Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Dialogue hosted by Shell concerning Sustainable Transport. This is the first time I have participated in one of these web chats where the audience is given the opportunity to propose questions to a panel of senior Shell representatives covering a range of different sectors in the corporation. The website hosting these Dialogues can be found here and the transcript for the discussion should be available shortly.
I initially had reservations about the usefulness of this form of corporation-public interface. I feared that questions would be either asked in advance so that polished responses could be prepared or that only a handful of selected questions will be responded to. This fear was quickly dispelled when it became apparent that the panel were answering all varieties of questions posed to them. Some of the answers were short and lacking the detail I would have liked to see, but for a question and answer session it certainly exceeded my expectations.
