Thank you for your comments and thank you Dave for raising this important issue of the need for public bodies to sometimes attempt to reach out to where the conversation is taking place.

This is an important area that Government at all levels, locally and nationally, needs to understand more. Guest blogs from Perm Secs and the official blogs from Ministers, either Departmentally such as David Milliband’s or outside of the Departmental spaces such as Tom Watson’s are a great leap forward from the offical communication lines that have existed in the past.

The recent Power of Information Review looked at this in more detail and councils are responding up and down the land developing new ways of using technology to enhance their dialogue with communities in their location e.g. Redbridge with consultation or Stratford with Twitter. This builds on the existing technology such as online reports and webcasting offering new ways of engagement which are breaking new ground for public bodies.

The issue of confidence and trust is a very important alongside the issue of slowly changing existing culture, custom and practice to accept new technology into communications which is more than traditional web 1.0 that Government has previously focused upon. This still has a massive role to play in making information available to the masses and also continuing to enable traditional transactional services to be undertaken utilizing technology. Web 2.0 interaction on the other hand is still evolving and is very citizen driven, which can only be a good thing in determining the needs and discussion that people want to see.

How should Government play in this space is still being discussed but the more it becomes normal for healthy and informed dialogue to take place, the stronger our civic society will be, which I am sure is a common aim for many.