A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner was “in the early stages of organising a trial government blog. The purpose of the experiment will be to explore the possibilities for government participation in blogging.”
To his credit, Mr Tanner is following through with the same notion of using online forums to encourage participation and seek peoples’ views. Next week he is participating as a guest blogger at Open Forum as part of an interactive, online discussion forum on the topic of better regulation, including how to use technology to regulate better.
Tanner says he is “interested in hearing new ideas and innovations, including better use of information technology to enable continuous regulatory reform.”
There are plenty of politicians who think the idea of genuinely trying to engage the community through blogs and online forums is at best a gimmick and at worst a joke. If you disagree and think politicians should be encouraged to try to use this type of medium more regularly and meaningfully, here’s your chance to do some encouraging.
The forum is open for input now and Lindsay Tanner will be responding to peoples’ submissions throughout next week. It might seem quite a dry topic for many people, but that is what a lot of politics is actually about – serious solid policy consideration. It’s just that most of that gets little attention in the media (or on a lot of political blogs). A dry, wonky topic might could help encourage serious contributions and input, rather than partisan rants and point-scoring which can blight the comments threads of some political blogs. Certainly the early public contributions that have already been put up at time of writing are quite solid and substantive.
