Stephen Blyth's Blog

For quite a while we’ve wanted to get an up-to-date snapshot pressures, concerns, and joys faced by fathers. Mothers tend to be very vocal and find the time to get on to The Couch, but poll results suggeted the dads were not so forthcoming. So, on father’s day we launched a poll asking for replies [...]

According to website 101 advice, regular evaluation of your website is imperative, so is making incremental changes. As June Cohen says in The Unusually Useful Web Book “you launch the site, study how it’s used, and make continual changes to improve it”. Yet as evaluation takes time and effort it’s not always completed in a [...]

Yeeha!! We celebrated the first anniversary of The Couch today. Rebecca pulled together a celebratory breakfast for staff at the Families Commission. With lots of help we cooked up a big pile of pancakes, with lashings of fresh fruit, maple syrup and bacon. While 30 plus staff ate around an extended table, a birthday cake [...]

The Fun family photos promotion the Families Commission ran at the International Cultural Festival in Auckland on 26 February was a real hoot. During the course of the day we took over 250 photos of different familes, friends and other permutations of bodies and faces. I was part of the team cajoling festival goers, handing [...]

It’s gratifying when people notice that you’re doing good work. Last week David Hume, a consultant working for the State Services Commission, said The Couch is “a leading example of online participation in New Zealand”. David is part of a team promoting efforts by government agencies to use the Internet for citizen participation. You can [...]