Press Release

Muscat Governorate Conducts Workshop on Digital Community Engagement

15/09/2026

        Muscat Governorate today conducted a workshop on Digital Community Engagement, delivered by the Communication Management and Digital Access Team under the Digital Transformation Committee at Muscat Governorate. The workshop aimed to raise consciousness of the concept of digital engagement and utilise its tools to listen to the views and needs of the community, and to benefit from them in developing services and policies and supporting decision-making.

      The workshop addressed the concept of digital community engagement and its importance in providing the community members with opportunities to express their views, submit suggestions, evaluate services, identify needs, and contribute to developing services and policies. It explored the levels of digital engagement, which include providing information, consultation, and active participation in decision-making.

      The workshop highlighted the key principles of digital engagement, foremost among them aligning engagement with government priorities and directions, reaching target groups, providing genuine opportunities for expression and communication, promoting openness and transparency, ensuring inclusive participation, and employing appropriate technologies and methods innovatively.

     The workshop presented a methodology for selecting digital engagement tools, starting with identifying the objective, target group and level of engagement, followed by selecting the appropriate tool, whether surveys, polls, receiving suggestions, discussions, and evaluations or voting, with a focus on how to utilise and benefit from the results.

   The workshop emphasised that community engagement does not end with collecting views, but extends to analysing contributions, evaluating their outcomes and measuring their impact. This enables insights to be utilised to improve services, address challenges and support the decision-making process.

      The workshop also addressed key practices that may limit the effectiveness of engagement, including a lack of clarity regarding the objective, selecting an engagement tool before determining its purpose, failing to identify the target group, collecting contributions without analysing or utilising their results, and failing to inform the community of what has been done in response to their contributions.

     This workshop further discussed mechanisms for enhancing the continuity of digital community engagement by raising issues related to community needs, diversifying areas of engagement and implementing them periodically, benefiting from the results of previous engagement activities, documenting success stories, and publishing the outcomes and impact achieved.

    This workshop concluded by reviewing indicators for measuring the success of digital engagement, including the participation rate, the quality of contributions, and the extent to which insights are utilised in developing policies and services. This contributes to moving beyond merely collecting views towards achieving a tangible impact through community participation.