I’m often advising councils that conversations happen in the community and they can’t force them to happen where they want them to happen. We’ve suffered from this in the past couple of days. Having posted a 3 minute video about I’m a Councillor on YouTube we were keeping our fingers Read more…
The reason for me being at the symposium was to take part in the final session on Thursday. Tom Gaskin from NorfolkBlurb forced young people onto the agenda and was asked to organise a session on empowering young people. A couple of phone calls later and I was going to Read more…
You spend £1,000s on developing an advertising strategy, £100,000 on creating some TV ads, £1,000,000’s on advertising slots and some students from Poynton High create an homage on Facebook to "one of the greatest drama teacher’s" ever. For FREE. You can’t buy this type of marketing and that is why Read more…
A bit like the proverbial buses – you wait all year for an eDemocracy event and then suddenly three (and then some) appear at once.
Yesterday Sophia and I nipped across to the bright lights of Bristol and the Watershed for the Modern Methods of governance – democracy in action or mob rule?. (A Webcast has been promised).
We heard from Tom Steinberg of MySociety about how ePetitions and "golden pages" can help draw people into engaging with democracy and government. A view that was put forward in our evaluation of ePetitioner for ICELE (page 8). Mary Reid continued on ePetitions and Mike Brewin added some Bristol detail. Ian Wiebkin from Kirklees Council presented the DigiTV project and the imminent digital switchover was hailed as a potential tipping point when interactive TV services could become mainstream. I am currently sceptical about interactive services on TV and the figures that Ian was able quote from Sky were not comforting. 90% of Sky users have used the interactive service at some point, but nothing about how often they used them and what for. Personally I don’t know anyone who has ever used digital TV to access a non-TV service, yet last night in the pub (not a Hoxton digirati crew) we found that Mr T, the farmer, was on Facebook and for the next hour a masterclass on social networking and virtual knickers ensued. I have never heard that buzz about interactive TV services.