There’s a lot of buzz at the moment in the government about Digital Britain, Open Source and digital engagement. In February, as part of an open code initiative the DIUS made available the Commentariat WordPress Theme:
A comments-oriented theme, designed to make it reasonably easy to publish short, ‘commentable’ documents in a convenient, accessible, degradable way.
Wat it does is allow users to comment on meaningful ‘chunks’ of a document which are more than a paragraph and less than a whole post. It seems as if the E-Forum and the electronic discussion board ideas are being replaced by tools which are easier to use and easier to re-use.
Steph Gray, Head of Social Media & Stakeholder Engagement (the post title gives it away) at the DIUS talks about the initiative here. One of its first outings was with The Power of Information Taskforce Report which now offers views of the draft version + comments as well as the final version incorporating those comments.
Clearly, the Taskforce likes this kind of thing as it closely adheres to its terms of reference:
To advise and assist the government on delivering benefit to the public from new developments in digital media and the use of citizen- and state-generated information in the UK, including those identified in the Power of Information Review.
The areas that it’s targeting are criminal justice, health, and education, though as with anything ‘open’ it can’t control possible applications. As a result, a host of experiments in the harnessing of social media for public consultation have emerged in the past month. It’s not surprising that WordPress has been used as the platform of choice. The (more than) a blogging platform has been at the centre of a revolution in publishing, feeds and comments. It’s open and development on it is innovative and rapid. And as the government begins to embrace the information age by making more and more data publicly available, it seems to be looking to the open source community to develop ways of using it. Some of that work is aggregated by the developer network at http://innovate.direct.gov.uk/ which looks like it will be a hub of some interesting ideas this year.
I think these moves are significant. By providing exemplars and tools the government may finally be entering a conversation about data and discussion that goes far beyond anything that previously appeared behind (virtual fire) walls. A paradigm change?
Here are some examples to see what kind of ‘digital engagement’ is being achieved:
- Eliminating World Poverty from the Dept. of International Development
- Report of the Consultative Group on the Past
- Low Carbon Industrial Strategy from the Dept. of Business Enterprise
- Education Theories on Learning HEA
Whilst you would think that the DCMS Digital Britain Interrim Report would be a prime candidate for this kind of consulative tool it took Tony Hirst from the OU to develop Write to Reply with the report in a commentable version: an example of the ways in which opening up documents can lead to unforseen collaboration and innovation.
Aside: it strikes me that the kind of work being done with feeds, comments and rss could be harnessed by the reading group. Next job is to set up a blog with the theme and use it as on online preamble to the face-to-face meeting.
Update: Have now completed the reading group site.