Mark Elliott

A key learning from the development of and being involved with FutureMelbourne.com.au was that large organisations are not set up to respond to collaborative consultations. Specifically, individuals typically do not have the authority to respond on behalf of large organisations. (thx Miriam Lyons for reporting on HTML working - hopefully mine does too!)

This also works in reverse (as can be seen with this blog) with large organisations not giving authority to individuals to represent themselves at the front end of the consultation process.

Identity, reputation and personality (by screen name (real or imagined) or avatar) contributes considerably to driving online interactions through the same dynamics we rely on in the real world - trust, familiarity and community. Therefore it is *very* important that individuals are represented in this process.

And, I'm happy to report that this is not impossible.

If you Google "future melbourne team" the first hit tells you exactly who was behind that collaborative consultation - including nicely personalised (read: humanised) pictures with more details if you go to their profile pages. (The same approach is being taken with another state government run online consultation we are involved with which I will mention here after the launch announcement later this week.)

Of course I understand it is tricky from a process point of view to attribute individual identity to posts that were probably written by several people, then vetted and signed off on by a gaggle more. Never the less, providing human faces of the "The Digital Economy blog team" will likely engender higher quality responses, as people will feel more like they are talking to humans as opposed to the facade of a major institution (which often inspires 'rage against the machine' type responses).

Btw, there's nothing new in or wrong with a collaborative blog - eg, BoingBoing etc, it's a great model that's widely used.