Yoosk goes to Jordan.

By Keith

Recent visitors to yoosk may have been suprised to see a few questions appearing in Arabic script. These were part of a project we ran in conjunction with the British Embassy in Jordan.

Prior to a visit from David Miliband, the Embassy wanted to give the Jordanian public a chance to put questions to the Foreign Secretary and they chose Yoosk as the platform to enable them to do this.

In total, 43 questions were posted and David Miliband answered the top 5. You can see what he was asked, and his answers here. At a time when we clearly need to be opening up dialogue with the people of Middle Eastern countries, we are pleased that the FCO chose Yoosk as their partner.

We are also pleased with how smoothly the event went and for this we need to thank Rana Nejem at the Embassy in Amman who organised the Jordanian side of things and also Manal Nakli for giving up her holiday weekend to help with adding the Arabian subtitles on the video clips. Thanks All!!

What is happiness?

By Keith

What makes you happy? It is an interesting question and one which Matthew Taylor answered rather well here on Yoosk.



This paragraph from a Kezia Dugdale blog post was enough to make us at yoosk happy:

'The beauty of the tools of new media, whether it's twitter, youtube, facebook, yoosk, or blogs is the ability of people to organise, empower and affect change - or simply join a debate about the past, present and future of our country from the comfort of their armchair.'

Thanks Kezia, I hope the founders of twitter, facebook and youtube were similarly proud to be mentioned alongside us!! You can read the whole of Kezia's blog post on the role of blogging and the internet in politics here.

Yoosk win 4IP funding.

By Keith

Yoosk has come a long way since its first incarnation 2 years ago - we've added many new features and improved the original design - we recognise though that there is still much to be done to make Yoosk a truly user-friendly platform.

That is why we are particularly excited to have been chosen as one of the projects 4ip are investing in. Together with Screen West Midlands, 4ip have injected some development cash which is being used to give Yoosk a total makeover.

Made Media are the people we are working with on this and already we are in the process of outlining a new look and planning an easier user journey to asking a question. There's nothing better than having fresh pairs of eyes looking at what we're doing to get us focussed again on the direction we need to be heading.

We hope to get the changes rolling out soon, so, as they say, watch this space...

Yoosklondonsummit.com evaluation.

Well, The London Summit is well and truly over, so time to look back on our summit portal and think about some of the things which worked and some of the things where we can aim to improve.

On the success side, we managed to get answers from 10 of the 15 people we featured on the site, including 6 Ministers. We should also say a big 'Thank You' here to BSN who did an excellent job of filming all the interviews and at sometimes very short notice. Overall there were 491 questions posted on the site and 53 were answered - and this probably amounted to the widest ranging digital engagement exercise of its kind with the UK govt involved.

Disappointments? Yes - two in particular:

1. Gordon Brown declined to answer his questions.
2. We didn't get the level of traffic we would like to have seen.

Some criticisms from various people:

1. We did not provide a balanced cross section of opinion - there were no opposition MP's there.

Yes, this is true but the site was open to anybody to express their opinion and to challenge that of the Govt Ministers who we were questioning. We also had 4 non-govt people who did not represent govt thinking.

2. The Yoosk platform is not as user-friendly as it could be.

Yes, guilty - and this is something we are working on making better.

So, overall, it was an extremely busy time for us and a fantastic opportunity to give the yoosk platform its first real test - we've learnt some important lessons (number one being the value of video-answers) and are looking forward to our next opportunity to put what we've learnt into practice.

We had some intersting and insightful answers along the way and if you would like to see a cross section of some of them, take a look at the video below. If you were one of the online community who used/use yoosk, Thanks to you too, please keep coming back and also tell your friends about us.

If you have any feedback, feel free to add in the comments here or to contact us via the 'contact' form.

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.

Yoosk Vietnam is launched.

Yoosk is spreading its wings and the first overseas site has been launched. Those of you who have been following the progress of Yoosk will know that we have strong ties with Vietnam and this is the country we have chosen for our first overseas site.

The site is being run in partnership with the British Embassy Hanoi and www.vietnamnet.com as part of the celebration of 35 years of diplomatic ties between the two countries and the aim is to allow Vietnamese people to ask questions of people in the public eye in the UK.

The site can be found here.

Already the site has 230 members and has gathered over 100 questions - more than 50% of which have been answered.The site has generated a lot of interest in the Vietnamese Press and we have high hopes that this will kick start a completely Vietnamese version of the site with Vietnamese celebrities and politicians answering the questions.

Watch this space - we'll keep you posted on any developments. Meanwhile British Foreign Secretary David Miliband will be the next public figure to be in the interview spotlight - we're looking forward to seeing what the Vietnamese public will want to ask him!

Yoosk and FCO

Last week Yoosk ran an experiment with the FCO in which the FCO used Yoosk to gather questions from people in Wales. There were some interesting questions and David Miliband answered the top nine of them. You can see the answers here.

Stephen Hale, Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy gives the FCO thoughts on the experiment in his blog here.

For Yoosk it was an exciting challenge and we are proud to have given a voice to the ordinary person and enabled them to have a question put to, and answered by the Foreign Secretary.

We can't claim that it was a total success though as the response - in the number of questions - was disappointing - and some of our coverage on Welsh blogs was negative to say the least. Here I should hold my hands up and say that I am partly responsible as I did send out the same message to several bloggers asking them if they would like to offer their readers a chance to post a question - but lesson learned for me, it won't happen again! Miss Wagstaff was one person who didn't appreciate my email although if you read the comments you can see that she did soften a little..

So where do we go from here? We hope that we can continue giving Yoosk users the chance to put questions to the people in power - it's something which we passionately believe is both necessary and ultimately beneficial to all sides.