Comments on: New Opportunities

By: Data Sharing is Good, Right? Or is HM Gov Evil? « OUseful.Info, the blog…

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:29:54 +0000

[...] which leads to a page of White Paper Resources for Media and Bloggers. Resources that us bloggers can use to build a post around (remembering, of course, who actually produced the resources…), or at least that will act as a starting point for developing an understanding of what the government thinks it’s trying to achieve with yet more legislation. (See also: New Opportunities – Goevrnment 2.0 sites.) [...]

By: Steph Gray

Steph Gray — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:17:57 +0000

@Paul: that's true, and particularly so for a cross-government paper like this one, as I hinted. A White Paper isn't formally a consultative document, of course, or else there would certainly have been more formal channels for feedback. There's a trusty Netvibes page helping to keep track of online coverage via aggregated Google blog and Twitter searches, which has helped identify coverage to be tagged and shared on the bloggers page. But the challenge here as for any conversation we try to launch, is to get officials in particular to track and take on board the online conversations. @Sam: Thanks - no, the open source CMS was in place already, thanks to the sterling work and thriftiness of the Cabinet Office team.

By: John

John — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:09:55 +0000

Well done on this project Steph – moving everything along a step further in the right direction – and also on the frank write-up here, which was very interesting for me and which I’m already busy sharing around (And of course as was finding your very good blog for the first time!). Cheers, John

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:38:59 +0000

Great to see another Whitehall department using open source, is this something you adviced on?.
Very impressive for the most part, including the concept. The pages could have been shorter.

By: New Opportunities « BASIC CRAFT

New Opportunities « BASIC CRAFT — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:48:44 +0000

[...] Steph Gray – who advised on the development – has a done a write [...]

By: Neil Williams

Neil Williams — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:30:14 +0000

A wonderfully honest write-up Steph.

I’ve commented on Ross’s blog to say I don’t think the interactive bit is quite strong enough within the site itself, but the partnership approach is much the better way to go.

The concept of the social media news release is an exciting one – and followed through well, right down to the use of bookmarking/sharing links on every page. I think you’re right: this hasn’t been done before because it falls between the cracks of press and web teams. But I also wonder how many people had thought of doing it. To which end, I am sharing it round.

By: Paul Johnston

Paul Johnston — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:20:02 +0000

The site looks really good and I like the social media news release. It seems to me that all of this is about promoting as widespread a debate as possible which is great but I still have some worries about what you do with the responses and conversations (if anything (and I don’t mean that cynically – just with the best will in the world it must be very difficult to do anything with hundreds or thousands of different comments and conversations all perhaps starting from the same point but very quickly going off in divergent directions)).
To some extent I suppose it is fine to say: if we can get lots more people talking and thinking about social mobility, that is a good thing in itself (or to be more civil service neutral – that contributes to ministerial objectives). I suppose one could also argue that an issue-promoting “consultation” prepares the way for a detailed consultation where responses have more chance of really shaping the government’s actions. But that for me is the big issue: how do we innovate in relation to government consultations so that the inputs from citizens aggregate in a way that is likely to be more usable by civil servants/ministers and therefore more clearly influential?