Monday 2 February 2009

Yoosk launches dedicated G20 London Summit site.



Yoosk continues to play a part in promoting Government engagement with its new London Summit website.

In his blog for the FCO, Stephen Hale says of their LondonSummit site:

"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 VoxEU, Yoosk, and the World Economic Forum as well as surfacing the debate from around the world....

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."

Gordon Brown is committed to answering questions from the Public (his introductory video to the Government's new website can be seen below) and, as Stephen says, this is only the start, we hope to have more names appearing and agreeing to be interviewed over the next 2 months.

This kind of engagement is something the Americans are very good at (if you don't believe me, check out Barack Obama's YouTube page) and something the government here in the UK appears to want to get better at. There has been some cynicism in the past about the value of these kinds of exercises - "Does anybody listen?" "Does it make a difference?" - well, maybe and maybe not, but clearly, if we want to be involved in the democratic process, we have to ask questions of our Leaders and have to try any means possible to get our ideas across.

Naturally, asking questions of people in power is something we at Yoosk are very passionate about and we would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions for how we can improve the way we go about it. You can leave comments here, or contact us through our "contact" page.