Crowd-sourcing online engagement plans for next week’s Digital Britain final report
<Update> Positive reaction from Computer Weekly to the way we published the DB final report. (Even if the credit was given to DirDigEng!) </update>
Next week my department and DCMS will publish the much anticipated Digital Britain (DB) final report. Expectations from the technorati are high and I’m keen to make sure it’s supported by exemplary online communications.
Working with the rest of team DB (made up of policy officials, marketing and press colleagues in both departments, and in close consultation with the Minister), I have come up with a plan I hope will give the report’s web-savvy audience the interactive and digitally-enhanced publication they deserve.
The first step in the plan was to share the plan itself via this post on the DB blog, as an exercise in transparency and to crowd-source any other ideas.
So please go there and read about what we’re planning to do to publish and gather feedback on the final report, and if you can think of any better or additional ways we should be engaging online around this, then please let the team know by posting a comment on the official blog, or you can let me know directly.
Big thanks to Dave Briggs, for fine-tuning the ideas and into whose capable hands we’ve entrusted the delivery.
The story so far
By way of some background to the importance of getting this right, pretty much since I started in this job back in early Feb, I and the rest of team DB have faced unprecedented, sometimes campaign-like demand for digital engagement about what the interim report said and what should go into the final strategy. It’s brought exciting opportunities for me to do some full-on digital engagement and support the team through these new ways of communicating.
We’ve been meeting the demand by:
- Blogging and vlogging. I’m pretty sure this is the first proper policy team blog from any central UK government department – correct me if I’m wrong – and it’s been home to some disarmingly frank and honest posts from senior officials.
- Embracing and sometimes joining the discussion elsewhere
- Engaging, both robustly and quietly, on Twitter
- Social reporting the summit on 17 April with live video, blog and Twitter coverage
- Harvesting and distilling the huge volume of feedback online (not least from Write to Reply, the fake DB wiki, and the Twitter-powered unconferences, but also from Twitter and the blogosphere) and trying to reflect back on what impact all that feedback has had on the policy process
With all this pro-active, vested interest in the content of the final report among the online community, it’s vital that the way we publish is as interactive, accessible and re-usable as possible. However, it has to be remembered that this is the final report, so feedback can’t alter its content, but people should still be able to have their say in the best way possible.
Any ideas for what else we could be doing with the publication and engagement for the report will be much appreciated.
Note: this is not the place to post comments about the content of the report. I am not one of the policy officials, I just provide communications advice to them and this is my personal blog.
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[...] Crowd -sourcing online engagement plans for DB final reportNeil Williams’ Mission Creep blog covers the plans for publishing in ways which are “as interactive, accessible and re-usable as possible. However, it has to be remembered that this is the final report, so feedback can’t alter its content”Mission Creep blog [...]
[...] Crowd -sourcing online engagement plans for DB final reportNeil Williams’ Mission Creep blog covers the plans for publishing in ways which are “as interactive, accessible and re-usable as possible. However, it has to be remembered that this is the final report, so feedback can’t alter its content”Mission Creep blog [...]
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
I think you are doing very well so far, and I really wish there were more people from gov depts involved in this way. Well done, keep engaging, keep listening and that is half the job sorted. Power to the people, and to a digitalbritain eh?