Tag: social network

UKGovCamp 2010 taking shape

After just one day, interest is already starting to build up for January’s barcamp. We have had a tonne of responses to the register of interest form, which is awesome, and have made significant headway in getting the venue arranged.

More on that as soon as I know it.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some gardening on the community site we have set up on Ning. Deleting spammers, starting new conversations and creating some new groups.

We now have specific groups to discuss government data sharing and cloud computing – both hot topics. Make sure you sign up and jump into the conversations about these two topics.

An EU Political MySpace?

From EU Observer:

Plans are being developed to launch a social networking site for MEPs and MPs to boost contacts between politicians across Europe and promote a trans-European democracy.

Myparl.eu – officially to be launched in October – is a website currently under construction that aims to work along the same lines as the popular MySpace or Facebook social networking services, but in addition to linking social contacts is supposed to foster debate about legislative proposals coming both out of Brussels and from national parliaments.

Sounds exciting, eh? Here’s the real belter though:

The site is planned to be open to the public, who will be able to react to the issues with letters to the editor. However, only MPs and MEPs will be able to post comments.

One for the ‘really badly not getting it’ pile.

Online Innovation UK

I’ve been playing around with Ning a little this morning, and am really impressed with it, not least because now users can create subgroups within a community. Add that to blogs, forums, photo and video uploading and plenty of RSS goodness, and you’ve got a pretty comprehensive community platform.

The community I created whilst testing this stuff out is called Online Innovation UK. I had the idea that it might be nice to have a place for everyone to get together, whether public or private sector; and regardless of geographical location within the UK. All you need is to be interested in the application of web technology to make life easier for folk

oiuk

I think this could be really useful, and I hope it isn’t a case of reinventing the wheel. There are probably several groups out there that cover one aspect of this area, but nothing that drags everyone together.

Ning does allow me to send out invites to people to join, but that makes me feel nervous – too close to spam for my liking. So I thought I would try to promote it in a more circumspect way: through my blog, twitter, facebook etc. If nobody joins, then I guess I haven’t lost anything, as amazingly, Ning is free.

If you’d like to connect with other people who are engaged in making use of Web 2.0, Social Media and other web technologies, please visit OIUK and join in.