Technologies for Participation

Last Tuesday we held our Seminar on Technologies for Participation - a day spent considering all the new fangled methods of holding dialogues.

The audience were mostly public sector officials who are already dabbling in this, but who are mostly working for organisations who are yet to make a strategic commitment. They are almost all working in a twilight zone of semi-approved tactical experiments. Local Government in particular seems hesitant.

Co-incidentally we received the early results of our annual survey of consultation pages on Council websites. We looked at the same 100 local authorities as last year so it is a direct year-on-year comparison.

There have been improvements, but ledt's reflect for a moment on one figure. Only in half of the websites examined could we find the results of public consultations. This is nothing short of a disgrace, for unless we feed back to the public, what's happened as a result of a dialogue, how on earth can we expect people to give their time for future consultations?

I'm not convinced that this is anything much to do with the technology. It's more about process, disciplines and commitment.
That's what is currently missing.