1.)Listening
2.)Engagement
3.)Creating Content (same as explaining, except I included blogging here – just for a practical point of view for that audience – it bridges the two.)
4.)Collaboration (I would agree the word convening has its charms)

I present this as a hierarchy (although ideally it shouldn’t be) with the order dependent on the organisation.

Apart from listening, that has to come first, it can be helpful to swap, emphasise or rename elements to match existing understanding, their own skills, expectations and operational restrictions and objectives.

It all comes down to horses for courses but semantics aside I agree on the approach.

I’m not so fussed about ‘Convening’ but I will say that much of the actual convening I’ve seen where Government is an active participant often involves the same faces, something I used to call the ‘donut of interested Citizens’ that sits around Government. I think to the uninitiated this can often be a very daunting circle of people to break into.

It is this circle that I think sometimes needs to broken apart allowing for other ideas and opinions to enter into the mix – and of course that is the challenge of this last bit – how do you create or enable that engagement to occur? I think it happens best at a local and hyperlocal level.

As for the mention of inclusion – implicit in Cyberdoyles comments about getting better access – I think there is an often overlooked second part to that: Once you get people access and online, how do you get them to participate and engage? Which comes back to the issues I’ve mentioned above.

Having recently attended the GLA #londondata event, I suggested that they not only hold sessions with developers who are interested in open data sets, but also the people who hold the data in GLA and Citizens on the street – after all, it’s one thing to release data, but in my mind no one has yet adequately answered the question of what do Citizens really want out of it?

It’s an interesting model you have. It’s something I continue to work on and evolve from outside of Government.

Convening implies much more than collaborating.

And I agree that evaluation is a golden thread through it all. Tied to that, it’s worth noting the important activity of selecting: choosing when, where and how to engage – which opportunities are going to make a difference and which could be a less worthwhile use of time. This probably comes somewhere between listening and the other three? Listening internally, as well as externally?

From the perspective of corporate IT, I can see that getting to the stage of sharing common interfaces and processes is a major achievement with major efficiencies. But from where I sit, and particularly where there are existing online communities, there’s a stage beyond this where people get together and take action helped but not led by government.

Clearly, that doesn’t apply to every aspect of service delivery. But for policy making and the kind of entrepreneurship, ambition-raising, networking kind of policy objectives my campaigns often need to support, using the tools to get the right people talking and connecting with each other to work out what they can do to deliver the solution is really key.