Michelle Lyons, who oversaw Digital Dialogues for the MoJ, is now Community Manager at DIUS. She has asked some bloggers and other champions of online engagement to help her promote a new pilot being run by the department. Very happy to oblige :)
The DIUS pilot has taken the Innovation Nation White Paper and made it interactive – in that it allows interested parties to comment on the Paper paragraph by paragraph. Neat.
So even if you responded to the original consultation, this is worth getting into – partly because policy officials want your views on the subject matter, but also because a good turnout and some constructive contributions will encourage them to do this again.
If I know Michelle, she’ll make sure that policy officials pay proper attention and that the exercise gets a thorough evelauation.
As an aside, I like this CommentPress, which is run by the Institute for the Future of the Book. I worked with Vohm on a ‘collaborative book’ based on Drupal for the Digital Dialogues reports. And Sam Smith has a good, similar set up with his CommentOnThis site.
I like these ‘social texts’ and I think the application of comments to specific points and paragraphs will really help policy teams. The only problem is perhaps the sheer number of comments that could be appended to any one section. Guess we’ll need to wait and see how they get on :)
Ross Ferguson 