Stephen Hale

Making the London Summit a 2 month online event

I mentioned last week that we were considering our options for digital engagement in the lead up to the London Summit. I can tell you now where we've got to.

The Prime Minister launched the official London Summit website earlier today (video below). Here it is: www.londonsummit.gov.uk.

There's plenty more to do but we've come a long way - in about 4 weeks we have turned a vague idea into a comprehensive strategy, a functioning website, and a set of tools and partnerships for engagement.

We want the website to be a source of authoritative content, to aggregate content from the debate around the world, and to be a stimulus for - and a home for - debate around the summit issues. So what's on it?

A dynamic multimedia home page that we will refresh every day including, if necessary, at weekends. We haven’t finished with this yet.

The Summit aims section of the site sets the context, describing the background to the crisis and UK positions. This is the most comprehensive part of the website now, and it's unlikely to change that much in the next 2 months.

The Join the debate section is a really a skeleton at the moment, but it will grow organically over the next couple of months as we help direct and respond to the global debate. This will be where we encourage and present the debate, on and off the website. At the moment, we are promoting content from our partnerships with at VoxEU, Yoosk, and the World Economic Forum as well as surfacing the debate from around the world.

We'll use the Global update channel to highlight the debate from around the world. We're well placed in the Foreign Office to use our network of embassies to report on the debate as it happens locally. We need to develop this quickly.

The Media centre will provide journalists with all they need in the lead up to the summit.

We've built all of this on the existing FCO web platform, so at no extra cost to the taxpayer.

Launching a website often feels like an end in itself, but the London Summit website is clearly only the start something - our efforts to stimulate online conversations will undoubtedly increase over the next 2 months.

And of course, the website itself is only part of our digital engagement strategy. I'll post more about the specific engagement exercises as they happen, and I'd welcome your thoughts on what we've done so far, and what else we should be doing.

Posted at 17:09 30 January 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[5]