Slugger Consults

Because there are now fewer barriers stopping anyone from contributing their thoughts and evidence, there is a huge potential for web-savvy organisations and individuals to improve the quality of their policymaking.

In the past, politicians, civic leaders and business people have had to rely upon a relatively small group of professional advisors – think tanks, polling companies, civil servants and so on.

But now, to paraphrase Clay Shirky, everyone is here to help you. And contrary to what many web-evangelists may tell you….

• You don’t need to change any of the processes that you use to fix policy
• You don’t have to allow yourself to be dictated to by individuals with an agenda
• You don’t have to be bullied into adopting policies against your better judgement
• You can break the monopsony of advice provided to you by civil servants, pressure groups and think-tanks by going over their heads and asking the public to describe and model issues for you

So put aside those awful experiences you’ve had with e-petitions and make sure you don’t have any more of them. Forget that brutalising experience you had when you wrote something for a weblog and got called all sorts of rude names in the comments thread.

These are not managerial tools. They’re not for benchmarking. Their prime users aren’t the Sir Humphreys of this world. They are, however, good political tools. They are great for creating human connections.

Most of the good ones are free of charge and you don’t need to be a techie genius to work out how to use them either.

Slugger Consults can help you to simply put yourself where the public are already and encourage them to share their intelligence with you in a way that you will be able to make use of it.

The benefits are simple:

• You will make better policies
• You will hear new perspectives that you were unaware of
• You will be able to raise your personal profile
• Your policies will be approved of by the public a good deal more than they are currently
• The public well feel consulted and involved in your thinking

You don’t need to be a geek to do any of this either. Call us – we can help you with this.

As you can tell from Iain’s account, last night’s Editorial Intelligence (see the vid, if you’re not sure who they are)/Edelman debate in London was something of a ding-dong (Alex thought it was mostly about contending egos). In fact it was a fascinating debate with equal amounts of heat and light. Mark, who got the first question, (podcast here) has a good post up; which grabs some of the big ticket stuff. Some of the questions from the floor, were particularly sharp. Rather than do a report, I’ve laid out the guts of my own argument below the fold: Read more here…