Initiative Overview
The policy position that ICT should be used as a means to facilitate engagement between citizens and the government is a long-standing one. However, through its assessments, the Democratic Engagement Branch deemed that there was insufficient cross-government understanding of the nature and scale of the demand for online engagement, or of central government’s capacity to respond to demand.
Digital Dialogues was designed to stimulate a cross-government debate about the desirability and feasibility of using ICT to engage with citizens and stakeholders. The intention was to inform this debate through the evaluation of a series of case studies that captured the use of online engagement techniques and tools in live policy-making environments.
A general call was put out to government agencies, departments and ministerial offices for registration to become case study owners. Participation was open to those with previous experience of online engagement, or those with limited or no previous exposure.
Case study owners could be policy or communications leads, and were responsible for recruiting and managing their support team. Owners could determine at which stage of the policy cycle they applied Digital Dialogues – assessment, design, realisation or review – and whether the online activity was run in parallel or integrated into existing offline activity.
Three platforms – blogs, forums and webchats – were offered to the case study owners on the basis of their popularity in the consumer market and their limited previous application in the policy-making process. A budget of £3,000 was made available for the technical design, construction and support of each case study; all other costs (for example, marketing, staffing, policy analysis) were to be met by the case study owners.
The Hansard Society appointed long-term technology partners, Vohm (www.vohm.com), to build and support the platforms used in Digital Dialogues. All the sites were built using open source software system, Drupal, to minimise costs and maximise the ability to customise for the needs of the case study.
The Hansard Society prepared training based on its previous evaluations of online engagement by Parliament and local authorities; this was delivered prior to the launch of the activity. Following training, owners were encouraged to be self-sufficient and develop their own means of setting up, managing and evaluating their case study. In this way, it was hoped to awaken and develop the necessary skills amongst existing government staff.
Six case studies were completed between December 2005 and August 2006. On the basis of these case studies, the training and evaluation models were reassessed and developed where required. Between September 2006 and April 2007, a further 12 case studies were evaluated. These are contained in this report.
