I had a fantastic day at myPublicServices on Thursday. It was a real success. For the first time in a long time (perhaps ever!) I was truly conflicted after lunch: all the sessions looked great, and I could only go to one. Annoying!

I spent most of the morning in Ivo Gormley’s ThinkPublic session. We tried out some of the techniques they use when they’re helping clients to improve service delivery. We had talks from the operators of three sites, and then tried to apply the lessons learned from those sites to our own example scenarios — in our case, an old persons’ home. We took on various personas and tried to apply the good practices from the talks to our own problems. It was a great way to think about things with a new perspective.

One of the sites from that session was particularly interesting: HorsesMouth.co.uk is an online coaching and mentoring site which has established a pretty impressive community of mentors and help-seekers. They take great pains to ensure to preserve their members’ anonymity and to make the site a safe environment to ask sensitive questions. Rather like StackOverflow, but for personal problems. Really good to see. They deserve much more attention than they’re getting.

In the afternoon, I went along to Paul Clarke and Mark O’Neil’s session on bringing together official and unofficial services. I have to say: they were a marvellous double-act. Though I did get appropriated as the representative of all developers everywhere (quite an honour!). They had several Socratic debates followed by discussions covering reliability, incentives, sustainability, ecosystems for innovation — the whole gamut, really. I wish there was video of it. This was immediately followed by another session run by James Munro on “The elephants in the room: the questions people are avoiding”, which addressed lots of the same questions.

It was a really good day, with interesting and inspiring talks and a great mix of people. Mostly, though, there was just a wonderful energy about the place. Enthusiastic, passionate people all talking about practical ways to improve public services. A grass-roots conference, organised by people on the front lines of health services, attended by people who care.

Congratulations to Patient Opinion for their spectacular success. I hope there’s another one next year!

Last Thursday, G2010 — a conference on Government 2.0 — finally arrived. As others have said, it was a fantastic day, with many interesting people in attendance and on Twitter.

At the beginning of the year, Jeffrey Peel asked us to organise a panel for the day on digital engagement. It’s an area we have some experience of — we made TellThemWhatYouThink.org and ConsultationXML, and are helping the COI to deploy RDFa to describe consultations documents on central government websites. We had a lively panel and discussion about consultation and how to do it, which you can now watch:

And here are my feelings on the subject — in a bit more detail than we could fit in on the day.

Consultation is an area in which there is intense activity. Departments consult on almost everything they do, local government has a statutory obligation to consult residents on a wide variety of issues, and the rise of social media in government has brought into sharp focus the things that the Web makes possible. But despite all this activity — very much including innumerable panels at conferences — we’re not achieving the mass participation in policymaking that is, for many, the goal of digital engagement. So what’s wrong?

I think that some very big assumptions have been made about digital engagement, its potential, and the right way to do it. Everyone’s been excited by the possibilities, myself included, but I think we’ve failed to really look at the people we’re trying to engage, their level of interest, motivation and available time.

The reality is that formal consultation is simultaneously necessary (in that a deliberative, evidence-based policymaking process is valuable) and expensive in terms of the investment of time and energy that people must make to participate. We have conflicting goals: to reduce the barriers to participation — make it quicker and easier — while also maintaining an informed policymaking process. Formal consultation is far from perfect and we should work to make it better, but it’s not obsolete.

The solution we’ve adopted so far is to try and make it easier to dip one’s toes into a formal consultation. This has been valuable, and we’ve learned a lot from it, but I don’t think it’s workable.

Such approaches can substantially increase the number of responses that consultations receive, but they’re usually not the right kind of responses. A formal consultation doesn’t much benefit from large volumes of anecdotal correspondence about personal experiences. That kind of input is extremely valuable, but by the time a policy has reached formal consultation, it’s too late to use it. That kind of engagement has to happen earlier.

It also has to happen more often. It’s simply no good to pick a time — essentially arbitrarily — to ask people about their experience of, for example, public services. A consultation on the NHS probably wouldn’t be of much interest to me 5 years after my operation, but if I’m asked straight away, I’d be much more likely to respond. The issues would be fresh and immediate, and I wouldn’t have moved on with my life.

Those experiences happen all the time. They constitute the raw reality of our society and the value, or lack of it, that Government succeeds in generating for people. They are innumerable, chaotic, disorganised, neverending and personal: just the unstructured, unrepresentative things that you don’t want in a formal consultation, but that have the potential to create real, valuable change in the way ministers, Parliamentarians, policymakers, civil servants and front-line staff do their jobs.

We need to pick apart these strands. First, we must take formal consultation on to the web, away from paper and PDFs, and engage those people who are interested in investing their time and effort in the process. Second, we must embed into government a culture of engagement, so that those who have stories to tell can tell them to the right people at the right time. Engagement is not the exclusive province of web, press and comms teams. It’s everyone’s job, and everyone must make time for it.

After all, “engagement” is just another word for “talking to people and finding out what on earth’s going on”.

Who couldn’t get behind that?

On Thursday, we ran this month’s UKGovWeb Teacamp — a strangely named event that brings together civil servants and contractors working in e-comms and digital engagement with each other, and anyone else who’s interested and wants to come along to talk about government and the web.

This month, Jenny came along to talk to people about monitoring online news stories using free online tools. It turns out that iGoogle, in comination with Google Reader and Google News, can provide a fairly powerful solution for monitoring news. It can pull in stories based on complex searches, display them, allow them to be shared with a team and flagged for further action. She’s even got it set up to send subject-specific emails containing relevant content to different business areas within the department. Cool stuff.

About 40 people turned up to meet, network and listen to Jenny, which was great. Next month, Tom Steinberg, the Director of MySociety, will be along to talk about something. This will doubtless be very interesting.

We’ll be there — do join us if you can, at Cafe Zest on the top floor of House of Fraser on Victoria St on the 2nd April.