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.