Making online consultation easy

Last week the New Zealand Police launched a wiki inviting comment and ideas from the public on the new Policing Act.

The response to the wiki was overwhelming with the wiki being suspended after 3 days of being open to the public. It’s fantastic to see the Police embracing such and open and democratic process. A brief look around the wiki quickly threw up examples of irreverence and satire. It’s disappointing that the public haven’t taken full advantage of the opportunity presented. Congratulations to the New Zealand Police on their willingness to engage the public.

This month we have added two great new features to Sonar, Likert scale questions and Spider charts.

Likert scales allow you to gather subjective and objective information from your audience. Sonar enables you to easily create Likert scales of as many points as needed. A default set can be set to make creating your Likert questions quick and easy.

To display the answers graphically we have adopted spider charts (sometimes referred to as radar charts). Log in to the online demo to see how they work and try your own. We look forward to your feedback on these great new features.

To make it easier to meet the e-Govt web guidelines we have recently added an audit trail to Sonar. This enables administrators to easily see when a change was made and by whom. If needed these changes can be “rolled back” to an earlier version.

We are adding exciting new features over the next month and welcome your feedback.

The GOVIS 2007 conference which begins on the Wednesday the 9th of May 2007 is focused on innovation in ICT. The lineup looks fantastic and the conference will be an excellent opportunity to catch up with developments within the government sector as well as trends in the wider IT sector.

Stephen Blyth of the Families Commission is presenting “Families on The Couch: heading online to hear from New Zealand” on the second day of the conference. This will be an excellent opportunity to hear first hand about managing and implementing a national e-democracy project.

Innovative approach to sharing and receiving content sets NZLive.com apart from other finalists.

This years judges for the TUANZ Business Internet Awards selected The Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s web site NZlive.com as the winner of the information category.

“It’s really encouraging to see some recognition for local Web 2.0 initiatives, and providers of such valuable cultural content” says Nathan Donaldson, from Boost New Media, a fellow information category finalist.

The Couch has made the finalists in the information section of the TUANZ Business Internet Awards.

Announced last week on the TUANZ website, The Couch is up against some fierce competition including NZLive.com and Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony to be held on 21st November.

Welcome, in the coming weeks we will be adding live demos of both the administration area and the public-facing side of Sonar. This will enable you to experience first hand how easy it is to use and administer Sonar polls.