What it was:

Talk on current Digital Participation and Engagement at Government Communications Network (GCN), 19 October 2010.

What I learned:

Government Departments should make their data more attractive if they want to help get their messages across.
Engage people in finding out for themselves. Show don’t tell. “Interactify” the data if possible.
Interactive data visualisations are not about ‘telling’ but about the ‘learning journey’ your visitors will follow.
Make it about them – for example “Your CO2 footprint”, “Your spending review” etc.
Capture your visitors’ data (how they moved the sliders, etc.) – it is valuable in its own right.
Agencies can be used generate bespoke visualisations.
Don’t lose the opportunity to get data out there and use it to tell your story – or someone else will mine it to tell a different story.
We can use visualisations in internal as well as external policy development.
Be clear what is success – useful end ideas / leads? Or simply the number of comments?

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

Use visualisations and use data to tell the story more in future