An online notebook
LocalGovCamp is returning!
It will be held on Saturday, July 14th in Birmingham – venue to be confirmed.
Sign up for an early bird ticket here.
Thanks to the UKGovCamp fund and Talk About Local who are early sponsors. If you want to throw some cash at a seriously cool bunch of local government innovators, you know where I am.
I had an enjoyable time on Saturday at the Talk About Local unconference, where lots of people involved in hyperlocal websites get together to share stories and experiences and to figure out answers to tricky questions.
There tends to be two angles with hyperlocal – the future of local journalism stuff which I tend to find rather dull; and then the community activist side, which is a bit more interesting.
I enjoyed the session organised by Vicky Sargent on neighbourhood planning and hyperlocals. We’re supporting a local neighbourhood plan initiative with web stuff – see A Plan for Holbeach – and of course there is our site for NALC too.
Vicky has a web tool coming out soon to support local groups in putting together neighbourhood plans – which ought to be pretty useful and I’m looking forward to seeing more on that.
Philip John – a Kind of Digital team member – ran a session proposing the Hyperlocal Alliance, which sounds like a great initiative and you can find out more about that here.
I didn’t run any sessions – I’m not really a hyperlocalist myself and was mainly in listening mode – but I have kicked off a project to openly collaborate on a hyperlocal handbook. Do join in!
As part of an EU-funded bit of work we are working on with Lincolnshire County Council, we’re running an event in Louth next Saturday to demonstrate a whole range of useful and innovative technology that people working in the creative, cultural and heritage sectors would find especially cool.
You can book your place here. The blurb follows:
Kind of Digital, in co-operation with Lincolnshire County Council are holding a one-off digital demonstrator day for the Arts, Creative and Cultural sector in East Lindsey.
This one day event in Louth offering you the opportunity to connect and participate in some great digital technology demonstrations with top technologists, future-forward practioners and thought leaders.
Get hands-on with cutting edge equipment such as 3D scanners and learn how they can benefit your business. We want you to leave this event, inspired, connected and clued into what digital can mean for your business.
The event will also kick start our consultation into the development of Creative Hubs across East Lindsey, leading to the implementation of new digital technologies to grow local infrastructure, networks and great creative business ideas.
This is part of a series of events in the DigitalLincs programme focused on the development of East Lindsey’s creative industries infrastructure.
Here’s my latest wheeze: an entirely online conference to discuss digital government stuff. It’ll be free too.
Here’s how things will run. There will be two sessions per day, three days a week over 2 weeks – so 12 in total. Right now I am thinking this will be between 7th and 18th May.
Topics under discussion will be stuff like:
The sessions will go live at a certain time, and you’ll be able to watch a video or presentation from the speaker, and then discuss the topic using comments afterwards.
Once the session has gone live, you’ll be able to access and comment whenever you feel like it – although the speaker will only be guaranteed to be around for an hour or two after the session initially goes live (they may well choose to check in now and again after that, though!).
There will also be Twitter chat and so on involved too – in fact pulling together as many online resources as possible.
Obviously, it won’t be perfect – you could spend a lot of money developing a fully interactive online conferencing platform. But this will hopefully work well enough using freely available tools and a bit of WordPress hackery.
Any thoughts?
The group blog collecting people’s thoughts is really good reading.
Lloyd hits the nail on the head here:
We do it this way because it works and because we’ve seen the alternative really fail big time again and again. Because it’s unusual for most of us and outside of our everyday experience, it’s tempting to make two mistakes. One is to think that because it’s the first time we’re doing it, that this is the first time it’s being done – nope – it’s a well-established technique that is probably used somewhere in the world every day to help large groups of people organise their own experience. Secondly it’s tempting to look back at bits of the day that didn’t work for us and think it didn’t work because we got the grid work wrong and therefore we should do it differently next time. This mostly comes up as a suggestion that “just a little bit more structure or pre-planning” is introduced. While I’m sure that we do get things wrong sometimes and there are ways that we can make the process serve us better, I don’t think that it’s a reason to introduce pre-planning. All that pre-planning does, in my experience is make people who are feeling anxious and don’t trust the process think that they will feel better. The answer is to trust the accumulated experience that the process works well – this will give you much more relief from anxiety and will truly make you feel better.