Not even slightly far fetched as far as I’m concerned.

Thanks for the heads up to the Bham and Seattle thing.
When you posted this I’d have been scrambling my final draft of an MBA dissertation on the subject.

I ran my case study on a hotel in Egypt as a mock community. Trying to find a means of supporting realtime decision making based on informed consent.

I ran an earlier module project on engaging those with accessibility hurdles – both technical and also sensory…

This was for implementation via a paper based tool – on the end of a tech-touchpoint chain.. For use in community centres and also within emergency relief scenarios to rapidly generate contextual insight.

Would love to discuss – as your latest post on agile development chimes with my use of service design process with user stories.

I’ve been gibbering about ‘Development windows’ as realtime consultation process for a while now – great to hear mirrored sentiments.

And thanks to Dave and Walter for enriching the discussion.

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But the principle of making online consultation a much more interactive and rich experience for citizens still stands. There have been some interesting discussions on engagement recently (see Dave Briggs and Tim Davies blogs) about who Councils should and could engage.

There is a serious technical hurdle to your vision which cannot be ignored by councils, namely Microsoft.

Despite being the market leader in the browser wars, Microsoft has only recently made any sounds about implementing HTML 5 on which Wave depends in Internet Explorer.

Anybody accessing a “Wave” using even the latest version of IE will find themselves unable to engage. People are notriously slow at upgrading browsers, with most never changing the one which comes installed on their machine. This is why IE6 remains common and Microsoft have just extended support for this old workhorse well into the next decade.

It would clearly not be right for council to use a consultation tool which cannot be accessed by a sizable proportion of their customers. To say nothing of the fact that few council workers are likely to be provided with sufficiently advanced tools (i.e. Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome) which will allow them to use Google Wave.