The Big City Plan – Part 5 – Processing Comments – jon bounds – Jon talks about his battle to get Birmingham City Council to accept the comments received on Big City Talk:
…the department had expressed concerns about the ?formality ? of comments left on a blog post. This despite all of their consultation methods being ?free text? (email, post, web form, face-to-face meeting) and our consultation blog being split up to paragraph level. A separate, but related, issue was that the comments on the Big City Talk were (or could be) ?in conversation? with each other ? that was a problem for the consultation team.
Once they had accepted the comments, there was a weird issue of the council signing Big City Talk commenters up to the Limehouse ‘consultation portal’ without their consent, something Jon rectified himself by putting all the comments under his own details.
It all seems to indicate the Council ‘weren?t experienced enough, or managed or trained well enough to operate in today?s social online spaces. It wouldn?t take much work to help with that though.’