Whilst navigating the popular Londonist site on a recent excursion to the city I was pleased to see that they had taken one of the excellent explanatory videos from the site and embedded it on the site.  I think this is a really great example of how the consultation can be explained quickly in one article using resources that were easily accessible.

Well done Londonist, and well done Vimeo.

The site itself is built on the (much loved by us and others) Word Press platform and makes use of a number of excellent plug-ins to further enrich the presentation of the huge amount of information that is available on the project.  Other technologies and services used include Scribd, Vimeo, Google Maps and some rather impressive cross-browser compliant Javascript libraries.

The site now contains a separate section for each of the 25 proposed construction sites providing maps, documents and news.

A lot of hard work has gone into getting this site live from teams at London Tideway Tunnels and Thames Water alongside some inspiring technical work from my colleagues here at Delib.  We are very proud to be a part of the project and look forward to our app providing a platform for engaging the public gathering their opinions.

Last month, the app was used in a very interesting manner where the DECC Youth Panel were involved in building a group consensus on the pathways.  The event took place at the Bath Youth Climate Summit which is organised by the Green Vision Movement.  Tom Youngman explains how he ran the process:

We did a nice interactive thing with the My2050 game. We got a group of 40 to raise their hands to different levels corresponding to levels 1 – 4 on the calculator, and as a group (with my explanation of the levels and need to balance supply and demand) managed to reach the 20% target! They all thought about the lifestyle changes they’d have to make to live in their world. Went really well, thought you might be interested.

It was a really good activity and all teachers I’ve spoken to you about it really love it as an education tool.

So, an interesting use of an online consultation tool, and some great positive feedback.  Below is a snapshot of the pathway that the group agreed on:

The pathway that was finally chosen by the group. Interestingly, no onshore wind turbines were built and electrification featured heavily.

You can read more about what the Youth Panel are up to on their blog.

Meetings are always important to have, sometimes. In some organisations, a ‘meeting’ can be a dirty word that fills potential attendees with fear of losing valuable productivity on their current work, boredom, irrelevance, falling asleep in front of the boss/client, faffy overhead and no clear goals or outcomes.  Even 37Signals launched a campaign against meetings.

This is clearly no good and is thankfully not the case here at Delib.

So do I think meetings are any use? Not only are they good, they are absolutely essential and can improve everyone’s productivity, when done right.

To keep this short and sweet (as any good meeting should aim to be ) here are my key rules that we follow here to help us:

1. Be on time and insist on it for all other attendees.
   The key part of this one is the ‘insisting’ bit. We are not at school, we work as a team together and rely on each other; we shouldn’t expect the meeting chair to have to be the ‘angry teacher’.
2. If the meeting is a short catch up, stand up.
   Taken from the Scrum methodology we know and love, standing up ensures people stay focussed and everyone has a clear reward for keeping the meeting efficient.
3. When you’re starting a new project, always, always, always have a face to face kick off meeting.
   Too often these are skipped due to busy diaries or unwilling travellers. This will only come and bite you during crunch periods when that previous human interaction really does help everyone in the project team understand each other and work together.
4. Have an agenda.
   Probably a given for formal meetings (I hope) but even informal ‘gatherings’ will benefit from the loose goals being written up at the start on a whiteboard and ticked off as you go.
5. Invite the minimum number of people.
   You don’t need everyone from a particular team or department to be present. Trust that team members can share and disseminate the output of a meeting to their colleagues.

To finish off here’s a good article by Kevin Hoffman similar in content to his talk at SXSW and based around the 37Signals campaign.

Version 1.4 brings users and admins many useful additions to the system and you can read more about them over on our Citizen Space blog.

As the product is cloud-based, current Citizen Space users will have their systems updated for free and will be contacted to confirm their upgrade schedule.  If you’re not yet using it then have a look around on our demo to see the changes live.

My2050 challenges you to get UK CO₂ emissions below 20% by 2050 by setting how much effort is applied to areas both in the Supply and Demand sectors.  The percentage is compared to 1990 levels of CO₂ emissions.

This is a project that I am excited about both personally and professionally.  It’s a really interesting problem and one that everyone seems to have a different angle on.  It has been 12 months in the making and involved a lot of great work from the team here at Delib and especially the 2050 strategy team at DECC.

Let’s hope it makes a great debate and once you’ve submitted your pathway be sure to check back here to see how it’s getting on.

Link: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/i-gave-at-the-o.html