Archive for 'consultation'
Commenting is not crowdsourcing
I've noticed a lot of people getting quite agitated by this Guardian piece about how the Programme for Government 'crowdsourcing' (sic) exercise has ended 'without a single government department expressing a willingness to alter any policy'. Now, I'm speaking for nobody but myself here - but what the Guardian piece doesn't fairly reflect is that [...] read on »
Wanted: consultation platform, £1m reward
I'm glad my former Microsoft colleague John McGarvey reminded me of Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's proposal of a £1m prize to develop 'the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them'. That's what happens when you announce things over the Christmas holidays. The plan [...] read on »
New site for National Student Forum
Today sees the launch of the latest little site we've built on behalf of - or more accurately, in collaboration with - BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. It's a pretty straightforward WordPress build for something called the National Student Forum: a panel representing HE students' interests, whose latest annual report was published [...] read on »
Credit where it's due
The BIS All-Stars have produced something relatively small-scale in support of their new consultation on credit and store cards: but it works remarkably well. Working with plain English consultancy Simply Understand, they've boiled the classic 80-odd-page goverment consultation document down to just 10 (and done a nice design job on it too). But then they've [...] read on »
We care a lot
One of my bigger projects this year has been the website for the Care And Support green paper, aka The Big Care Debate. Basically, the country is in desperate need of a new funding model for long-term care of the elderly and disabled: and in July, three funding options were put forward for consideration. And [...] read on »
Building DFID's new consultation platform
A few months back, I helped the Department For International Development set up an online consultation site for their white paper on Eliminating World Poverty. We used WordPress (obviously), plus Steph Gray's Commentariat theme (with a few tweaks). The site was well received, and had close to 500 reader comments, many of them lengthy. So [...] read on »
COI browser guidelines: consultation works!
The final version of COI's browser testing guidelines have emerged, and it's simply wonderful to see a shorter, tighter, more standards-centric document than the draft I reviewed back in September. In fact, looking down my bullet-list of specific recommended changes, all of them seem to have gone into the final document. Cool. The revised document [...] read on »
COI's contradictory rules on browsers
Timely, given the release of Google Chrome, and the reopening of the Browser Wars: COI has just issued a consultation document, five months in gestation, on browser standards for public sector websites. Its 15 pages can essentially be boiled down to the following, based on an intriguing 2% rule of thumb: 17. Browsers used by [...] read on »