Armchair Involvement – NHS tech project goes live!

I(nvolve) started working on a project for the NHS Institute last year looking at how new technology can offer opportunities for people to engage in healthcare more effectively. (Think preventative health agenda and Wanless report/s.)

Needless to say, by the time we’d been through all of the research and written the thing up, you could have added so much more to the final document- it looked like things were going out of date – and fast!

As a result we worked with the Institute to make a webspace out of the document with some interactive elements to encourage sharing of ideas amongst NHS staff - you can comment on reccomendations and themes of the report and also upload relevant projects.

The idea is to introduce a more collaborative way of working into the research and dissemination process – which can otherwise be quite a dry and static experience- and to kickstart the process of moving forward with implementation of new tech/health ideas.

Would be great to have some input into the site and some feedback on how to go forward with the ideas behind the project, and of course, please pass on the info to healthcare types.

Here’s the link to the main site.

 

Public Engagement in Local Government Conference

Went along to speak at an engagement conference yesterday. Here’s a selection of themes that came up around the room in the session I attended:

1. How to avoid the problems presented by traditional ‘town hall’ meetings.
2. Are we ‘marginalising the mainstream’? Engagement funding is targeted at deprived areas (and with good reason) but who else is getting left out at the community level?
3. People still don’t know who represents them – the elected representative to citizen ratio is so high
4. We may be in danger of making communities ‘responsible’ for solving their own problems
5. Tension and confusion between representative and participative democracy – clarity and boundaries needed
6. How do we ‘mainstream’ engagement so it becomes more than a ‘3yr wonder’?

I have a few initial ideas and responses to two of those more practical points, others need more thinking-time and discussion. All of them need more heads working on the subject and sharing ideas

The problem with town hall meetings

You could try hosting your meeting in a community venue at more convenient times of day than weekday evenings. With Involve I’ve been working on the Say&Play approach where a school fun day is used as the site for a consultation and so attract mums and dads with caring responsibilites can bring their children with them to the event.

There are lots of different formats other than a Q+A session which can get dominated by the same voices and can put off potential participants at their first meeting. Try a World Cafe perhaps – look at www.peopleandparticipation.net for more ideas to make your meetings more interesting and interactive.

Finding your representative

Online tools are making it much easier for people to find out who their elected representatives are but also to interact with them. Sites like WIMPS are using postcode searches (combined with great video content) to match young people with their representatives. Council websites are catching on too – see Westminster’s postcode search here.

Apart from finding out the name and contact information for your representatives, a whole lot more can be achieved in terms of participation when they go online and seek to engage with communities by blogging. This way a 2-way conversation is instantly made possible.

Here are a few examples of councillors wot blog:

Antonia’s Blog

Ann Garner

Iain Lindley

Hope those quick reflections give some pause for thought. I’ll be picking up on the other issues in separate blogposts in future.

Also will be sharing my presentation on slideshare – as soon as I get the images to work properly! (Who would use new technology eh??)

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a plan?

Yes, the rumours are true – there is a plan…

I’ve been thinking how to structure this blog thingummy in a way that will make it a useful resource – and moreover to make sure it hits the spot somewhere between interesting and informative – hopefully managing both simultaneously! See my introductory post. 

So … I plan to split up the subject matter as best I can into three areas:

1.Public participation in all its many and varied forms (tag/category:pubpart)

2.How my blogging is going – documenting my learning and general web-based flailing around (tag/category:blogging)

3. A few links to interesting bits and pieces that I find lying around the wwweb – all work and no play is dull after all…. :) (tag/category:stuff)

To try and help you order this info I’m going separately tag all of my off topic non-participation related posts categorise as ’stuff’, then make sure that all of my public participation and blogging posts have either blogging or pubpart on there as a tag and category. Simple eh?

Er, yes you blogging novice, but what’s this pubpart thing?

Well, what it is not, is something to do with hanging around having a hearty drink, nor is it the opposite of privatepart. (Although thanks for those suggestions people!)

What it IS, is a way of trying to bring together all of the many diverse participation-related resources and information from across youth, health, development, community - all policy areas both online and off by marking them with a recognisable tag in a community tagging project. This could work much like the nptech tag monitored by Beth Kanter in this weekly digest or along the lines of the tag aggregator recently used by ruralnet in their co-design process.

Please check out Tim Davies’ far more considered explanation of how pubpart will work here.

A public participation community certainly exists both in the UK and internationally but as a whole is so loose and fragmented across a number of policy areas and interests that there are few places that draw together expertise from across the board.

[Check out www.peopleandparticipation.net for one such cross-policy participation effort. I think its a good start, but then I am quite biased as I do work for Involve! Let me know what you think about the site on here:) ]

The idea of using a community tagging system like pubpart is one way of further unifying the many different voices out there which touch on various aspects of public participation and involvement, be it edemocracy, social media, PPI networks etc.

I’d be really interested to know what you think about the idea and to know if you’ll be joining in yourself.

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My link of today: 

Do poor people use Yahoo and those better off use Google?

If this is so, what does it say about online cultures?