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This popped into my timeline today, from the fabulous digital team at the Department of Health. Stephen and Susy distill down to 37 minutes the conclusions from the experiments they’ve tried and sometimes tough lessons they’ve learned from iterating their organisation’s approach to online consultation over the last few years*. It’s brilliant in its honesty, but the…

Here’s a conversation that I have quite frequently during training courses when we play Dave Briggs’ evergreen Digital Engagement Game: Me: So, tell me how you’ll implement your plan… Team: Well, we’ll [do creative stuff with social media] and work with our stakeholder group to get the message out to the audience. Me: So, are your…

At heart, I’m an evolutionary, softly-softly kind of digital person, so I instinctively disapproved of chunks of Martha’s report. But even I can appreciate that, amid the destruction GOV.UK has wrought amongst the websites of Whitehall, there are some breathtaking vistas to a new way of doing things thanks to the mantra of ‘revolution, not…

Things will be tight in the public sector – and local government especially – in 2013. So far, so Mystic Meg. I don’t underestimate the effort required by the brave souls who, unlike me, are still in public service, just to keep the lights on next year. But it’s not a question of martyrdom: a…

Think back to you last digital engagement project outside Facebook. What did you ask people for? Chances are, you asked for a ‘comment’. Maybe a ‘reply’. ‘Feedback’, perhaps. A handful of you might have requested a ‘submission’. That’s not necessarily wrong – all of those are valid forms of input and depending on the goals…

I think it’s probably safe to say that you, like me, think that public servants engaging online as part of their work is the proverbial Good Thing. It might be a tougher challenge if we were to try to put some definitions around this, to describe what sort of digital engagement we’re talking about, and…

Neil has blogged some thoughts and slides on digital engagement that he worked on with Simon Dickson and me, on the fringes of the Alphagov project. (Literally the fringes, we were sat round a forlorn a set of pedestal drawers, brainstorming in the corner of a room at Alphagov towers): 73116962812735488 As Neil says, it’s…

On balance, today was a good day for more progressive approaches to online consultation by government. The BIS team were out of the blocks early with a nice little consultation site for the proposed changes to parental leave which explains the issue through video vox pops and a simple visualisation. It breaks a still rather…

I don’t get out as much as I used to. Well, I do, but I don’t do quite as much speaking about digital engagement and how the public sector can use the social web as I used to. So it was great to be invited to Edinburgh last month to give the keynote (my first…

It’s the biggest political event in a non-election year in US politics, certainly the biggest speech, and presumably a pretty big deal Comms-wise for the good people of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On Tuesday, President Obama delivered his State of the Union address to Congress. And this is part of what it looks like online: There,…