A government-wide platform for participation
The challenge
The Scottish Government have a dedicated Digital Engagement team. Their role is to identify online tools that the whole government can use to improve public involvement – and then to help 'culturally embed' those good digital platforms and practices across government.
The government runs hundreds of consultations every year. With surveys and questionnaires already well-established, the Digital Engagement team wanted to layer in an idea generation tool to complement and augment the existing consultation activity.
The approach
Dialogue is a powerful platform for opening up challenges to the ideas of the public. The Digital Engagement team felt that Dialogue's structured, open format provided a new, beneficial way to hear from the public. And, because it comes with no limit on the number of users, they could cost-effectively make it available to all of The Scottish Government's various departments and teams.
The platform's flexibility was also an important factor. For instance, Dialogue was quickly deployed as part of two very different public involvement exercises: one on open data, and one on wild salmon fishing.
The results
The Open Data team asked three broad questions and kept the Dialogue open for several weeks. By contrast, the Fisheries team used Dialogue to follow up on some specific issues that had been identified in a previous policy consultation. Whilst the Dialogue was only open for a week, it quickly generated high levels of engagement, receiving hundreds of comments across more than 60 ideas.
Dialogue has enabled us to expand public participation beyond formal consultation to include lively discussions and exchange of views. We have crowdsourced hundreds of insightful and constructive ideas around some difficult decisions, without the constraints of the traditional consultation process.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.