Importantly, key things I wanted to pick up on was how Citizen Space can be used as a hub where consultation teams can manage their whole consultation process through – including bringing together both offline and online feedback together, so you’ve got all your consultation data in one place – enabling you to be more organised, and allowing you to more easily and quickly analyse and report your consultation findings.

Here’s a quick overview of how Citizen Space could help you do this:

As noted above, the key parts of the consultation process Citizen Space can help improve are:

• Collaborative drafting: draft your consultation questions together with colleagues, and allow others to edit and update – showing how the consultation questionnaire would look and work but in a closed secure online space (rather than endlessly sharing word documents between your team!)
• Publish your online consultation and supporting documents in an interactive format: Citizen Space allows you to upload all your consultation documents in one place, alongside your consultation survey – allowing stakeholders to read background information and feedback easily at the same time.
• Ongoing management and tracking: once your consultation’s underway and people are feeding back, you can keep an eye on the results as they come in, and do quick analysis any time during the process.
• Collating online and offline feedback together: one of the big challenges in managing a consultation process is that you’ll often get feedback from stakeholders in different formats: e.g. paper surveys, emails, .pdfs, comments from events. What Citizen Space allows you to do is collate all feedback from whatever format (once transcribed) into one central database, so that you can then analyse all the feedback quickly and easily. The system also provides each feedback record with a Unique ID, so that all records are easily tracked. Delib also provide *transcription services*, to help you transcribe feedback from different formats into a digital format.
• Analysis and reporting: finally, at the end of the process you can easily analyse all the data you’ve collated using Citizen Space. Additionally, we can provide a 3rd Party analysis and reporting service from YouGov if you’d prefer 3rd party validation.

So, there you go! Hopefully that gives a good overview of how Citizen Space can be used to help ensure you run robust and pain-free consultation processes. If you’ve got any questions, just drop us a note: info@Delib.net

Although the Delib team are 100% geeky digital natives, we do understand the engagement landscape and the need to integrate online and offline to create the most effective multi-channel mix.  After all, not everyone in the world are Angry Birds champions!

So, to help government organisations make that transition from offline to online (multi-channel), we’ve developed up some quick tips as to how to develop up your online engagement capacity (see below).

I suppose one of the key points to make is that online and offline aren’t mutually exclusive.  In particular there are two great ways online and offline can merge and help each other:

1. Management / organisation / data storage: using a consultation management system like Citizen Space allows you to organise and manage all your consultations (across your organisation) in one place.  Databases / calendars, enable citizens and staff to understand when consultations are taking place, and also provide a useful data record / archive of past consultations and their outcomes.
2. Using Apps in live events: possibly more exciting, is the use of online apps in live events.  Both the Dialogue App and Budget Simulator are both used regularly by our clients in town hall meetings, to help facilitate open community dialogue.

More tips and tricks below!

Consultation Infrastructure Tips

As a quick introduction to Verne, we thought it would be a good idea to do a quick interview with him – so here you go:

Delib: When did you first use the internet, and what did you use it for?

VK: My first job in local government communications coincided with me and the internet. Councils in Victoria were amalgamated in 1994, bringing about major investment in communications infrastructure in the new bigger organisations. Then there was the Cluetrain Manifesto a few years later.

Delib: What’s the most awesome difference you’ve made to the community through your engagement work?

VK: I can’t imagine one person can make a lasting difference without others taking over the reigns at some stage. Unfortunately, sustainable engagement is not well done by governments. I’m proud of my part in the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games – I directed a many layered year long community engagement campaign to connect the sectors, and broker them doing things together.

Delib: What’s your top community engagement tip?

VK: Be clear what the engagement is for, and what you’re going to do afterwards with (1) the information, and (2) the relationships, connections and databases created along the way. I’d also add that community engagement is marketing in disguise.

Delib: Who’s your hero [and why]?

VK: I have many. Frank Zappa (musical genius and satarist), Erwin Schrödinger (he described my favourite concepts, and a fellow theoretical biologist), Salvador Dali (turned me into a part time artist), and of course Jules Verne (who gave me SciFi, and my name).

Delib: What’s your favourite internet meme / phenomenon?

VK: Convergence. The day is coming when we’ll have a device in our pocket that does everything, foldable, expandable to whatever screen size you want, phone/computer. Social networks will have effectively collapsed into me-at-centre.

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We’re in the process of fully setting Verne up on our various systems, so once he’s fully up and running we’ll share details more widely.  Exciting times

That said, I did find the idea of Christmas in the sun a wee bit of an odd one – this oddness was especially amplified by the festive decorations e.g. the sight of Father Christmas with his sleigh heading through Melbourne’s CBD in 30 degree heat. Though, when I stumbled across Jesus in his manger in Christmas Square it did make me think that given Jesus was born in a hot and sunny Bethlehem maybe a sunny Melbourne Christmas was more aligned to reality than a snowy London Christmas.

Anyway, amidst all these random thoughts I decided to create a photo tour of Melbourne’s Christmas decorations. So here you go . . . and have a great Christmas from everyone at Delib UK and Delib Australia

Fed Square’s Christmas tree forest

Christmas carol concert in Fed Square School

Shooting star lights over Flinders Street

Jesus in his manger in Christmas square

So, in this instance, given Melbourne’s reputation as being a creative hub, I put together a talk called *Angry Government* – sharing thoughts on how government can learn from Angry Birds.

The basic tenet of my chat was pretty simple:  if Angry Birds is the most engaging / addictive thing on the internet, then how can government learn from the game (and online gaming in general) to engage better with citizens.

For those that missed my chat, here’s my short slide deck / notes I presented:
Angry Government

The basis of my thinking is all games are based around the same core drivers.  If you analyse these, you can then (fairly easily) apply these drivers to government engagement / consultation.

Importantly, implementing these drivers into government engagement work doesn’t have to be complicated and require high-levels of gaming technology.  Most of the drivers are pretty *soft touch* – i.e. are based around things like how to phrase a question (e.g. turning it into a community challenge) or ways of setting the narrative of the process (e.g. by using video / rich media).

That said, if you do want to be more creative and invest in technology to take your engagement to the next level you can – and we have.   An extreme example of this is our My2050 project for DECC around engaging UK citizens in CO2 emission targets, and on a less ambitious level is our Budget Simulator app that let’s local government consult on their budgets using a simulation process and our Dialogue App – for community crowd-sourcing.

(photo from last night’s event in Melbourne)

@DelibThinks

One of the most awesome projects I’ve come across is the ACT’s Twitter Cabinet -  flagged up by Steve OzLoop over a coffee earlier today in Canberra.

What makes  ACT’s Twitter Cabinet so awesome is the fact that it connects citizens directly to decision-makers in a super easy way – providing a direct channel through which citizens can easily feedback / share ideas  with ACT’s decision-makers at the *point of decision making*.  This for me is what real *digital democracy* is all about – connecting citizens with decision makers using the most appropriate technologies. (see the Twitter Cabinet in action below)

Where the innovation in ACT’s Twitter Cabinet lies, isn’t in the technology or the process, but it’s the combining of new technology with old (existing processes) to make the democratic process more accessible.  All in all, it’s very inspiring and I hope governments from around the world learn from the impact such simple application of technology into existing democracy processes.

Thanks for the tip Steve + hats off to Katy Gallagher and all the ACT team for their great work
(live Twitter Cabinet conversation in action – screenshot below)

The worst thing about living in Kirribilli is the horrible commute to work – which involves the following . . .

1) Overcrowded wait on the Harbour platform

2) A stressful 5 minute journey across the Harbour

3) Terrible views of insignificant landmarks like the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge

. . . so there you go – a really torturous commute in comparison to my usual 20 minute sweaty sardine-like commute on the tube in London

As a quick round-up, I thought I’d share the ones people have found most interesting one blog post:

Adventures in Digital democracy presentation

An overview of our experiences delivering the biggest government crowd-sourcing processes in the world, involving 750,000+ people.

Adventures in digital democracy

The Dialogue App

This is our super awesome, and super cheap web app for running community dialogues and crowd-sourcing processes.  Developed initially for use in the US by the White House.

See more here: www.Dialogue-App.com

Open for free use by community groups around the world via our #GlobalDialogueProject.

Watch our US Health IT Dialogue case study video here, giving a behind the scenes overview of how the Dialogue App can be used:

Citizen Space

Our all-in-one consultation platform.  Developed in collaboration with the UK government, and used by governments around the world.

More info here www.CitizenSpace.com

Awesome examples of government agencies using it here:

• Stockport PCT: http://www.citizenspace.com/stockport-haveyoursay
• Thames Water (Quick Consult use only): http://www.thamestunnelconsultation.co.uk/
• BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/index.shtml

My2050

Our game-based consultation on Climate Change, made for the UK government to help both educate and get deliberative feedback from citizens on how best to reduce CO2 emissions through intelligent energy choices.

Have a play here: http://my2050.decc.gov.uk/

This free version of the Dialogue App is all part of our #GlobalDialogueProject aimed at helping not-for-profits run community dialogues better online.  To get going with your dialogue, all you need to do is click the button below (or here) and our Dialogue App will automatically set-up an online dialogue for you.  It’s as simple as that!

And if you haven’t heard about the #GlobalDialogueProject, then check out the project poster below or click here for a bit of background.  And of course do spread the word to any friends / colleagues you think would be interested in taking part . . .

I’m in the process of organising my diary for my tour, so if you think it would be useful to meet and chat, pop me a note and I’ll get something in the diary.  My rough dates are as follows:

• Perth / WA: Thursday 17th to Friday 18th November
• Sydney / NSW: Monday 21st November to Wednesday 23rd November
• Brisbane / Queensland: Monday 28th to Tuesday 29th November
• Sydney / NSW: Wednesday 30th November to Friday 2nd December
• Canberra: Monday 5th December
• Adelaide / SA: Tuesday 6th December
• Melbourne / Victoria: Wednesday 7th to Friday 9th December

If you want to get in contact my contact info is: Chris@Delib.co.uk or @DelibThinks.  My colleague Ben is also helping organise my diary, who’s Ben.Fowkes@delib.co.uk.

From my last tour in June, there seemed to be two things core facets of our work that people working in the engagement space were interested in

• Running online community dialogues: with thoughts about how the Dialogue App could be used to run these – especially in the context of dialogues around strategic plans.  We put together a top tips document here.
• Setting up *online consultation infrastructure*: looking at how government organisations could run their everyday consultation exercises better using Citizen Space.  There’s more information on building your in-house online consultation infrastructure in our guide here.

As well as these core engagement essentials, there was also a fair amount of interest in our more innovative work – especially our My2050 Climate simulator and aMap argument visualisation and debate software.

Anyway, if you’re interested in meeting up – do drop me a note, and I’ll get something in the diary.  Also, do spread the word to colleagues too – especially about our *Global Dialogue Project* which I’m happy to discuss too.

Hope to see you soon