Month: May 2009

LocalGovCamp group

Much planning is afoot for LocalGovCamp, the unconference for local government which is taking place on 20th June in Birmingham. All tickets are technically sold out, but if you are desperate to come, email me.

I took a wander around the venue – Fazeley Studios – last Friday and have to say I am really, really impressed. Plenty of space, light and airy and lots of blank white walls for projectors or post-it notes!

Remember – what is keeping this event free, and ensuring it is happening at all, is the terrific sponsorship we have received from a variety of sources. Check out the supporters page for more information on who is involved.

Anyone wanting local information about where to go and where to stay can find it on Jon Bounds’ excellent post.

To get some more discussions going around various issues at the event – including people putting forward ideas for sessions – I’ve created a Google Group for email based conversations.

All those with a ticket should have received an email invite. If you would like to join in the group – even if you can’t make the event – sign up below. Everyone is welcome. Well, not everyone. But you know what I mean.

Google Groups
Subscribe to LocalGovCamp
Email:

Visit this group

Even if you don’t fancy joining this group, I’ll still be pinging the odd email to the attendees list on Eventbrite and adding updates to the main blog, so don’t worry!

Wave power

Google have announced something really rather interesting called Wave.

(Warning: looooooong video)

Essentially,

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Lots of people are very excited about it. Take TechCrunch, for example:

Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale.

What is really interesting is the way that Wave will work as an open standard, with APIs available to developers to make it possible to embed the way Wave does things into other applications.

Of course, before we get too excited about Wave, we need to remember Knol, Sites (which I actually quite like, but no-one else seems to) and Base. Google gets a lot of stuff wrong.

But when they get things right, such as with Gmail and of course search, the results can be devastating. For that reason alone, it’s vital to keep up with Wave and its development.

Tech books

A year or so ago, I wrote about my dead tree web 2.0 reading list, which was all about what books were being published about the interactive web. I’ve bought most of those on the list, plus a bunch of others that folk suggested.

There are other books one can buy about this stuff though, which don’t just talk about the issues and culture of the web, but which actually tell you how to do things.

I don’t tend to buy too many of these, as a lot of the help one needs one can get from the web itself, but I got a couple through the post from Amazon the other day.

Using Drupal is a really good entry level guide to what is a fiendishly complicated, but amazingly powerful CMS. It’s genuinely readable and am really pleased I got it.

Ning for Dummies is a guide to using and setting up your own networks on Ning. As someone who Ninging is entirely based on playing with stuff, it’s great to have a resource to pick up and find out what some of those options I dare not touch do. Again, recommended reading.

One book I have had for a while, which I have to mention here, though, is WordPress for Dummies:

Which isn’t for Dummies at all, in fact it’s for very sensible people. It takes you right the way from setting up a WordPress.com blog to writing your own themes and plugins – awesome stuff.

What techie books do you swear by?

Hyperlocal alliance

Will, Dom and Kalv are starting something that has the potential to become really rather cool.

So where are we going with this? Well we want to know if hyperlocal people in the UK are up for some sort of ‘UK Hyperlocal Alliance’ (working title) dedicated to a positive future for hyperlocal content in the UK. This isn’t an attempt to form a trade body or a union or a lobby group, just a simple web resource where we can sign up to a simple statement of intent, get in touch with each other and tell our stories.

Leave a comment on the post if you want to keep involved…

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