For the past few months, I’ve been working part of Camden’s webteam in redesigning the new website. The first stage of this project, which is the design (look and feel) of the website is due …

This blog posts highlight some of the other web development blogs within UK’s local government and how they are increasing transparency for citizens.

This blog post talks about the election and features a video on vote on power and useful websites to help you decide your vote.

Just a few weeks ago, Charlie Leadbeater gave a great keynote speech at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe 09 in Barcelona. I had the pleasure of being in the audience as a Google Fellow at this conference. He talked about the cloud culture and its impact on leadership and politics. This post breaks down and summarizes all the important points he made in that speech.

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.

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.

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.