Our top five priorities for the Director of Digital Engagement
With the
new
Director of
Digital Engagement taking up his post on June 2, we thought it would be a
good idea to review the
recommendations
of the Power of Information (PoI) Task Force in order to set our own
priorities for the role.
The PoI
Task Force recommendations are excellent and make a good starting point for
this discussion but we've also taken on board the suggestions from the
UserVoice site ‘I'd like the Director of Digital
Engagement to...', set up by Steph Gray, who is Head
of Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement at the DIUS. The following list is in no particularly order:
Give civil servants access to the social media tools
that the public use and
make sure that they know how to use them properly and effectively. As part of
this, it will be necessary to train and mentor civil servants in how to engage
effectively and genuinely with the public.
Innovate. Innovate. Innovate. We like the PoI suggestion of
adopting the ‘backstage' model and support this but we're also keen to see a
culture of innovation develop where creative, fast-to-market tools are created,
deployed and shared. We want to see this go further, not just a percentage of
the budget to seed innovation but a percentage to seed engagement too. We're
not advocating greater spend because we also see the value in a parallel
systematic review of online spend to ensure it is being targeting correctly.
Open up the policy dialogue, within government and beyond to
citizens. This leans heavily on the two priorities above but is important in
itself. We want the policy dialogue to be open, transparent, accessible and timely.
Integrate government data into civic life, make information - data -
available now, online and for free. Unless there is a good reason to restrict
access the default position is that data is shared. We don't just want a whole
new series of PDF downloads and websites, this data needs to be provided in a
range of formats, including being made available through simple to use APIs so
that others can work with it dynamically.
Promote digital inclusion. Online government doesn't work
without online citizens so it's important not to lose sight of the ‘customer'.
Andy Williamson