Government starts blogging

The Government has launched its first blog.

Titled “Charting Our Course: Sustaining Bermuda”, the blog has been established to help solicit public feedback on the draft sustainable development plan. Comments can be left on any of the posts on the site; to encourage discussion among contributors, these comments will appear as soon as they are posted, rather than requiring pre-approval. There's even an RSS feed.

At this stage it’s not clear how often the Government plans to update the site, or who will be writing for it. Most of the existing posts are either high-level placeholders to act as a jumping-off point for discussion, or provide links from which the draft plan and its annexes can be downloaded. To provoke meaningful debate and keep it on track, however, the Government will need posts that discuss specific aspects of the plan in more detail.

The blog has been established by the Sustainable Development Unit (SDU), part of the Cabinet Office’s Central Policy Unit. The Sustainable Development Round Table (SDRT) advises the SDU, but is independent of it. However, it’s my hope that the SDU will ask the members of the SDRT to write for the blog too. The more people that are writing for it, the more often it will be updated. The more often it’s updated, the more often the public will check back to see what’s new, and the more likely they are to contribute when there’s a topic that interests them. Hopefully the members of the SDU (and SDRT) will respond to the comments on the site too, to make it a real conversation between the Government and the public.

It's a shame that the Government has left it so late to start this blog. Public consultation on the draft document officially ends on 25 September, less than 3 weeks from now. Nevertheless, I’m enormously encouraged that the Government is starting to see the value of blogs for interacting with the public. If this one is a success, perhaps we’ll see their use becoming more widespread in the months ahead.

Comments

[Adjustah on 05.09.06 at 20:24]

A Govt. blog? In Bermuda? Let me check the skies for winged swine...

Nicely done, I'm impressed that this is up, albeit quite late in the game, but the fact that is is up at all is encouraging. Indeed, it would seem to address a demographic that our current government seem to have missed -those that only chose to comment here on LIB.

Now. Where's our Independence Blog then, eh?

[googlybda on 05.09.06 at 21:41]

Adjustah,
Don't mention Independence you get deleted. This subject is however directly in correlation with sustainable development and should be discussed as part of this exercise.

[Intrigued on 06.09.06 at 16:24]

Is it just me, or do others have no luck downloading the appendices pdf files?

[Adjustah on 06.09.06 at 18:37]

"Don't mention Independence you get deleted."

Yeah, I can't help but think that they're jotting down IP addresses too...

[Intrigued on 07.09.06 at 09:18]

Appendices still not downloadable. The blog now atleast says that there is a problem. Message saying get them from main bermuda government site. Went there, and guess what? Yep, appendices don't download there. Bad karma for sure.