The quad!

This time last week I was on my way to meet my Northern Irish, English and Scottish Outreach (collectively known as the quad) counterparts in Edinburgh…weaving through the crowds on the Royal Mile who had gathered for the Edinburgh Fringe, getting angry looks from passers by as I accidentally rolled over their feet with my suitcase…oh, and I did walk by what has to be the best named restaurant in the whole of Scotland…

Despite the fact that our teams and services vary slightly in terms of which specific team delivers what, and what our teams are labelled as, the challenges were very familiar to all of us. It was interesting to see how each of us had progressed different areas of work more than others, which meant that we could learn from those around the table. All very timely as from a personal perspective I’m currently working on developing the Assembly’s public engagement strategy for the next 5 years, and though we pride ourselves on the work we do around citizen engagement in committee scrutiny (see these blogs I wrote on the National Assembly for Wales blog), there are certainly lessons I learnt from the crew in the various engagement projects they run.

So after a day of sharing examples (good and bad!) and suggesting ways around each other’s issues, we agreed that the big challenges that we faced, which we would look to focus on in the future were:

• The importance of recognising the need to meet the needs and manage expectations of the public and elected representatives when delivering engagement activities
• Engaging people on issues, and recognising that committee inquiries present excellent opportunities to engage people in the work of the Assembly/Parliament — even if people don’t consider themselves to engage in ‘Politics’, engaging citizens in committee inquiries provides elected representatives with a greater diversity of evidence, and (hopefully) encouraging longer term democratic participation and citizenship
• Ensuring the way in which we feedback to participants in engagement work is systematic and effective
• Moving from measuring the number of engagement activities we deliver to measuring the impact and the effect of our engagement in the short to medium term (using the questions posed in the Hansard audit of political engagement as a barometer)
• Effective objective setting and managing contributors expectations of what participation in different engagement activities can achieve
• The need to better manage people’s information across departments, so that we can engage with citizens on a longer term basis and make them aware of participation opportunities
• Brexit and other opportunities for cross parliamentary working
• How emerging technologies can support engagement (some examples from the NAtional Assembly for Wales below), and how we evaluate the effectiveness of our engagement programmes

I also managed to get a quick nosey inside the debating chamber…

So lots of things to follow up on. Whilst we as a collective can help each other based on our experiences and skills, we agreed that we will need to bring in external expertise in on some of the issues mentioned above, so if thats you, please get in touch by commenting on this blog below.