Online community engagement – It’s a dogs life

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At a recent visit to the vets I read that one year of a dogs life is the equivalent of seven human years. I think a similar comparison could be made about experience in the world of online community engagement.

The online world moves at a fast pace. There’s no point in reading books from the library about online tools for community engagement as there probably aren’t any. And if there were, they’d be out of date.

All of these thoughts led me on to thinking about the phenomenal knowledge and experience someone would have if they’d spent three years working on developing and delivering safe, online spaces for the community to have a say over or debate public policy. Three years ago in online years is a long time.

And that’s part of the reason I’m proud to be associated with Bang the Table. With their dedication and passion for providing straightforward, accessible and safe spaces for the public to discuss decisions that affect them combined with their time spent in what has been a crazy few years of massive growth in Internet usage by millions of Australians, Bang the Table is clearly Australia’s leading online community engagement company.

And of course not forgetting the combined experience in the world of face-to-face community engagement of founders Dr Crispin Butteriss and Matthew Crozier. Collectively they have over 30 years experience in the UK and Australian public sectors (wow, they are old). Their combination of face-to-face knowledge with online expertise is unique.

And the great news is that Crispin, Matt and the team at Bang the Table have produced a fabulous little booklet that shares some of their experience to date. ‘100 Ideas to Help Engage Your Community Online’ is available to download or order through their website. I highly recommend that anyone considering conducting some online community engagement gets hold of a copy! (And if you are worried it’ll go out of date, you can add and view other ideas as they happen via a wiki set up by Craig Thomler here)

And as for me, I love working in association with Bang the Table as our values align and I’m passionate about innovation. And as dog years go, collectively we’re old but incredibly wise.