Some of it’s contained some interesting ideas for how things could be done differently for another one, but some of it’s just been nonsense. One of the biggest fallacies has been that nothing has happened as a result of it. We’ve already documented on this blog some of the things that have changed as a result of suggestions made, and it would be interesting to put a full list together someday.

But spotted another one in the Guardian the other day, the fact that, due to a suggestion submitted to the Your Freedom Dialogue, the law around what time of day you can get married will now be changed. Here’s the quote

“It also contains some quirky proposals such as relaxing matrimonial laws to allow people to marry outside the hours of 8am to 6pm and repealing the right of police officers to enter your home to search for German enemy property. The change in the marriage hours stems from suggestions on the government’s Your Freedom website and is likely to trigger a mini-boom in evening wedding venues.”

Sure, it may be seen as quirky, but it’s another direct change that will have a real impact on a real industry and on real people.

I was in two minds about this when the law requiring all UK local authorities to provide an online petitioning system was first mooted. On the one hand, the road of such measures is somewhat littered with the paper bodies of previous failures. Remember e-government priority outcomes E3, G3 and R15? No?

They were requirements for councils to make certain provisions for public engagement and consultation through their websites. A few did so, a few looked at doing so, and a good few more just ignored them, on the basis that they hadn’t the money, time or inclination. Ironically, I once mentioned this situation to Hazel Blears when she ran the DCLG, the department monitoring the outcomes, and even she said she had never heard of them.

So those were just targets/outcomes/requirements, call them what you will, whilst e-petitioning is a legal requirement. But does it matter?

If an authority hasn’t the money to do something, it can’t do it. This law was brought into an unfortunate world I guess, conceived when money was seen as plentiful, but born when money is realised not to have been.

Ironically, this part of the problem could have been fixed really easily. We’ve just developed an open source e-consultation system in conjunction with central government to allow local authorities to pay hugely less than the normal going rate for online consultation and engagement functionality.

We did something similar back in 2004/5 as well with our Demgames, where central government paid for the initial development, after which local authorities could customise an instance with their own branding and use them for free as the initial development cost was covered. We stopped getting the hosting for them paid for years ago, but we leave them up because they’re a good thing*.

If the government wanted each authority to have an e-petition system, why not invest in the development of a national platform on which each council could create their own free instance, like Demgames? Instead it’s been left to the marketplace, costing the public sector many times more in paying for procurement processes, then paying the supplier on top. Classic inefficiency.

Aside from the money though, perhaps it’s good that not every council has adopted e-petitioning yet. Demgames were some games. Young people played them, and went away knowing more about local democracy. e-Petitions are something entirely different.

If you submit a petition, or sign a petition, you expect something to happen. Of course, there are some petitions that won’t get anything done about them, like, well, pretty much every petition that went through the Number 10 system before it was taken down.

But there should be some that might make a mark, and to do that takes a decent amount of internal process on the part of the authority itself. Who moderates the petitions, who logs them, who makes sure they get to the relevant people, who writes the responses to them, who makes sure that the responses go out to all the signatories?

A law requiring an authority to have an e-petitioning system is a bit like that famous challenge to write into a film script the most expensive scene to shoot using the fewest words, the winner of which was ‘The fleets meet’. An authority could have e-petitioning systems coming out of its metaphorical ears, but without the processes in place behind them, they’re only going to cause more public cynicism, criticism and disengagement.

So, where next? Well, either the law is quietly dropped and joins E3, G3 and R15 in the history of directives that hadn’t quite been thought through, or the government bites the bullet and provides a national system for every council to sign up to for free, saving hundreds of thousands across the public sector in the process.

I hope we see the latter not the former, but I suspect we’ll see a muddling through between the two for a short while yet.

*in fact, I think they’re now the only thing left to show for the many millions of pounds spent on the National Project on Local e-Democracy that ran around that time too.

2 more action packed sessions! First up was a discussion on using WordPress in government, showcasing the new DEFRA website with WP 3.0 multi-site implementation. Second was an excellent talk on Open Data where I was able to talk about our current Bristol City B-Open research project and also hear from other government departments of their experience using Open Data.

UPDATE 16.09 (from Adam)

You’ll notice the lack of blog posts over the past few hours – the reason being that Gez, Robin and myself have been putting the online public sector world to rights with our fellow Govcampers.

I’ve just been involved in a talk regarding open spending data – how to get hold of it in a useful format and the practicalities of doing stuff with it.

Intriguing to get views from freelance developers through to comms people from councils. The conclusions leading towards the fact that people increasingly want to see spending data, but the challenge still lies in organisations having a commitment to adding value.

Visionaries are leading the pack in online data, but there’s still a way to go. We finished the session with an unbelievable story about an authority taking responses to an online survey, printing them off and then manually entering them into excel to analyse the data shows that there’s a big difference between those who understand online engagement, and those who don’t.

UPDATE 13:40 (from Robin)

It’s been a good morning so far, there are over 100 people at the ‘unconference’ discussing all range of topics from engaging social media strategies to creating short videos on a budget.

The first session I went to was discussing “How we can Improve Online Consultation”. Your Freedom was mentioned as one of the highlights of the coalition public engagement, but the general consensus was that online consulting was still stuck in age old PDF formats.

My second session was looking at establishing Skunkworks projects in government – providing a platform for problems to be presented in a format where they can be challenged, developed and solved. A key point was engaging with failure and the benefits from learning from it. It was exciting to see the buzz around Innovation Hub and hack days utilising open data, similar to our recent Bristol Open Data Hack Day.

UPDATE 12:50am (from Adam)

Just stepped out of a session from which Chris Chant, Interim Head of Digital Engagement, for Government was talking about what’s been happening at the highest level.

Naturally, not too many concrete details were disclosed, but fair to say that the Government’s vision is that digital engagement is a big priority. Good to hear that they’re excited and keen to start implementing more open-source software to make more effective use of their ICT strategy.

All positive feedback and excited to hear what comes out over the next few months!

UPDATE 10:50am

So in the introductory session, where we all have to stand up and say our names, where we’re from and what we’re here for in one word.

Loads of great people, and a massive spread of central government departments and a good few local authorities too, which is pleasing to see.

We’re now pitching the ideas for sessions we’d like to run today, loads of great ideas coming out, from specific platforms to open data and social media. We’re going to be spoilt for choice here. Happily though, if you can’t make it at all, if you fancy watching the event live throughout today, then check out the live feed here.

So, here we are then, at the legendary UK Govcamp, run by the able Messrs Grey and Briggs.

From Delib here today we’ve got Gez, Adam and Robin, here to find out what everyone’s up to, and share a little of what we’re up to. If you’re here, we’re talking about Citizen Space at 11:00am and 2:30pm, and possibly about other things at other times too. If you’re not, or you’re reading this afterwards, then we’ll write up the day here as things happen.

So, first of all, the obligatory ‘people sitting round before it all starts shot’. Apologies in advance for the iPhone quality photos…

What do you think?

It all started off back in 2008 really. We ditched our old Citizen Space Local platform, as we wanted to move towards a more open source approach. So, we built Opinion Suite, an online consultation database and survey tool.

Late last year, we went through an evaluation process with central government, and Opinion Suite was chosen to be developed further as an open source online engagement platform for use by the whole of government.

So, this year, that’s what we’ve done. We’ve worked closely with the Central Office of Information, as well as myriad central government departments to ensure that what was built fitted the exacting requirements of government consultation, not just in terms of functionality, but accessibility and high level data security as well.

It’s been quite a journey as with any major government software project, and a big shout out to the whole Delib team here for going above and beyond the above and beyond on more than one occasion during the process. The only unexpected change was that Opinion Suite got renamed back to Citizen Space during the process.

But names aren’t as important as the fact that we got there, and rather controversially brought the project in both on time and on budget.

Since then, we’ve built up quite a queue of organisations wanting to use the system themselves, and we’ve already blogged who’s using it already here.

This isn’t the end though. We’ve already been through one round of system improvements based on feedback since it launched, and we’re doing another one right now, to be released in January 2011. We’re also upgrading our old Opinion Suite customers to the new Citizen Space system as well, cos we’re nice like that.

So, if you fancy making some cost savings in the new year, and genuinely doing more for less, then as ever, get in touch for a chat.

The two biggest events for us here were having our Dialogue App chosen by the new coalition government to run the two largest online policy dialogues in the UK this year.

First up was the Your Freedom dialogue. Personally backed by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, with regular video updates from him embedded in the site as the dialogue went along, Your Freedom allowed people to suggest laws they would like repealed in the UK, as well as allowing others to rate and discuss ideas suggested. Whilst the ideas suggested ranged from the serious to the not so serious, the project overall was a big success, setting a new benchmark for online mass consultation in the UK.

As Guido Fawkes put it;

The fact that the public’s suggestions are often illiterate and ill-thought out ideas doesn’t mean that in among the jokes and madness there won’t be some good ideas. It will be messy, it will be a bit chaotic, so what? It doesn’t matter so long as we find some diamonds in the mud.

After that was the Spending Challenge national dialogue. Again backed by Chancellor George Osbourne with video updates, the site allowed people to suggest ideas for how the government could save money. Whilst some doubted that the government would actually act on the ideas suggested, some of them have indeed now been adopted. It’s not necessarily about ‘big ideas’ with these sorts of projects, but identifying a number of smaller opportunities to make changes across a range of areas.

Speaking of spending, Dialogue App has also been used to engage and consult at a local level on spending and budgeting this year. We really enjoyed running a pilot dialogue across three wards in Bristol to let residents allocate £15,000 of spending themselves. You can still see this e-participatory budgeting pilot here if you want to find out more.

After that, the App was used by Norfolk and Warrington Councils to hold discussion on their budget setting and prioritisation activities, and has been adopted by the London Borough of Sutton as a long term platform for ideas generation on different topics.

Those are the big stories for the year, but let’s not forget that a basic Dialogue App can be used by anyone for free for as long as they want, and as a result we’ve seen literally hundreds of dialogues being set up and run using this free model. It’s not just about the UK either, with Dialogue App now being used in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as it continuing to be used in the USA.

It’s been really interesting to watch the idea of decent online policy dialogues starting to take off in this country and across the globe, roll on 2011!

1. The leader’s debate live blog

In April, we had one the the televised leader’s debates for the general election take place practically at the end of our street, so we spent the day roaming around, photographing and live blogging what we saw and (over)heard. Great fun, have a read to remember the days when everyone agreed with Nick, and Gordon was still publicly visible.

2. Our campaign for another bank holiday

An old post this, but one that always draws traffic thanks to the wonders, or perhaps oddness, of Google. We suggested that another Bank holiday be created a few years ago, and it seems people are still interested in reading about it.

3. How councils used the internet for budget consultation

Spending cuts and priorities has been a huge topic this year, so it’s no surprise to see a blog on some case studies of Budget Simulator clients being high up in the rankings. Like Budget Simulator really, which once again is the most popular online budget consultation tool of the year amongst UK local authorities.

4. Panorama on council budget cuts

We were interested to see the BBC’s Panorama program flag up the importance of councils consulting on budget cuts this year, and it seems many of you were too!

5. Bristol City Council’s new website

There’s been lots of controversy over councils spending fortunes on new websites, only to find they’re not actually that good. Earlier in the year, Gez went to a meeting with Bristol City Council to talk about plans for their new website, which seemed as positive as they were cost saving. This blog’s got the details on some of Bristol’s plans at the time.

6. Government as platform

A lot of our work this year has been centered around the notion of ‘government as platform’, something that enables rather than totally controls. This infographic has been really handy for people in understanding this idea, and how public sector online activities are currently changing.

7. Building the future of digital democracy in the UK

We held a few events this year on various things, here’s the blog post that started one on shaping the future of digital democracy in the UK

8. Bristol City Council e-participatory budget pilot

Participatory budgeting’s slightly fallen off the agenda since the general election, which is a shame, as in many ways it’s much more use and have far more demonstrable impacts than Labour’s other e-democracy agenda item; e-petitions. We ran a pilot for online participatory budgeting with Bristol City Council that worked really well this year, and we’re currently looking at more of this work further afield.

9. How not to tender for e-consultation software

The tendering process can be an expensive and ultimately pointless activity for all involved in it, and we’ve seen some really impressively poor tenders issued this year for e-consultation software. We’ve got another one to write about soon too, but this one’s still a great case study of exactly what not to do.

10. A round up of commentary on our ‘Your Freedom’ website

One of the bigger projects we’ve worked on this year is the ‘Your Freedom’ crowd sourcing website for the coalition government, where people could suggest, rate and discuss ideas for laws to repeal. The site itself got tons more traffic than this blog post, obviously, but people were still interested in a roundup of what was being said online about the Your Freedom project at the time.

And there you have it. Those are the ten most popular blog posts according to our webstats. Were there any posts you particularly liked? Anything you’d like to hear more about. As ever, let us know.

There’s a great atmosphere in the room, the event sold out and we’ve just come up with a load of ideas for what data to work on and what could be done with it.

So far, the groups seem to be forming around;

• doing more with the Your Freedom Dialogue data the government has now released, especially making the data more simple to understand. However, my favourite so far is a widget that will turn all the ideas into Haiku, and then allow people to vote on their favourite Haiku, then compare that with the votes for original ideas.
• doing more with Bristol City Council data on shopping trollies dumped in rivers, open data whose existence surprised some at the council itself!
• focussing on water quality data, and perhaps developing a generic interface for commenting on the quality of the data in return.
• looking at Bristol bus data, perhaps a web app that makes knowing where the nearest bus is and when it’ll turn up. Much needed still, if you’ve ever seen the First Bus website for this city…

We’re here in the Colston Hall all day, so if you’re around, drop by and say hello!

If not, then we’re tweeting under #bristolhackday, and will be blogging more too…

UPDATE 11:15 – an idea’s come up to turn ideas in Your Freedom into Koan (yes, I had to look it up too). Rather amusing when you think about it…

UPDATE 12:50 – So, where are well up to then? Well, over on the table dealing with the Your Freedom data, Rich is doing the legwork of turning the ideas into their useful components, removing words like ‘the’ for example, whilst Jess has found a really rather cool semantic analysis tool to use.

Elsewhere, the team looking at Bristol bus information have their user stories nailed down, and a plan for what their app should do, namely locate where you are using GPS, allow you to enter where you want to go, and the app will show you your nearest bus stop and the time of the next bus. Genius stuff, the sort of thing you wonder why it hasn’t been done already.

The only problem of the day so far? Some of the lights in the Colston Hall go off automatically when they don’t sense movement for a while, so people need to stop to wave their arms every now and again.

If that’s the worst thing that’s come up so far, then we’re onto a good thing.

UPDATE 13:11 – Meanwhile, Dan Lewis is taking House of Commons Debate data and feeding it into an auto-tagging service. He’s then going to hook that into news feeds to see how quickly MPs respond to the local news. Top stuff.

UPDATE 15:50 – Loads of great stuff still going on. Libby’s put together two great visual user stories for the Bus times and locations app, here’s one user story, and here’s the other user story.

Andy’s blogged some photos from the event so far too here.

Meanwhile, turning the Your Freedom data set into haiku is proving both awesome and hilarious. We’ll share the best ones with you in a bit, as well as a round up of where we’ve got to at the end of the day! Time flies when you’re having fun…

UPDATE 16:00 – Having conquered haiku, the Your Freedom data project is about to move on to turning the dataset into limericks.

Co-design

Co-design has been at the heart of the Citizen Space project, with government departments involved at each stage of Citizen Space’s 12 month development process.

Easy-to-use and empowering

Key objectives that Citizen Space has been designed to address include:

- Manage and organise multiple consultations across multiple policy teams

- Share consultation information openly in a structured way

- Create a easy and robust way to create online consultations on complex policy documents

- Provide a way to easily analyse consultation data (both qualitative and quantitative)

- Provide a central space to manage / track responses – whether it’s online responses or postal responses

Open source

Citizen Space has been developed as an open-source consultation and engagement platform, enabling government departments and the wider digital democracy community to build on the foundations that have been developed, leveraging efficiencies by sharing development costs and benefits.

The open source nature of the Citizen Space platform also means that government departments are flexible in how they implement and use Citizen Space, as they’re not bound by specific vendor licenses.

An expandable suite of online engagement tools

Citizen Space is a set of open source software, which consists of Consultation Finder and Quick Consult. Importantly, Citizen Space is designed as an open-source platform which can be freely added to over time – with all improvements benefiting the government community as a whole.

Consultation Finder

Consultation Finder is a centralised hub designed to help in-house teams manage consultation processes efficiently online.

* Central platform for multi-partner management

* Consultation database to find and sort multiple consultations

* Easy-to-use content management system

* RSS syndication for sharing

Quick Consult

Quick Consult is an online consultation app designed to allow government departments to quickly and easily create an interactive policy consultation.

* Easily set up both linear and non-linear online consultations

* Let people comment on complex policy-documents

* Analyse quantitative and qualitative data

* Manage respondents live

As an open source system developed in collaboration with government, the complete Citizen Space package is available to government organisations to use from as little as £3,000 as a one off cost, a substantial saving on many existing systems and processes, less even than some organisations spend on e-consultation licenses in a single year.

To see a demo version of Citizen Space, visit www.citizenspace.com/demo. If you’d like to have a look at the administration side of the system too, then get in touch.

So, aside from the wide range of accessibility and security testing that Citizen Space has been through, we thought we’d share with you who’s using the system at the moment, so you can see what they’ve been doing with it.

In central government in the UK, we have the Central Office of Information, the Department of Health, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change. In wider government, we have Transport for London, and on a more local level we have Bristol City Council, the London Borough of Sutton, Rotherham PCT and a partnership of 9 authorities in Cumbria all using the system, with the London Borough of Barnet, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and Avon and Somerset Constabulary all set to go live very soon.

Farther afield, we have the South Australian Government’s Department for Families and Communities using the system for similar processes in a different context.

There are many more organisations looking at Citizen Space at the moment due to its low cost, lack of ongoing license fees and proven flexibility. If you’d like to find out more about it, then get in touch!