I can’t admit I’ve played with it yet, however my authority has used the DeLib Budget Simulator for a few years, but from the same stable comes CitizenSpace, an open source toolkit for consultation. Their strapline describes it as ‘built for gov by gov’, although I might prefer ‘built with citizens for citizens’, but I can only guess that’s the case?
This type of thing is great for the ad-hoc consultation on individual policies but when it comes to day-to-day services and delivering with citizen focus, I’d still promote the model around what I have called the Citizen Engagement Exchange Nov 2010. There was a recent debate on GovLoop around the term ‘engagement’ and I don’t believe anyone came up with a better one, citizens are still citizens unless we are dealing with them as a community, and in terms of the model, exchange still refers to letting people know what is going on.
The Great E-mancipator 