Colin McKay, a Canadian Government communicator and blogger and social media pioneer extraordinaire, has written The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations. It is not a technical guide. More a cultural, managerial guide to avoid the roadblocks set by IT and legal departments. Colin has blogged about it Read more…
Big Kudos to Ideal Government who are hosting Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO, the first blogging Permanent Secretary in the UK. Sir Bonar, perhaps stuck a little in a Civil Service mentality of talking to us, uses his first post to reflect on the "famous talk I always give to Read more…
David Cameron is often accused of being full of hot air and lacking real policies. All the more surprising that the majority of his speech to Conservative Councillors Association last week was devoted to the subject of data standards. He told the councillors that their councils should be publishing data Read more…
Over on the UKIE-dem mailing list and at Designing for a Civil Society, there has been discussion about the BBC relatively new plans to launch an Ultra-Local network of community sites and the closure of the BBC Action Network. Mick Phythian, a Local Government ICT manager from Yorkshire wrote: Working Read more…
Banksy has been held as a shining example of local eDemocracy for a couple of years now. Until now it was the petition that had gathered the most signatories on a council ePetition site. As of this morning a petition to get Bristol City Council to reject a plan to Read more…
The NLGN have just published a paper called 21st Century Democracy – e-petitioning and local government. It is a big title and subject. The author sees e-Petitions as the solution and there is some logic to it, but I feel she places far too much hope in them. ePetitions are Read more…
That’s a fair description of BarCampUKGovweb (although I guess the easy doesn’t apply if you organised – hats off to Jeremy, Emma and co.).
My way of describing BarCamp is that it is a conference without the interminable self-promoting presentations. It is self-organising to the extent that the agenda can and does change right the way through the day and more time is spent discussing and networking than listening to people tell you things you could have read if they’d been bothered to share it online.
More information about BarCampUKGovweb is on PageFlakes.
I want to use this post to make a few comments about the day and to move the conversation forward. This is needed because the one frustration I felt about the day was that everytime the discussion was coming round to solutions and actions someone would pop their head around the door and say
Following the avalanche of emails about the rapid organisation of BarCampUKGovweb is a masterclass in Web2.0 tools. Twitter, Googlegroups, Wiki, Yahoo Pipes, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Slide.com, and my favourite because it brings them together – PageFlakes.