An online notebook
The latest in the seemingly unstoppable movement of localgovcamps is happening today, in Cheltenham. It’s subject specific, and is going to be all about project management and that sort of thing.
Great work by the team at Cheltenham Borough Council in throwing this together: Jon Hyde, David Wenban and Fiona Legge, amongst others.
Learning Pool is proud to be sponsoring the event, and you can follow all the action on Twitter via the ppmlgc tag.
Thursday’s LocalGovCamp in London was superbly organised by Anke Holst and her team.
I was involved in one session, which was to by about internet culture and whether that’s the interesting thing local government ought to be taking on board, rather than stressing about whether or not they should be using Twitter.
Flickr credit: Arun Marsh
Rather than just have me drone on for 45 minutes, I thought it would be more interesting to get some views from elsewhere, so I persuaded Huddle’s Kunal Contractor, IDeA’s Ingrid Koehler, and Microsoft’s Dave Coplin to join in for a bit of panel-type session.
It went pretty well, I think it had a different feel to a lot of the other discussions that I’ve been involved in at unconferences. There was plenty of interest and contributions from those in the ‘audience’, which was really nice.
Afterwards, David Wilcox grabbed us all for a chat, in his usual social reportery way:
http://qik.com/video/5272643
There has been a great deal of discussion about the event, on Twitter and on blogs, etc – SocialMention has it all covered.
Another busy week, this one.
On Wednesday, Learning Pool are hosting another local government breakfast meeting, at Coventry City Council’s offices. We’ll have a range of contributors from local authorities, as well as me. Details here – do come if you can.
Thursday is LocalGovCamp day, this time in London. Well done to Anke Holst for organising it all – it promises to be a great day. Mary and I will be there from Learning Pool, and I’m hopefully going to be organising a session around whether councils can feasibly engage with citizens when people within those councils aren’t talking to each other on a regular basis. It’ll be fun, I promise!
Then on Friday, we’ll be hot-footing it back to Learning Pool towers in Derry for the LP Christmas party! Bit belated, but then that should mean we’ll all be well up for it.
A localgovcamp event for project and programme managers is taking place at Cheltenham Borough Council on April 27th, organised by Jon Hyde.
You can find out all you need to know on the event Ning site, or on the Community of Practice (various levels of registration required).
We’ll keep it *very* local so as to not get confused with UKGC10.
This will be an all-day event on (or around) 25 Feb in partnership with IDeA. Venue will be Central London. Exact date and location tbc.
Themes will be relevant to anyone working with local government in the social media/digital engagement space. We are aiming to create spaces for discussion and engagement, the sharing of experiences and creation of new ideas. Conversations are encouraged. We will have lots of parallel sessions and break-out spaces. In the tradition of localgovcamps, you set the agenda in the beginning of the morning and afternoon sessions.
Apart from local authorities, MPs, councillors, ICT and social media specialists, we are inviting arts centres and other local heroes to work with us on involving their existing communities in learning how to engage online.
So even if you’re not able to make it for the whole day, come for however long you can!
You can register for your ticket on the Eventbrite page.