Tim's Blog

If you're looking for a way to run a quick mobile phone based consultation - or you've been wanting to use interactive voting at a conference or participation event - but haven't been able to afford expensive e-voting equipment - then you might want to take a look at SMSPoll.net.

 The service (which I just discovered this evening and have only briefly tested) lets you set up quick polls - which anyone you tell about them can vote on by sending a text message to a UK number. The results are updated in near real-time on the website - meaning you can get an 'ask the audience' style effect if you project the graphs that SNSPoll generates onto a big screen.

It's free for small polls (25 votes or less) and is very cheap for larger polls (from £5 month). 

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.

I've explored the role of games in consultation before, but never bringing together the mix of playful real-world games, person-to-person interaction, and digital consultation and dialogue in quite the way that the process Kevin Harris describes in this recent blog post on 'Community engagement by treasure hunt'.

Kevin combined a quiz-book based treasure hunt around the site of the library due to be redeveloped with opportunities to speak to architects, chances to text-in ideas and an invitation to record reflections in the quiz-book. Kevin writes:

I wrote this one page guide on running an online survey in response to a suggestion from Damien at ChangeMakers Virtual Volunteering programme, and to go towards a section on online consultation and participation I've been putting together for Participation Works.

You can download the guide for printing here (PDF), or for editing here (Word doc).

(The twitter post: Well, it had to come sooner or later...)

I've just returned from an event in Chester (YOMO's Practical Ideas for Participation gathering) where we were making use of a tool called twitter to collect and share instant feedback throughout the event direct from people's mobile phones. The image above shows the feedback we got at the end of the event, all sent in by text message.

This has been my first large-scale experiment with twitter, and so shared below you will find:

One of the joys I find in blogging is that just when I'm strugging to find a way to express an idea, I stumble across an idea with similar roots elsewhere that can, hopefully, help make sense of what I was thinking about.

Just such a thing occured with this post from Annecdote about 'Story Spines'. As Shawn explains:

I asked the groups to grab an issue and tell a story explaining what happened. People busily jumped into the activity but I noticed they were just writing dot points detailing their opinions about what had happened. No one wrote a story.

It seems that they didn't know what to do to write a story. I had just assumed that everyone else thinks about stories like I do and has a sense what one looks like. Big mistake!

My next opportunity was at another knowledge strategy workshop but this time with a government department in Canberra. I had remembered Andrew introducing us to story spines so I dug out the blog post. Here is the simple story spine (Viv's example is more elaborate).