You’re right – to be honest, I think with the holiday season coming up we’ll struggle to get really active dialogue going, but I’ll see what we can do to keep the momentum going with email and meeting updates to the policy team involved and a second email mailshot to contributors. We’ll certainly make sure there’s a final push before the site formally closes in early September.

Thanks for the bug report – there are gremlins to iron out in Commentpress as @MJ has noted above. I’m trying to get them sorted out as the basic software feels like something we and others could use more and more and I’m keen to share it across government if I can.

While the DIUS commitment to responding to comments started off reasonably well, they seem to have hit a quiet patch. Your comment about the difficulties was quite right Steph – “Don’t underestimate the scale of the cultural challenge here: we’re asking seasoned, busy public servants with a familiar way of working to take extra time and effort to make engagement a continuous process”.

The word “continuous” is the key – like many social media tools, this one faces a point where the interest of the key participants dies off. One way to keep people returning to the site is to give them an option, when they submit a comment, of subscribing to a daily or weekly email summary of new comments. Otherwise it’s too easy to forget about.

A minor technical issue – the “by commenter” page has a small bug when clicking on the DIUS people. Anybody with brackets in their name, e.g. “David Rawlings (DIUS)” comes up as having no comments because the brackets get lost somewhere.

Random aside: I just had haveyoursay.communities.gov.uk reject my .coop email address as “invalid”. Stuck in the 1990s? At least you’re ahead of them.

Thanks for stopping by!