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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The planning for the 2009 Slugger O’Toole Awards has begun in earnest.  The 2008 awards were a terrific success, underlining Slugger‘s status as a blog that is positively engaged with the political process. Where recent press headlines have focussed upon the anti-political nature of some of the more nihilistic high-volume political blogs – and the [...]

The WeMedia PitchIt final have asked me for a 65-word pitch. How does this look? Policybrief aims to help the civic conversation around policy to compete with the often-deafening political debate. We’re building an attractive useable open source web facility to make this happen. It will enable professional producers and users of high-quality policy-related content [...]

A few months ago, I noticed the Ashoka ‘Changemakers’ competition ‘The Power of Us – Re-imagine media‘- an award scheme looking for ideas. I tried out an idea that I’ve been nursing for some years – Policybrief. It’s a site that I had built (badly) back in 2001. It was launched at the ICA by [...]