Since the launch of PICamp in late May, a number of important themes have been highlighted and addressed. The main one, it seems, is the small-p political nature of  many changes that are happening at the moment – changes that are brought about by the rapid take-up of usergenerated content tools. These have been fleshed [...]

In Belfast earlier this week, working on the inaugural PICamp – the Political Innovation Camp alongside Amplified 09. We had some great coverage from the BBC’s Hearts & Minds programme – Nothern Ireland’s Thursday evening political slot.     This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required [...]

On Tuesday, I’ll be in Belfast (un)organising an Unconference called PICamp – the Political Innovation Camp. I’m working with the Slugger O’Toole weblog and Amplified ’09 in doing this, and we’re hoping to have sixteen sessions (that’s how many we have time and space for) – each one initiated by attendees. The most exciting thing [...]

If you want to get an idea of the value of Twitter, here’s my experience in establishing an ‘unconference‘ and publicising it quickly and cheaply.  Last week, myself and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole launched PICamp. We did it using a free-of-charge Ning website and the whole development took about an hour – soup-to-nuts (as they [...]

I’ve written a post over on the Common Endeavour political weblog about the problem with policy-deliberation and how it may result in the ideal solution to the people-won’t-pay-for-content-anymore problem.

Tim Davies has written a post about the kind of obstacles that get in the way of organisations in promoting interactivity. He has then spun it out into a Wiki. It’s quite a brilliant idea of Tim’s and I’ve written about it here on the Local Democracy blog. My shorter version of a long post [...]

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be promoting and working on ‘picamp’ – the political innovation camp event in Belfast on the 26th of May. This project is being done in conjunction with the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole, with NESTA-sponsored Amplified ’09 and Queens University Belfast who have kindly allowed us [...]

One weakness of the name ‘memeserver’ is that you have to spell it out a lot on the phone. “Nemeserver?” or “mem-server?” are the two common ones but there are plenty more. Initially, I thought this pointed to a poor choice of name (or name …. FAIL! as one popular viral would have it). But [...]

I meant to post this ‘20 signs you don’t want a social media project’ post when it appeared before Christmas, but for some reason I didn’t. It’s a response to Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘20 signs you don’t want that web design project‘ post – one that it a great deal more familliar. I can vouch for [...]

Here is the text from a speech I’m giving today at the opengov conference as part of a panel discussion. (Update – my co-panelist Steph Gray has posted his outline here). The text below includes links to articles elsewhere that flesh out the relevant points in more detail. Most political scientists are still agreed that highly [...]