Online consultation on science and society

July 18, 2008 by
Filed under: Transfered 

Thanks to tweets from Dave Briggs and a blog post from Simon over at Puffbox I've just been exploring Steph Gray's quite fantastic innovations over the Science and Society consultation website.

Not only does the site work hard to make a complex consultation more accessible through the use of video introductions and a blog format – but it sets the consultation free, and let's any visitor select questions from the Consultation to make available on their own websites via a custom widget – which feeds information right back into the core consultation.
So – bloggers, schools, youth services – anyone with a web presence where they can add in a little widget code can help their users and audience engage with the Science and Society consultation in a manageable way.

For example, the widget below (you may not see this if viewing in an RSS reader – so click through to the main post to take a look) displays a couple of questions I thought readers of this blog might be interested in answering.

Science and Society: your views

Please visit the Science and Society consultation site to join the debate.

This approach of enabling citizens to easily take, remix and re-publish government consultations to their networks is worth exploring in many more contexts – not least in promoting positive activities, enabling young people to take, remix and share information about positive activities in their areas with their networks.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Online consultation on science and society”

  1. Paul Webster on July 20th, 2008 3:12 pm

    Perhaps respnding to widget requests is something we could all help with as part of the 5 to 9 volunteering idea?
    http://timdavies.org.uk/2008/07/04/five-nine-volunteering
    On the daily commute we could read widget-chains respond to a handful of questions and fire them off to the master-sites that the widgets came from?

  2. Tim on July 21st, 2008 8:22 am

    Hmm, worth exploring… I don’t know what the widget-y questions, the answers to which would help third sector organisations, are, (as collating and processing widget-y questions is probably one of the big challenges) – but if consultations were more easily available by blackberry etc – and commuters could opt-in to responding to those that could be interesting.

    (Although, I’m not all that interested in the political empowerment of the commuter – who likely has access to enough resources to be politically heard right now. Bite size consultation to young people on mobile platforms could be more interesting…)

    What sort of content might this widgetised volunteering carry?

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