In the space of one week Twitter has flexed it muscles and had a significant effect that organisations public and private should wake up to. On Tuesday news came out of the injunction imposed upon the Guardian preventing them from publishing about a Parliamentary Question or even the fact they Read more
I went to see some dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum yesterday. I was there because TalkWiki had gathered speakers such as Tom Reynolds, who blogs at Random Acts of Reality and others. One of the others, Peter Kawalek, from Manchester Business School, mentioned a powerful idea almost in passing. Read more
The Met Police have taken a big step forward and released a Beta Test of a much awaited Crime Map. The interface is very simple and easy-to-use, the information is kinda useful in a crime’s going up/down sort of way. At the sub-ward (6 streets or so) level you can Read more
Sokwanele, a Civic Action Support Group in Zimbabwe, has used Twitter to bring a Flickr group of pictures to the attention of the Prime Minister via his Web team at 10 Downing Street. The pictures are powerful. Sokwanele are using lots of Web2.0 tools to bring their message to a Read more
Steve Webb MP, writes about how he will be breaking new ground in the next few weeks by being allowed to use laptops in committee discussion on the Climate Change Bill. Although the traditionalists will be turning in their graves – and we’ve already been warned not to use our Read more
Tom Watson, blogging MP extraordinaire, was promoted in the Peter Hain aftermath to be a junior minister in the Cabinet Office. According to his blog he has some responsibility for technology projects, which is a good thing because Tom is certainly interested in technology, and he wants to hear from 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
" Having a static website rather than a blog is like having a cardboard cutout of you at a party instead of going yourself." Tim Ireland used this analogy, three or so years ago when we met to discuss how to get more MPs and councillors blogging. There have been Read more
Jeff Littlejohn uses Google Alerts for his work [and quite possibly on his own name too – hope all is well in Bellingham, WA]. Jeff is interested in Community Development and emailed us the day after the YouCanDo Guides website went live asking a question. He has a Google Alert Read more