Great e-Democracy work is coming out of Northamptonshire County Council at the moment, along the lines we’ve been advocating for a while.

First of all, they’re one of the many clients using our Budget Simulator this year. Nothing unusual with that, it always just works wherever it’s used. What is new is that they’re promoting it through Facebook alongside more traditional channels, which is having a measurable impact on their response rate.

Alongside this, their Chief Executive is using Youtube to communicate with staff around changes to the authority’s management structure. The video has already become the 8th most watched in Youtube’s News and Politics category.

We can’t tell you how excited we are to see a council who ‘gets it’ like this in terms of social networking. Facebook’s one of the most popular social networking sites in the world, and really should be a no brainer for public engagement.
Youtube’s the most popular video site on the planet, so if you want to get your message out to people in video form, using it (for free) makes far more sense than building your own system within a closed network as others have done. Northamptonshire are even allowing comments on the video project through Youtube, giving them a free discussion forum.

In one way it’s sad that it’s taken until now for a local authority to grasp the power of the existing free tools out there, but now one has, we only hope many more follow them.