Participation

What we do

March 2, 2015 by Leah Lockhart No Comments | Category Our work

The Digital Engagement Team at Scottish Government is giving hands on support and guidance to policy professionals to learn to use digital tools to be more transparent, more collaborative and more creative. We are encouraging greater citizen engagement, helping colleagues reach and engage more people through the web and social media.

We are small but perfectly formed with just four members: Christian Storstein, Chris Connolly, Eachann Gilles and Leah Lockhart. We have only been together a few months, and one of the first things we did was put together our offer to Scottish Government colleagues and the result is a kind of internal consultancy service. We are using our Yammer network and word of mouth to let people know we’re open for business. Whatever people need to get their digital engagement work started – from sandbox sessions, strategic advice or creating an online consultation – we are here to make the learning and planning painless and meaningful.

We are part of a larger Digital Communications Programme that includes redeveloping our intranet, corporate website (gov.scot) and getting to the bottom of some of the cultural and technological barriers to becoming a more open and accessible government.

We have our work cut out for us, but we’re ready. Opening up dialogue, working in more transparent ways and learning how to use digital tools all mean new ways of working, and this will take time. We are going to be running a series of workshops and learning sessions for a fortnight in March that we hope will surface people who are keen to start working on their digital engagement plans or who are at least ready to improve their skills and capabilities. We’ll be publishing what we get up to here regularly so do subscribe and keep up with us on Twitter.

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