Stuff I have bookmarked for October 30th through November 6th:
- Change.gov – Obama's pre-inauguration website. *Great* URL!
- Sunderland Community BarCamp – Sunderland Council appear to be hosting their own Barcamp. Crazy!
- Innovation Catalyst | The Young Foundation – "Despite all the good work of the last decade in local government, there is still a need within the sector to develop new approaches to delivery if we are going to meet the challenges facing public services both now and in the future."
- The cynicism at the heart of the communities agenda – "With this in mind, the proposed duty on local authorities to "promote democracy" is not only a curiously bloodless way of engaging the disengaged. More worrying is the notion that democracy can be imposed by diktat. This authoritarian bent to the communities agenda reveals a thinly veiled attempt to paper over the exhaustion of politics and the increasing isolation of a clueless and desparate political class. "
- Demos | Publications | Network Citizens – "humans are social animals, spinning intricate webs of relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbours and enemies. These networks have always been with us, but the advance of networking technologies, changes to our interconnected economy and an altering job market have super-charged the power of networking, catapulting it to the heart of organisational thinking."
Change.gov is a great site, but it is a bit disappointing that while asking for ideas, it does not let you see the ideas of others. I am afraid that suggests to me that the input is mainly a PR-exercise. Even if you deeply believed in listening to citizen input, how could asking large numbers of people to send you random ideas really contribute to drawing up your programme?
Paul, you are right of course, and I have always been deeply suspicious of whether Obama’s use of the web in a social, collaborative way will last once he is in government.
A good example of this was in the UK with the campaigns for the Labour deputy leadership, a few of which featured some cool webby stuff, not least Alan Johnson’s. Did he carry this through into his government work afterwards? Nope.