Cross-platform consultation and dialogue tool
Submitted by: Tim Davies
Describe your idea. What will you do?
Develop and pilot an online application which allows local authorities or other public institutions to build an opt-in list of people interested in influencing services - and able to express their preference for how they want to hear about new opportunities.
It might be via post, SMS, e-mail or through a Facebook/Bebo/MySpace application (and sign-up to the service could take place through these also).
The tool will then allow the local authority/public institution to pose questions to, or start discussions, with, those who have opted in notified about them, and those people will be invited to participate via their chosen platform.
The tool will support the local authority/public institution to think about the sort of questions they are asking, and how to promote them. E.g. if you want a quick response, target SMS users and ask a poll-style question... or, if you want dialogue, set up a discussion space (using the tool) and use all the different communication platforms to invite people to it.
The tool would also offer ways of visualizing outcomes of consultation/dialogue using tag clouds and graphs (etc.).
This draws upon work on using SNS for consultation (see here , here, and here) and is focussed on making it easier for local authorities/public institutions to communicate with and involve service users - particularly young people - where they are - rather than always requiring people to come to where the institution is.
This would be a pilot project focussed on developing innovative approaches and exploring the potential of multi-platform communication, viral marketing and consultation/dialogue in different settings. It would work towards developing a sustainable model for this sort of tool to be made more widely avaialable.
What will the benefits be?
- Reaching out and involving more groups in consultation and dialogue;
- Making the policy process more accessible to new groups, and particularly to young people;
- Better quality information and dialogue for public services to draw upon in improving services;
- Making positive use of the online social networking space;
- Getting good quality data on the best platforms through which to engage with users on different forms of issues;
Who will you target?
An initial pilot project would aim to work with young people across a local authority area - to build an opt-in list of people interested in influencing decisions and policies.
The local authority and other local services would be the key contributors of dialogue topics and consultation questions.
Pilots with other groups would be possible...
Is your idea linked to a particular town or region?
Potential pilot sites in Devon, Oxford and Cambridgeshire - but the resulting tool would have national applications.
What kind of assistance would you like from others?
Other partners interested in designing and piloting a system.
Posted by Anthony Zacharzewski on 12 September 2008 at 10:22 AM
Sounds like an interesting idea, but how is it different from the citizens' panels that many councils currently run (Bristol, Brighton and Glasgow, for instance)
Posted by Noel on 12 September 2008 at 05:37 PM
The idea of visualizing outcomes of consultation/dialogue using tag clouds and graphs sounds really interesting. How would this interact with other forms of online engagement that staff may be using, such as using video diaries in co-production for example?
Posted by Tim Davies on 08 October 2008 at 08:43 PM
Anthony:
The focus here is on taking the citizens panel forms of engagement to the places people are already active online - and taking advantage of the viral properties of social network sites - and the possibilities of mobile phone based consultation to hopefully (a) increase breadth and depth of responses, (b) make the local authority accessing in new spaces rather than always making people come to the local authority forums/spaces (c) reach out to new people who might not be already engaged in citizens panels.
So - it could act as a tool to complement a citizens panel - or could be used in a range of different ways.
Noel:
Good question. Visualizing information from videos is an interesting challenge. There is nothing to stop a tool like this displaying video content alongside other visualizations - and if it took a module approach it might even make it easy to transcribe and include input shared in video in the main tag clouds and visualizations as well.