guardian – Dave Briggs

What I’ve been reading

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Tales of the city: the rise of the local blog – "In its daily blogposts, Spitalfields Life aims to portray the full colour of life in London's East End. But who is the mysterious 'Gentle Author' behind this extraordinary work of social history?"
Apache Cordova – "Apache Cordova is a platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript."
Building Community in your Area? There’s a Handbook for that! – "The Community Organizers Handbook is the one-stop-shop for tips, tricks and how-tos for organizing local communities."
User experience design on new.shropshire.gov.uk – Project WIP – "Our aim is to provide the user with best experience we can possibly give them allowing them to do what they want quickly and easily."
When is an ‘official’ Twitter account not an official Twitter account? | Puffbox.com – "Much consternation in certain political circles this afternoon, as Boris Johnson renames his Twitter account… and takes a quarter of a million people's details over to his election campaign HQ."
The problem with digital politics – "If the major parties get their act together, the next election could be a very interesting time indeed for technology-watchers."
@LiamStacey9 : Tangential Ramblings – "Online hate is a big problem. Children, adults, celebrities and people outside of the public eye are all victims. The trouble is: those that dole out the abuse don’t seem to be the sorts of people who care."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Bookmarks for December 30th through January 9th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Engagement advice – Mick reports on a good list of engagement tips via @govloop
Our Society – "Our Society aims to connect people who are genuinely concerned to move power into communities."
Can you help? – Personal and Self Directed Learning tool – Carl needs your help to develop this neat learning tool.
Digital Inclusion – Time for a rethink? – Great post from Paul on digital inclusion and whether the debate is somewhat behind the times.
Creating democratic, scalable innovation – Great post from @demsoc on the skunkworks debate.
Local gov blogging – ideas for you – Some great blogging ideas from @ingridk
Moving your Infrastructure to the Cloud: How to Maximize Benefits and Avoid Pitfalls – Useful whitepaper on cloud stuff.
Cumbria County Council public consultation – Have your say on council priorities and budget options – Interesting use of Ning for public consultation by Cumbria County Council.
Nick Davies: The Julian Assange Investigation — Let’s Clear the Air of Misinformation – Make no doubt about it – the Wikileaks / Assange situation is a hell of a mess.
The rise of the parish council – Nice little article in the Guardian about very (hyper?) local democracy.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Public Sector Online 2010

psonline

Tomorrow (that’s Monday, 4th October) I’ll be at The Guardian‘s Public Sector Online conference, which looks like it should be a great day.

I’m on at 15:30, for the closing panel titled “Innovation in social media”. Here’s the skinny:

As more people use social networking sites to keep informed, and organisations use them to spread information and market services, what are the best ways for public sector bodies to engage with the public?

The rise in the use of social networks as a line of communication

Twittiquette – best use of Tweets

Twitter as a public service: e.g. Gritterfeeds

Generating and monitoring content – Social media etiquette

Online engagement – encouraging two way usage

Joining me on the panel will be:

Andy Gibson, co-founder, School of Everything and author, Local by Social
Sarah Drummond, founder, mypolice.org
Lauren Currie, director, mypolice.org
Gordon Scobbie, assistant chief constable, West Midlands Police

Which means that, even if nobody else has any fun, at least I’ll get to hang out with some cool people for an hour or so!

If you are attending, do get in touch and let’s meet up! Twitter will probably be the easiest way.