Month: December 2008

Hotel Yotel

I’m on my way to Stockholm, where I will be doing some social reporting and blog coaching at Cisco’s Public Sector Summit.

I’m flying from Heathrow tomorrow (Monday) morning, at 7.25am and to save myself a bit of hassle I am stopping over tonight so all I have to do is roll out of bed, onto a bus and I should be at terminal five within ten minutes.

I’m staying in the Yotel in terminal four, which specialises in, well, tiny rooms! I knew it was going to be small, but was quite shocked when I walked in the door of my ‘cabin’. I made a quick video with my Flip Ultra to demonstrate just how bijou this room is:

I must say, I have never been quite so scared of falling out of bed!

An open transition

Another Saturday evening post about how the internet can have a positive effect on the way democracy and government operates. This one is straight from the US.

An Open Transition is a site set up by a coalition of folk including Lawrence Lessig, Mozilla and the Participatory Culture Foundation. It states:

President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens. To this end, we offer these three principles to guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government.

Those three principles are:

  1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing
  2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing
  3. Free Competition

There’s also a video explaining things a bit more:

It will be interesting to follow this one, and see what influence it might have.

Us Now

Quite a few folk have been lucky enough to see Us Now, a film made by Banyak Films in association with the RSA. Ivo Gormley directs.

Here is how the film is described on its website:

Us Now is a documentary film project about the power of mass
collaboration, government and the Internet.

Us Now tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the
existing notion of hierarchy. For the first time, it brings together
the fore-most thinkers in the field of participative governance to
describe the future of government.

A great part of the project is that so much material has been made available online. You can see loads of stuff on the Clips page of the Us Now website. I’ve embedded the trailer below, for now.

Any readers of this blog will know that I am passionate about the ways in which advances in web technology can improve the way our democracy and government works. High profile projects like this – trying to draw the thinking together in ways that will get the attention of those not yet involved in the conversation – can only help improve things. Great work.

In a comment on Jeremy’s blog, Ivo mentions the possibility of using the film as the basis of a session at the forthcoming UK government barcamp, next month. What a fantastic idea – sign me up!

Bookmarks for November 26th through December 5th

Stuff I have bookmarked for November 26th through December 5th:

Social networking and other tools of engagement

Here are the slides from my talk at Public Sector Forums in Birmingham yesterday. Hopefully they make some kind of sense…

Engagement through social networking

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: psf)

It was an interesting day and I had some great conversations with delegates. The main issues seem to be – as you might be able to guess – the blocking of social web sites in the workplace, and convincing managers and politicians of the value of this type of work.

Some of the other talks were fascinating – not least Dan Champion‘s accessibility assault on web 2.0, which also provided solutions to some of the problems; and Lincolnshire County Council’s use of advertising on their corporate website as a revenue stream. There are plenty of arguments to be had about that one, I’m sure.

It was also a real pleasure to meet one of the other speakers, Medway Council’s Simon Wakeman, whose excellent blog I have been following for a while. Simon spoke with a good deal of knowledge and authority about how Councils should be approaching the use of the web on mobile devices – which will be an increasingly important channel in the future. You can find Simon’s slides here.

Thanks to Ian Dunmore, Jack Pickard, Ian Cuddy and others for laying on such a great event.

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