as a result, including almost abolishing the whole thing and putting the money behind the bar, and buying a small amount of woodland to be owned collectively between the audience members.

It’s a really interesting mix between a game show and a serious social point, and the ‘case studies’ of what happened are really well written too, so have a good browse around the ‘Who Wants To Be’ site and see for yourself!

Of course, Youtube in a way is a bit shorthand for A. N. Other free video service (we  sometimes use Vimeo for projects instead for various reasons), but the point remains the same.

So, very interesting to see this flagged up by Paul Canning, that Barack Obama has received $46,893,000 of free advertising through Youtube so far. Whilst it’s not worth trying to translate that into a UK value given the current economic climate, it’s clear that there’s a massive potential for free engagement and free value add from the use of popular free sites generally by the government sector at all levels.

The software is there, you just need to know how to use it properly.

Read Paul’s full blog post on this here