Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to: HELLO CAMPERS: Three years on from the first localgovcamp… so whats changed? – Nice bit of reflection from Dan Slee ahead of Saturday's shindig. Knowledge Hub: A response – Steve Dale…

LocalGovCamp next weekend!

Next Saturday (14th July) sees LocalGovCamp coming back to Birmingham!

It's a great opportunity for innovators across local government to get together, share problems and come up with solutions. It's also an honour (and occasional inducer of panic) to be able to put the event together.

Go off grid but not offline

That nice Mr Briggs has been encouraging me to post some stuff about hardware.

As it happens I’ve been trying out a new piece of ultra-modern hi-tech digital equipment.

No it’s not a MacBook Air, ChromeBook or even one of them new Google tablets.

It is... drum roll... The PowerMonkey Extreme.

Which is basically a back-up battery.

We need to talk about the Knowledge Hub

Or at least, about where people in public service can go to share ideas, ask questions and promote good practice.

Back in the summer of 2006, when I was working as a lowly Risk Management Officer (yes, you read that right) at a county council, I joined the nascent Communities of Practice platform, which was being developed by Steve Dale at the then Improvement and Development Agency.

I thought it was fantastic, and joined in with some gusto – so much so in fact that I did attract a little criticism from colleagues who thought – probably quite rightly – that I ought to have been concentrating on the day job.

Online PR – join in or be left behind

I admit it: I wasn’t always that interested in the internet and social media.

In all honesty I was a tad old-school – I’d started out as a newspaper journalist before the internet really took off, and before social media became mainstream.

Digital democracy: tweeting meetings

I'm giving a talk today at a conference in Norwich for parish and town councils and one of the things I want to do is just to share some really simple ideas on how councils could get some online interactivity going.

One of those ideas was to tweet meetings. I asked my network on Twitter for examples, and was deluged!

The Experience Revolution

Last week I chaired a panel at the Citizen 2012 conference in London. We awere talking about how the internet shapes how people access government services, and what government ought to do about it.