An online notebook
Be Vocal is
A site about social media for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful.
It’s part of the ‘Birmingham Open City’ project run by Digital Birmingham with a grant from the Timely Information for Citizens programme set up by the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Nick Booth is involved, so it must be good. Here he explains what it is all about:
LocalGovCamp last Saturday was a marvellous day, lots of great conversations and everybody seemed to have a good time.
David Wilcox caught up with me just before lunch for a chat about how things were going:
There has been a load of online coverage of the event, as well as talk of several spin off events too. Find out more on the LocalGovCamp blog.
I can’t think of much other than LocalGovCamp now. Am literally widdly with excitement at what will be a fabulous day.
Despite the disappointment of a few folk having to drop out at this late stage, the demand for places has been such that substitutes have been found – we’re looking at over 120 people turning up to Fazeley Studios on Saturday morning. Fabulous.
Even better will be the great range of talks and discussions taking place. The beauty of open space events is that the agenda is decided by the people attending, so there’s no arbitrary decisions around what people might or might not find interesting. Some of the stuff includes:
…and many others. All of these sessions will be run by people like the people attending them practitioners talking to practitioners, nobody calling themselves experts, just lots of people with a desire to learn and a desire to share.
Don’t forget that even if you can’t be at the event, you can still join in via the blog, the Google Group, twitter and plenty of other online places. Remember, if you are creating online content, make sure you tag it with localgovcamp so we can bring it all together.
I’ve also started a twitter list of everyone attending, so that those new to twitter can find a bunch of useful people to start talking to. If you are coming, please add yourself. If you aren’t, then start following those on the list so you can keep up with what’s happening!
Finally, a few thank yous to people who have been so remarkably helpful in putting this event together: Vicky Sargent of Boilerhouse and Socitm; Nick Booth; Sammy Williams of Birmingham City Council; Kate Manion at Fazeley Studios; and of course everyone who has contributed via the Google Group or on Twitter.
Massive thank-yous as well to the supporters of the event, without whose sponsorship, this would simply have not got off the ground. You can find them listed on the blog’s supporters page. They are all good people, and should be praised for associating themselves with an event which is quite different from most others.
I doubt I will be back here again until after Saturday. Hopefully then I will be writing about what a success the day was, and where we will be going next with this.
Dom at FutureGov has launched the FutureGovNetwork:
We have developed this site as a really straight forward, open and easy to use place to start to capture those things that we all do to improve public services – share stuff we’re all working on wherever we are, look at what other people are doing and, most importantly, talk.
It’s a strikingly uncomplicated looking site, where you create a profile and then post stuff to a common area. Keeping the barriers to entry so low should ensure a high level of takeup.
Dom says of the development of the site:
You’ll notice we have decided to take a pretty unique approach to developing the network, developing it from the bottom up, starting simply and getting ideas from you the users on what we should focus on building next.
So let us know what you think of what we’ve got so far and tell us what else would be useful. We’ll try and make it happen – and quick! – or if we can’t then we’ll tell you why not.
Sounds good to me. I’m here, by the way.