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It’s been a while coming but last month we introduced a new piece of functionality to our forums. Visitors leaving comments now have the option to tick a box asking them whether they’d like to be notified if another visitor leaves a response to one of their comments. To regular users of online forums, this will be nothing new, but in the context of online consultation for government agencies it is a relatively simple change that provides a great many opportunities to enhance the consultation process.
This new functionality will allow ongoing dialogue to develop organically between forum participants. As with all of our functionality and consistent with our general philosophy and modus operandi, the functionality is purely optional. This has two obvious benefits; (1) no spam for participants who are casual visitors and, (2) those users with a genuine interest in taking the conversation further won’t have to keep coming back to the website to check on the broader community’s response to their thoughts. With careful moderation this should lead to deeper dialogue between forum participants about the rationale behind their initial statements.
The second benefit from the addition of this functionality is that it provides an opportunity for our clients to respond directly to individual forum participants. This may come in the form of direct answers to their questions; clarification of the client position on an issue; provision of additional information; redirection to another organisation or source for more information, etc.
The third and for me potentially most exciting outcome of this change is the opportunity it provides for independent forum facilitators to engage participants in a deeper dialogue. Facilitators now have the functionality necessary to ask follow up questions of forum participants; to dig deeper into motivations and assumptions and to flesh out ideas.
We’re very pleased to announce this new functionality. It was added in response to client and participant feedback and demonstrates clearly that our clients are willing to be open to conversation and feedback, and are looking to take online consultation up a notch to create the opportunity for a genuine dialogue.
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