August 2012 – Page 2

Online consultations – how to get them right

August 21, 2012

I received an email today, from a local council contact, for me to respond to a consultation about an ongoing piece of work. This was to a web page, where I could download a 25-odd page document, and then an email and physical address where I could send my views. Some immediate problems with it sprung to mind:

the barrier to entry – reading 25 pages on a screen is hard, so you have to print it out – it’s also quite a big ask in terms of time and attention
it didn’t give me any questions to answer, or themes to comment on. Just ‘send us any comments’ – doesn’t frame the consultation well
the method of responding isn’t very intuitive or user friendly
the whole page had no images, just lots and lots of text

What made this worse was that the subject of the consultation was a digital one – ripe for doing something interesting online!

Luckily for me, we have Fraser Henderson on the team at Kind of Digital, who is a bit of an expert on consultation and played a big part in putting together the Digital Engagement Cookbook, as well as working on numerous other projects.

He’s also built his own knowledge base on consultation good practice, called HelpMeConsult, which is well worth checking out.

Here’s Fraser quick guide to doing online consultation well:

Spell out a consultation “mandate” (what has been decided and what hasn’t/how results are analysed/timescales/etc)
Make sure people give informed feedback by presenting background information in an easily digestible format. For example, use video or break questions into chunks.
Use alerts – for when a consultation of interest is happening, is about to close or when the results are in.
Allow conversations to form between participants, including debate about the outcome.
Don’t just ask questions. Think about more interactive input types such as getting people to click or draw – it’s more compelling and a better use of the medium.

Those are Fraser’s tips – anything you would add?

Introducing Kind of Digital Exchange

August 7, 2012

It’s not the most exciting bit of technology in the world, but it could be very useful.

I read an awful lot of stuff on the web – thanks to Google Reader, it’s made really easy. Lots of people don’t have the time to do so, and are quite grateful to have useful items pointed out to them. I usually do this by putting links up on my Twitter profile, and the occasional link round up post here on the blog.

The trouble is that Twitter is a very ephemeral medium, and if people miss links, or don’t record them anywhere, then finding them again can be very tough. I’m also slightly uncomfortable that someone else has a hold of all this data! What’s needed is a way to record these things for posterity, and perhaps create a conversation around them.

So, in about an hour of fiddling, I made the Kind of Digital Exchange. It simply publishes links to stories I find interesting, with tags to enable easier searching, and the ability for people to leave comments.

As well as the main site, you can grab the RSS feed, get the results by email or follow the firehose on Twitter.

It’s very basic – just a bog standard WordPress instance and the free, open source, P2 theme. The interesting bit takes place away from the site, where I have set up the wonderful IFTTT to pump items I star in Google Reader into Exchange as posts within WordPress. This means that for me to share something via the site, I just click a single button.

It doesn’t have to be just me though. I’d be delighted if others could contribute. Using IFTTT as the spine, it’s easy to pull content in from other sites, whether Google Reader as I do, or maybe through Delicious bookmarks.

So, if you’re keen to start contributing links to the site, let me know and we can get it sorted. Of course, you can start commenting on links right away!

Will this become the digital engagement equivalent of something like the awesome Hacker News? Probably not. But it didn’t take long to put together, and if people find it useful, then that’s alright with me. Of course, if lots of people find it useful, I’ll throw some resources at it to give it a makeover and start to add some functionality. Stuff like:

user liking or upvoting of the best content
user tagging of articles
ability to reshare links on other networks

…and I am sure there’s a lot more too. There’s a page to share ideas.

So do please go and have a look, and maybe get involved. I was asked the other day where people in government can go to find examples of innovation and creative ideas. Other than say ‘look on Twitter’ it was hard to muster a proper response. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to say – ‘look on the Kind of Digital Exchange!’.

Supporting innovation in local government

August 3, 2012

i had a great morning in Exeter at the beginning of the week, talking with the corporate management team at Devon County Council about innovation and digital. Dom Campbell was there too, thus proving that the two of us can both be in the same room at the same time.

We were invited down by Carl Haggerty, who has been one of the most relentless supporters of new working and the opportunities of technology to change local government for the better. In September, Carl is running Open Space South West – an event all about nurturing innovation in public services in the area. I’ll be speaking at it, and I recommend you come down if you can. Tickets here.

In my little session, I spoke about how digital innovation can happen within local government by making some small cultural changes and giving examples of them in action. My slides are embedded below, or if you can’t access sites like Slideshare, here’s a PDF you can download.

[slideshare id=13847856&doc=devon-clt-120803015237-phpapp01]

I wrote a fair bit about supporting innovation in councils about 18 months ago, my starting point being the skunkworks in central government, which is now part of the Government Digital Service at the Cabinet Office. The posts were:

It’s fair to say with hindsight I think that I got rather carried away with the concept of skunkworks in those posts. But the point is that few local councils have a properly thought-out and communicated approach to innovation. If someone in the organisation has an idea about making things better, where do they go? How do they tell people about it? How are ideas judged, prototyped and implemented?

It ought not be too hard to come up with a simple model that can be customised by individual authorities. It could involve a simple platform for identifying issues and problems, or sharing ideas, combined with some open space style face to face get togethers where solutions can be explored and worked on. Regular reporting on progress and evaluating activity would be vital too.

Any local authorities (or other organisations!) up for trying something out? Could be really interesting.

(The photo, if your’re interested, is of Dawlish in Devon where I and the family stayed during our brief visit to the area.)

Link roundup

August 1, 2012

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Enyo JavaScript Application Framework – "Use the same framework to develop apps for the web and for all major platforms, desktop and mobile."
Features | Re-usable Drupal recipes for government websites – Nice New Zealand government site sharing open source compontents for Drupal for gov webbies
Consultation Principles – guidance | Cabinet Office – "…the Government is improving the way it consults by adopting a more proportionate and targeted approach, so that the type and scale of engagement is proportional to the potential impacts of the proposal."
Inviting comments on a draft bill | Stephen Hale – "With a public commitment to feed the comments that we receive directly into the process of parliamentary scrutiny via the team working on the bill, we’re effectively enabling people to publicly contribute to the drafting of law."
The SEO war – fighting the good fight in search – A rare thing indeed – an interesting and genuinely useful post about search engine optimisation! Who would have thought that such a thing was even possible!?!?!

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