London Openspace Notes on Digital Democracy: 28th March 2015
Computer –> mobile telephony –> community concerns
To promote engagement; not replace traditional methods like bums on seats in halls.
Involve more young people in civic life.
Experiment at Pembrokeshire College. Already had electronic suggestion box with 100 suggestions (but do they take any notice). When VocalEyes was added we got 30,000 suggestions. Who took notice?
It is a crowd sourcing idea: debate –> voting –> then individuals can commit to taking things forward. Track to monitor progress.
It works. Gets through the apathy of lack of engagement.
Platform that can be used by students, senior management, unions. It is an idea that might be in opposition to hierarchy. Can be taken forward to a Student Parliament or used to start a Working Group.
Assemblies for Democracy 
It’s great to see VocalEyes Digital Democracy being discussed. In answer to some of your questions, here is a link the most recent case study video: http://about.vocaleyes.org
VocalEyes Digital Democracy is a direct democracy platform for crowdsourcing both strategy and projects, turning good ideas into action. VocalEyes is able to increase efficiency, drive innovation and improve the quality of your stakeholder’s experience within an organisation or community. In doing this it also promotes both active citizenship and entrepreneurship.
Here are a few examples in the education sector:
Pembrokeshire College staff identified approximately 28.5k of savings within 6 weeks as they now use VocalEyes to underpin their institutional planning
The college also transformed their engagement with students capturing over 26,000 interactions in the first year using VocalEyes for their Learner Voice process.
University of Wales, Trinity St David actioned over 40 ideas suggested by their students within the first 6 months and now have one of their highest ever increases in their annual student satisfaction survey.
You may also find this document useful as it has info and links to publicity materials, case studies and features of the application.
http://tinyurl.com/vocaleyes-marketing-features
Here are some other links for more info:
Features: http://about.vocaleyes.org/vocaleyes-features
Digital Democracy: http://about.vocaleyes.org/digital-democracy
Flier: http://about.vocaleyes.org/vocaleyes-flier/
Brochure: http://tinyurl.com/vocaleyes-brochure
Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/vocaleyes.ideas.into.action
Twitter https://twitter.com/vocaleyesuk
Cheers
Peter
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