In my scarce spare-time, I’ve started work on a non-commercial ‘hyperlocal’ website in my neighbourhood. It has brought home to me just how near-yet-far local social networking is from achieving what it could do. It’s in it’s early stages, but go and have a look at Finchlinks and tell me what you think? The whole [...]

I’ve just had this article published by The Telegraph. Sometimes, it’s only when you read yourself elsewhere that you see that you buried your more important point under less significant ones. “Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are [...]

Memeserver Ltd will be working with Slugger O’Toole, Northern Ireland’s premier political community website to deliver a series of open social media workshops in March 2010. Growing your networks – Tuesday 2nd March 2010 (book) Involving more people in your policymaking processes – Monday 8th March 2010 (book) Promoting conversational communities – Tuesday 23rd March [...]

If you will permit me a small plug for some work I’m doing, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Centre for School Design – a project that was launched on Monday evening by the British Council for School Environments (BCSE). I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now [...]

Via Mick Phythian, I’ve just seen this (shorter version: people don’t use interactive services because it undervalues their time, ‘valuing it at zero’- face-to-face is a more reliable ideal, and the utility calculation has to be positive before people will take online options. If buying something online saves you £20 then you may take the [...]

For quite a number of years, I worked on a project that was intended to produce the killer Content Management System. Basically, the tool that sits at the core of your website, managing the text, images, functionality and layout. My job was to persuade people to use it (and pay for it) so that the [...]

So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be obliged to promote democracy (and the bill is quite prescriptive about the role that the internet will have to play in this). It should make for an interesting seven months. There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent [...]

Last year, I worked on The Slugger O’Toole awards as it’s promoter. You can find a report on last year’s event and download our impact report from here. The idea of ‘catching politicians being good’ is something I’ve been keen on for a long time, and Slugger was the perfect vehicle for this. Mick Fealty [...]

Here’s a bit of advice for local councillors on how to (and how not to) use Facebook. Following the PICamp event at Reboot Britain in July, a number of disputes have been bubbling away around the question of whether local authorities should be producing their own newspapers or not. Here are a few dips into [...]

When new applications like Twitter proliferate, they rapidly become a ‘must have’ in certain circles. If you go to a conference, not having a twitter account excludes you from Kathryn blogged this here a while ago – and I get the impression that it can be fixed if you can get the attention of somone [...]