As part of the 2012 IAP2 Australia Leadership Forum an interactive workshop was led by Matt Leighniner, Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) titled 'Online Tools and Long-term Plans for Engagement – A Conversation with Matt Leighninger'
One of the interesting points that was made throughout workshop that often public engagement was generally an ad hoc process undertaken for specific projects with little or no on-going consultation. I spoke about our experiences with our Citizens Panels and how they provided a tool to allow for on-going consultation and engagement with a randomly selected sample group.
Given the amount of time and effort spent on recruitment it makes sense to use every opportunity you can to enable an on-going conversation with communities.