The Prime Minister’s Office ePetitions system is a standard-bearer for government-stakeholder communications. By the end of 2007, petitions attracted nearly 5.5 million signatures, from nearly 3.7 million different email addresses. During the peak times of the biggest petition (which attracted 1.8m signatures) the site was servicing up to 150 transactions per second.
Petition the PM
As far as local government goes, protests, handcuffs and someone’s Gran holding a post office to ransom aren’t necessarily the things you’ve come to expect from a local authority conference. It is however, exactly what the delegates, who stayed for the final session of a recent local government IT conference, recently experienced.
‘Citizen Sally - Power to the People’ was a 30 minute comic play commissioned by Siemens to help bring to life the issues behind the new communications technology that’s currently available to councils.
Beneath the humour was a very real and powerful message. Attendees at the conference described the point of Citizen Sally as “touching on the fact that, at the end of the day, service is about human beings delivering services to other human beings”.
The play seemed to strike a chord with a number of delegates, many of whom had similar experiences to Citizen Sally. “Just like any good drama it leaves you thinking and asking questions. I’ve only just come out of the session, but I’m probably going to dwelling on those questions as I drive home”, said Simon Berlin, Head of Technology and Transformation, Lewisham.
Digital dialogue is about making the face of council services more human, through digital mediation, rather than the opposite. Which is why Juice Digital - a specialist in digital communications - may just be a better partner choice that a pure ICT supplier.
