For an RSS Feed click here. Schedule for this 2 day event – 1st day, 2nd day
Personal Democracy Forum Europe 2009

First of all, I’d like to apologize for the lack of original content recently. Been trying hard to strike a balance between studies, attending conferences, keeping up with external demands and also constantly in a battle to gain some sense of personal growth! LOL Anyways, thought I’d drop a post to inform what I’ll be up to this week. I’ll be mostly in Europe, firstly Sweden then followed by Barcelona.

So its been a been a while since LocalGovCamp Lincoln but its never too late to share all those juicy details for all your reading and viewing

I managed to catch up with Helen Williams who is a Socitm Insight Associate as well as a Better Connected Report Reviewer and ask her thoughts on social media in local government.

It was certainly interesting to learn that the Better Connected report will also be reporting on local government social media usage in next year’s report! This is really exciting news for local government from my point of view because as its important to see how we can better local government services online, isn’t it just as important to have a proper and ongoing evaluations on emerging trends and technologies that have an impact on our communities?

The first session was run by Fraser Henderson (Founder and Director of Particitech) who discussed the issues surrounding e-Petitions. Now I wasn’t in this session myself, as I was in the “social networking sites” session (where else would I be …? hehe ;o) ), but I’m gonna have a go at reporting it based on the twitterstream and my own knowledge on this subject! Haha let’s see how well I do ay?

With budget cuts looming, there is a greater need to be more innovative in delivering public services online and self-services can be used to deliver more for less. So local council website s are looking like a more attractive channel to move away from the costly business of servicing customer enquiries via the phone or face-to-face to self-service through the local council website.

So as you guys already know, I was at the LocalGovCamp in Lincoln last Friday and was fortunate enough to talk to Andrew Beeken (in video above), who was “the man of the hour” and ask him about what he thought about the whole unconference. I mean, I personally thought it was great and definitely different from the previous LocalGovCamp in Birmingham just because it was a smaller crowd and we had more time to chat to everyone who was there. Having the capability to network rather effectively and have a more open table discussion, certainly made this LocalGovCamp a more cosy and intimate affair.

Being a student and possibly sometimes out of the loop on innovative things like this, it was refreshing to listen to Joss Winn talk about WriteToReply.org…

A site for commenting on public reports in considerable detail. Texts are broken down into their respective sections for easier consumption. Rather than comment on the text as a whole, you are encouraged to direct comments to specific paragraphs. The full texts for comment are listed on the right under ‘Texts’.

Its quite interesting to see throughout my research that there are still some traditional web ‘thinking’ going on within the public sector that deters them from fully exploiting the new web’s potential and opportunities. But this is not due to the lack in sufficient technology or gadgets.

It all comes down to insufficiency in skills and knowledge on how the new web is demanding more softer social skills and specific technical skills to enhance public services and public sector’s relationship with citizens on the new web.

Some delegates give their feedback on the Digital Engagement Event in London on 6th of October 2009.

I recently attended the Digital Engagement Event organized by Ten Alps Communications and managed to catch up with the Ten Alps Managing Director to ask about what was going on their website that supports their events. They have some improvements lined up that they wish to share with delegates. Hope you’ll find this useful!

While I was at the Digital Engagement Event, I managed to catch up with Nick Appleyard who prepared David Bott’s presentation slides about “Universal connectivity 2012″. Nick is Technology Strategy Board’s Lead Technologist and he talks in detail about the Digital Britain Testbed in this interview.

Take a look at what Michael Cross thought of the Digital Engagement Event held on 6th of October in London.

As mentioned by Adrian Hancock (Socitm MD) in his blog post on the Socitm blog here. I have been assigned to tweet throughout the Socitm’s Annual Conference taking place on the 11th – 13th October in Edinburgh. Check out Adrian’s overview of what we are planning to do for the event from this excerpt from his blog post below..

I met with Liz Azyan early evening (@Liz_Azyan if you are a twitterer) to discuss how Socitm can best use social media at socitm09 (#socitm09). We will be sending live streams from our key sessions which can be followed on our stream (@socitm) as well as Liz’s own and a site constructed specifically for conference output (www.socitm09.net).

There may be a lot of hype around about the benefits or potential benefits of social media but I am fully persuaded that the concept is ‘going places’ and that we will continue to explore how best to use it to the benefit of our members.

This session kicked off with the Chairman’s (@MichaelCross) welcome and introduction speech. I have to say, one of the joys of covering for events like this is getting to meet people like Michael who is an experienced professional journalist.

Michael’s opening remarks points out that this is an interesting time for us and also an important time for issues such as digital inclusion. It was interesting to hear Michael also point out that those challenges might include the possibility of change of government here in Britain. Its a hot topic for some time now and is a great point to ponder on. Its certainly feels like we will be going through some sort of change in school of thought here and everything is up for grabs. And the role of digital engagement will no doubt play a big role in the election coming.

An interview with Josh Bernoff, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Over the past thirteen years, Mr. Bernoff has become one of America’s most frequently quoted research analysts. His analysis, which aims at a deeper understanding of people and how they use technology, has been cited by sources from The Wall St. Journal to “60 Minutes.”

He is the co-author of the book “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies,” which offers myriad data-based strategies for companies that want to harness the power of social technologies like blogs, social networks, and YouTube.

Thanks so much to people at @gasstreetworks, @72prufrocks and @Mari_Browne who have helped to kick off this project!

Need more people to participate though. Find out more about this here in my earlier post. Please send in your pictures to either liz@lgeoresearch.com or tweet me @Liz_Azyan. You can find the ppt “Social Media is” here. So print it out and start writing! Then send it to me ASAP! Deadline is midnight tomorrow!!! (9th October 2009)

Digital Engagement – Empowering Citizens and Government through Digital Innovation

A video created for a presentation to the ACT Minister’s Department, Australia as a means of communicating some of the “life reflecting art reflecting life” aspects of Web 2.0 and modern culture. Video clips are used for education purposes only and used under Fair Use Legislation. No challenge to the trademarks, copyright or intellectual property of the creators is intended.

So another week, there’s another event for LGEO Research to sink its teeth into! This time its the Socitm’s 2009 Conference: Re-inventing local public services – radical thinking, practical solutions. LGEO Research has once again been commissioned to cover an event but the difference here is I am going to be speaking at the event in one of the parallel sessions to Head of IT’s in various local councils across the UK along with Simon Hume (Stratford-on-Avon District Council) and Martin Greenwood (Socitm Insight Programme Manager) on the subject of “Social media: are ICT managers blocking modern ways of working – and is it a problem?”