More seriously, perhaps there’s room for a cross departmental approach to this sort of thing run through the COI or the Director of Digital Engagement?

The work we’ve done so far in this area would suggest that this is an approach that has merit. Quite often it’s the same communities and online influencers that it would be useful for different departments (and policy teams) to talk to, so it would make sense for the indentification of and relationship building with them be handled centrally in order to share the costs and ensure consistancy.

As I hope you can tell, we’ve been thinking about this quite a lot!

But the problem is whose job it is to do this outreach? It’s not the poor old web team who built the thing until silly o’clock in the morning, I’m sure. It’s not really the press officer who’s setting up ministerial media round. It’s probably not the strategic comms manager who’s been project managing the work, who’s chasing proofs and content and event organisers and press notices. Who does this stuff?

I think there are two bits of the jigsaw missing generally from this kind of launch: community management to help sensitively share the policy within the communities interested in its content; and a better platform or set of platforms to really engage people with policy itself, which still presents a polished product Ministers can present, but gets people exploring, challenging, sharing, and writing stuff around the margins.

An outreach campaign to them clearly would have been one of the easiest and most cost effective ways of getting the word out to an audience who would likely be interested in engaging about the issues in the document. Frustrating…