New Director of Digital Engagement

So, Andrew Stott of the Cabinet Office is now the Director of Digital Engagement, responsible for working across gov to "encourage, support and challenge them in moving from communicating to citizens on the web to conversing and collaborating with them through digital technology." So says The Wardman Wire. There's a Guardian article too.

As Mr Stott has done some stirling work getting CivilBlogs and CivilWiki off the ground, I'm hoping he'll be an effective DirDigEng, (his twitter name - 1 tweet to date) -

"I'm delighted to be asked to take up the Director of Digital
Engagement role. Looking forward to building on my #poit work."

(poit being Power of Information Taskforce). Amazing the number of tweets already mentioning his appointment. He's already been picked up on his first tweet by David at Webometric Thoughts - for following only his boss & using a hash tag few people understood. As for him being a "generic civil servant" - he's actually got things moving so far, so I have some faith in him...

It seems he'll be concentrating on developing digital services already in existance - hopefully he won't be pushed into trying to control and 'manage' digital engagement, makings rules, strategies and setting standards as Ron Donaldson suggested on twitter...but he probably will...