{"id":1128,"date":"2022-01-21T11:14:59","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T11:14:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/participation\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2022-01-21T11:14:59","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T11:14:59","slug":"engagement-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gov.scot\/participation\/2022\/01\/21\/engagement-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Progressing digital democracy and engagement in Scottish Government"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Digital Engagement Team strategy refresh<\/b><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s coming up to a year since I started working in the Digital Engagement (DE) team at Scottish Government. The DE team is embedded in the wider Communications division and helmed by myself, Ellie Snape<\/a>, <\/span>and the wonderful <\/span>Jen Swan<\/span><\/a>. We offer support and guidance to policy professionals to use digital tools to engage people in decision making and policy creation. We manage the online <\/span>consultation hub<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>crowdsourcing platform<\/span><\/a> for Scottish Government.<\/span><\/p>\n

Democracy is at the heart of what we do. Building trust and strengthening democracy has never been so important. We believe transparency and accountability are a core part of this. We work in the wider context of Scotland\u2019s international role in the <\/span>Open Government Partnership<\/span><\/a> and achieving the <\/span>national outcome<\/span><\/a> of openness. Scotland has a reputation as a leader in public participation. We want to continue to be recognised as an innovative and progressive nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since 2015 when Scottish Government digitised its consultation process, the team have helped deliver over 600 consultations and a variety of public engagement activities. In the early days the team were responsible for building consultations to Citizen Space for policy colleagues. However in 2020 the DE team devolved building consultations to the teams running them. This freed up the team to work more strategically across the organisation. We still provide support and advice to colleagues and make sure each consultation meets our digital accessibility standards. But we spend a lot less time focused on only consultations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new strategy<\/b><\/h2>\n

Having created the space for innovation, it was possible for the team to develop a new strategy. I was lucky enough to come into the team at the right time to work on this. We spent time workshopping with senior leaders to look at what was going well, the challenges we faced, and where we wanted to get to. We came up with our overall strategic goal:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTo enable Scottish Government to involve people using digital technology.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

We broke this down into 4 specific objectives to work towards:<\/span><\/p>\n