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…

Watch the whole of Us Now – now

Us Now is “A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet” and it’s also rather good. Even better, you can now watch all 60 minutes of it. Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo. Once…

WordCampUK 2009: 18-19 July

WordCampUK – the only event in the UK dedicated to the joys of WordPress – will be taking place in Cardiff this year, on 18 and 19 July. You can find out all the details on the official blog, which…

Ofqual’s new commentable report

I’ve being doing some work over the past few months with Ofqual, the regulator of qualifications in the UK. Much of the work has been around how they could use social web technology to work better internally, but I’ve also…

Technologies for participation

I had the pleasure of bumping into Fraser Henderson at the recent Digital Inclusion Conference, where he mentioned an event he was helping to organise with the Consultation Institute, called Technologies for participation. It’s on 21st May at the Holiday…

LocalGovCamp a sell out

I’m delighted to be able to say that all the tickets for next month’s LocalGovCamp have been claimed. This is remarkable: all gone in just over a week! Many thanks for the enthusiasm so many people have shown. If you…

PSFbuzz: Facebook applications

Image credit: Steven Tuck I had a remarkably fun time up in Manchester last week, chairing the Public Sector Forums event at Old Trafford about local government web 2.0 strategies. There was a whole lot of Twitter action during the…

Cultural agoraphobia

John Naughton’s Observer piece this morning is a good one: The cultural agoraphobia from which most of us suffer leads us always to overemphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control, and to overvalue the virtues of order…

Add LGSearch to your browser

LGSearch is a search engine for the UK public sector that I developed quite a while ago. It’s built on Google Custom Search, and isn’t particularly clever, but is rather useful. Anyway, inspired by Simon’s recent efforts on behalf of…

The importance of evaluation

Stephen Hale at the FCO has an excellent, interesting and important post about measuring the success of the London G20 Summit site. With wonderful openness and transparency, Stephen has set out some of the factors by which the site’s success…

Citizen Engagement in Australia

Despina Babbage from the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development in the government of the state of Victoria in Australia emailed me this morning to let me know about her blog, which is all about citizen engagement. It’s well…

Mash the State

Mash the State is a campaign to “encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public.” The first part of the campaign is dedicated to getting local authorities in the UK using RSS…

Day 1 of Councillors Connected

The first day of the Councillors Connected online conference was really successful, with some excellent contributions from a whole host of different people. Here are some of my highlights: A fantastic debate about the meaning of local to different people.…

Councillors connected

Over the next three days, a rather special event is taking place online – a virtual conference for council officers and members to learn about the benefits of using social media to engage with communities. It’s happening on the IDeA…