Dialogue is a tool for hosting structured, meaningful online conversations with citizens. It’s a fantastic way to crowdsource ideas and an important tool for organisations who want to open up honest discussion in a way that’s less ‘top-down’ than formal consultation.

Organisations open up ‘challenges’ and then ask the public for ideas on how to approach said challenge. Users can rate and comment others’ ideas, and organisations can choose to pre- or post-moderate.

Here are some examples of the interesting discussions that have been happening on Dialogue lately.

Open Government Partnership New Zealand

New Zealand is committed to the principles of open government, and the Open Government Parnership is charged with, among other things, the creation of a National Action Plan for open government. They’ve got three challenges open at the moment, on the topics of ‘active citizenship and partnership’; ‘responsiveness’ and ‘transparency and accountability’.

Dialogue is perfect for open government initiatives because it’s…well, open. Responses are visible to everyone, even if you didn’t take part. They’ve had a good response so far, with citizens suggesting measures like participatory budgeting and anti-corruption safeguards.

States of Jersey

Jersey is using Dialogue to have a climate conversation with its citizens. They opened up a number of challenges on different topics, like ‘how should we be heating our homes?’ and ‘how should we turn our ideas into reality?’ They’ve had a great response, with about 200 ideas posted across the different challenges and lots of interaction and comments between users.

The Merseyside Violence Reduction Partnership (VRP)

The Merseyside VRP is a partnership between a diverse range of organisations like police, schools, health services and the arts that hopes to reduce violence in Merseyside and increase the safety of the area, particularly for young people. They’re looking for ideas on how young people can best avoid both being drawn into violence and being affected by it. They can’t get out and talk to kids directly due to the pandemic, so setting up the Dialogue was especially important as they felt the conversation couldn’t wait.

They made a great informative video to embed in the overview page. So far, there have been calls for more youth centres, cracking down on gangs and even boxing lessons.

To find out more about Dialogue, book a free demo and we’ll talk you through it.