So at Delib towers, we’re still here, looking after the http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk website we set live earlier today.
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’…
Sent from my phone, in safari