Dave

OrgLite – an open presentation

The Online Information conference is coming up again in December, and having attended it last year, I was determined to actually present something this time around.

David Wilcox and I have been talking a great deal in recent times about the ideas around ‘organisation lite’ – using social tools, whether on or offline, to help organisations get it right in terms of platforms, roles and worldviews. We thought this would make an excellent topic for a joint presentation.

So, we’ll be talking Shirky, Leadbeater et al, with plenty of real life examples and case studies.

So far, so pretty normal. But we want to try and walk the talk ourselves, and so we are developing our submission, paper and presentation out in the open on a blog. We’ve been doing bits and pieces on there already, but with a week to go till the submissions have to be in, we need to get this out and get others involved.

So, please visit the blog and leave feedback, suggestions and examples of stuff we might be able to use. As we write bits of the paper and develop the presentation, we will be publishing them on the blog for folk to comment on and, hopefully, improve. Everyone involved will, of course, get credit, and we’ll be publishing the finished stuff under Creative Commons, so hopefully everyone will be able to benefit.

Shine Unconference 2008

This weekend there is a really exciting event going on at the Bargehouse in London – it’s simply called Shine.

For three days, The Bargehouse at the heart of London’s Southbank will host a mash-up gathering, an ‘Un’Conference that will invigorate your thinking and give you the practical help to advance your business, whatever stage you’re at.

Long presentations, boring speeches and being trapped in closed rooms are out. Peer-to-peer exchanges, info-snacking and flexible sessions are in.

The content is contributed by participants, and there is no compulsory programme. Make your own event.

Sounds good to me.

Sadly I won’t be able to make it though – I already had a load of fun stuff planned as it’s my birthday on Sunday – but I’ll be getting involved at a distance through the social reporting blog that has been set up by David Wilcox, Nick Temple and Paul Henderson.

They will be posting blog entries, videos, photos and other media on the site, which also aggregates bits on content in the sidebar, like del.icio.us links and twitter posts via hashtags.

All of this can only be brought together with a bit of forward planning with regard to agreeing on a common tag, which for this event is shine2008, perhaps unsurprisingly.

There is also a Qik event page, where you can have the chance to watch some live video streaming from a mobile phone.

Get satisfaction with your council

Jon Bounds has come up with another brilliant idea – using the ‘people powered customer support’ site GetSatisfaction to create a community around the services provided by Birmingham City Council.

So, I thought, could this work for a local council? Imagine time saved by council officials if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available (once someone had explained how to apply for a licence, the information would be there for everyone), imagine a monolithic body “joining the conversation”.

Rather than deciding to attempt to persuade my local council (Birmingham City Council – one of the largest in the UK) that this would be a good idea, I discovered that – as the site is “a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this organization.” – anyone can set a company page up. So I have.

It ill be interesting to see whether the City Council gets involved. I guess it is like a Fix My Street but for all Council services. Might just have to make one for my local council in Kettering…

‘It’s not just video’ at DC10plus

My second post has appeared at the DC10plus blog, on some of the other, non-video elements of our social reporting experiment at the Digital Inclusion conference:

By using tags in this way, it means that anyone can publish content and have it associated with an event or organisation. An alternative would be to create an account to upload content to on each service, but that limits participation only to those with access to that account. By using tags, everyone can get involved…

So, we have put these building blocks in place for the conference, but they are now there to be used forever. Let’s see what the community can make of them.

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