My UKYouthOnline session?

Tim is inviting people to put forward ideas for sessions at the upcoming UKYouthOnline conference on the event’s social network.

I have put forward mine: a social web surgery:

My idea for a session at the unconference is to run a surgery on how youth web projects might work. If people have ideas but aren’t quite sure how they could be put online then I can help out.

This could be an all day session, taking place wherever there is space, or maybe as a more formal designated slot on the programme.

I’m hoping that people are going to be walking around, buzzing with ideas for new ways of using the social web to engage young people. I’ll be on hand to do some digital enabling and help them decide which will be the best tools to use, and how they might go about getting things up and running.

I have already has some positive feedback on the idea. Any more thoughts or suggestions? Leave them in the comments below or on the thread at UKYouthOnline.

Yahoo! Launch Fire Eagle

Yahoo! have launched Fire Eagle, a ‘geo-location platform’. Covering the launch, TechCrunch says:

Fire Eagle allows users to syndicate their positional data to any partner service after updating from a supported device or website. This means that after sending a Pownce message with a geo-tagged photo, I could have Fire Eagle automatically update my current location on my blog and social network profile. Users can opt to disable updates whenever they’d like, and for the especially paranoid, you can even lie about your location.

Sounds interesting, though for me there really are questions around whether I actually want everyone to know where I am all the time. Not that I have anything to hide, of course!

Building democracy with a bug tracker

Tim Davies is a busy boy right now. As well as organising the upcoming UKYouthOnline unconference, he is also flinging his ideas into Building Democracy, the new competition to fund exciting ideas to revitalise people’ interest in participating in UK democracy.

Tim’s idea is for keeping ‘Engagement on Track‘:

Drawing on ideas from bug tracking software and open source software projects this project would look to work with a local authority or public institution to help track the progress of ideas and input from the public through the policy process.

Input from consultations and direct from the public would be logged on the system, with every time ideas are discussed, aggregated, discarded or turned into policy proposals and actions logged – so that the people who provided the input in the first place can come back at any time (or get e-mail updates) to let them know how their input has fed into policy making and change making at the local level.

Great idea! As Tim says, bug tracking works just fine on open source software development projects, so why not with local service related issues?

One point I would make is that just using a current open source bug tracker won’t be much use without a lot of work being done on usability, as they can be really complicated things!

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