unconference

Going hyperlocal

I had an enjoyable time on Saturday at the Talk About Local unconference, where lots of people involved in hyperlocal websites get together to share stories and experiences and to figure out answers to tricky questions.

There tends to be two angles with hyperlocal – the future of local journalism stuff which I tend to find rather dull; and then the community activist side, which is a bit more interesting.

I enjoyed the session organised by Vicky Sargent on neighbourhood planning and hyperlocals. We’re supporting a local neighbourhood plan initiative with web stuff – see A Plan for Holbeach – and of course there is our site for NALC too.

Vicky has a web tool coming out soon to support local groups in putting together neighbourhood plans – which ought to be pretty useful and I’m looking forward to seeing more on that.

Philip John – a Kind of Digital team member – ran a session proposing the Hyperlocal Alliance, which sounds like a great initiative and you can find out more about that here.

I didn’t run any sessions – I’m not really a hyperlocalist myself and was mainly in listening mode – but I have kicked off a project to openly collaborate on a hyperlocal handbook. Do join in!

The home of GovCamp

Over the past few years, a number of events have happened which could loosely be described as ‘GovCamps’ – taking the barcamp idea of open space style ‘unconferences’ and governmentising it a bit.

Starting with Jeremy’s efforts in 2008, we have since seen two subsequent national level govcamps, and several local versions, in Birmingham, Lincoln, London and Cheltenham.

The next one takes place in York on 12th June – find out more here.

It’s always occurred to me that the GovCamps are something that public sector folk in the UK could really be proud of – proof that a decent number of people are interested in improving things, and that they aren’t afraid to give up their Saturday to do it.

So how to best shout about this activity? Best thing to do is build a website. We had a Ning network – but that was very much dominated by the national, January event, and had a stupid domain name (ukgovweb.org – will be closing at the end of the week) which didn’t come close to describing what it was all about.

So, I had a quick play with WordPress and BuddyPress and produced UKGovCamp.com – a simple social site where people can find out about the GovCamps, see which ones are happening and which are being plotted.

Go and take a look, and get involved! I’ve even written up a 10 point plan for running your own event.

LocalGovCamp London

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.

The Kulture Show

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.

UK GovCamp 2010

The UK govcamp event is happening on the 23rd January. Everyone should have had an email who has a ticket to come – if you think you ought to have had something, but haven’t, please let me know!

It’s an unconference, so if you are coming, please do come prepared to talk about something. Discussions are taking place on the event network, so dip in there if you are feeling low on inspiration.

For those that can’t make it, we’re hoping to have a bunch of active social reporters there on the day, recording words, pictures, sounds and videos. We’ll find a way of pulling them all together for your multimedia pleasure – probably again on the network site.

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