Ukgc12 being totally awesome and inspiring must go without saying. I'm
pretty sure that most comments will be repeating that opinion, so I'll
leave it at that.

Also, using posterous to create a collaborative space to collect and
discuss the points raised and the things learnt is a great idea. I can
now post as and when the maelstrom in my head coalesces into a
coherent thought.

The first of those thoughts is that the government (and local
government) consultation process is broken. I saw this a couple of
times yesterday, once when a group who had been working on defining
what an 'open standard' should mean. And secondly when I naively
suggested that consultation should be a conversational process. I got
laughs.

I understand that the current consultation processes are in place to
prevent policies from being unduly influenced by vested interests, but
the process seems to have solved this by using a very blunt instrument
of pretending that no opinion is yet in place and setting a rule of
'no discourse'. This is obviously a fallacy, but it is more damaging
than that. The people who are running the consultation have usually
(you would hope) amassed a huge wealth of information and knowledge
about the topic being consulted, but are not allowed to share where
their thinking has got them to. The consultees (made up word) have to
start from scratch. This makes the process far more difficult to
participate in for individuals and organisations who have limited time
and resources (i.e. SMEs are excluded). The consultation is therefore
self-limited to smaller set of organisations who can justify the costs
of getting up to speed (or who are already involved) ie. those with
vested interest.

Not only this but the implementation of consultation rarely encourages
discussion between the public. There are a couple of notable
exceptions like the commenting site that was set up for the
consultation on the Digital Economy Bill (however that suffered from
the usual perception of consultations in that it was all sewn up by
private conversations with the lobbying groups.)

The problem, I believe, is that the rules on consultation and the
standard practices for implementing them were put together when
conversations were expensive and difficult to make transparent, open
and inclusive. Today conversation is almost free to facilitate (good
conversations take some effort to manage). Providing background
information and supporting data is pretty trivial and making these
things available to all interest parties, not just those with enough
financial interest, could change the perception of consultations from
box ticking exercises to a real mechanism for collaborating in policy
making.

Isn't it time we looked at consultation again?