Return of the Mack?

Yes, in the time honoured tradition of  Mark Morisson, and Slim Shady; I have returned. Indeed, I am back.

Where have I been these last 8 months or so?

Could I possibly have been over at NESTA, managing the final stages of the Big Green Challenge and helping set up Jailbrake with the team at sicamp, as well as taking on the role of Chair at OteshaUK whilst simultaneously storing up ideas for allsorts of exciting blogposts that I haven’t had time to write up as yet…?

That sounds about right to me.

Watch this space for some new news and some old news, but definitely no Huey Lewis and the news. There are limits.

Google Maps

So – I’m always going on about the importance of online-to offline transition. Well, its not just me.

Here’s how Google really do maps…

Google Maps

Thanks to DarkRoastedBlend for this…

:)

Public Engagement in Local Government Conference

Went along to speak at an engagement conference yesterday. Here’s a selection of themes that came up around the room in the session I attended:

1. How to avoid the problems presented by traditional ‘town hall’ meetings.
2. Are we ‘marginalising the mainstream’? Engagement funding is targeted at deprived areas (and with good reason) but who else is getting left out at the community level?
3. People still don’t know who represents them – the elected representative to citizen ratio is so high
4. We may be in danger of making communities ‘responsible’ for solving their own problems
5. Tension and confusion between representative and participative democracy – clarity and boundaries needed
6. How do we ‘mainstream’ engagement so it becomes more than a ’3yr wonder’?

I have a few initial ideas and responses to two of those more practical points, others need more thinking-time and discussion. All of them need more heads working on the subject and sharing ideas

The problem with town hall meetings

You could try hosting your meeting in a community venue at more convenient times of day than weekday evenings. With Involve I’ve been working on the Say&Play approach where a school fun day is used as the site for a consultation and so attract mums and dads with caring responsibilites can bring their children with them to the event.

There are lots of different formats other than a Q+A session which can get dominated by the same voices and can put off potential participants at their first meeting. Try a World Cafe perhaps – look at www.peopleandparticipation.net for more ideas to make your meetings more interesting and interactive.

Finding your representative

Online tools are making it much easier for people to find out who their elected representatives are but also to interact with them. Sites like WIMPS are using postcode searches (combined with great video content) to match young people with their representatives. Council websites are catching on too – see Westminster’s postcode search here.

Apart from finding out the name and contact information for your representatives, a whole lot more can be achieved in terms of participation when they go online and seek to engage with communities by blogging. This way a 2-way conversation is instantly made possible.

Here are a few examples of councillors wot blog:

Antonia’s Blog

Ann Garner

Iain Lindley

Hope those quick reflections give some pause for thought. I’ll be picking up on the other issues in separate blogposts in future.

Also will be sharing my presentation on slideshare – as soon as I get the images to work properly! (Who would use new technology eh??)

 

 

 

 

 

Boris Johnson – Cabbies’ favourite mayoral candidate?

A taxi receipt received today … has anyone seen a Ken Livingstone counterpart??

Updated 14thFeb: For comment on this see here

TED 2008 : brains, synthetic life and the worldwide telescope

TED stands for Technology Entertainment Design. Its a conference or more strictly speaking a series of conferences that always has fascinating speakers from the worlds of tech, entertainment, design and far beyond!

The 2008 vids have just begun to be released  including  this talk from Harvard-trained brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. Yes, that is a brain in her hand!

Also, hear from Craig Venter on how close he is to creating synthetic life  for example, bacteria designed from scratch to gobble CO2 and generate advanced fuels.

Finally astronomer Roy Gould unveiled the WorldWide Telescope as created by Microsoft’s Curtis Wong: the WorldWide Telescope. Here’s his talk.

A fascinating mixture of information – and a great example of involving people from ‘beyond the room’ using webcasts.

Green works

This weekend I went to Wembley to buy a chair.

Who cares?

Well, it wasn’t just any old chair, it was a super functional fancy orthapedic office chair.

Still not interested in your chair story…

Ok ok, here’s the relevance. It was from an enormous store house up near Wembley run by an organisation called Greenworks. It  originally came from Rio Tinto’s offices (there’s a sticker on the back of most of the furniture- Rothschild’s gave away some lovely stuff- unsurprisingly!) and cost a mere £80- compared to the £300 price tag when new…

What Greenworks do is to take office furniture from big companies and sell it on to the rest of us at very bargainous prices.

They have a great selection to suit all budgets and they particularly target their services at schools, community and voluntary groups and the charity sector in general – there’s a discount for registered charities.

They have quite a few branches – find one near you.

Great selection, great service and ethos –  spread the word!

Internet and American Life : What kind of web user are you?

Of late I’ve spent some time looking at how different people approach the web – much like offline life, we have quite varying approaches! One of the more interesting resources I  found on my google-journeys is the Pew Typology.

Over at the Pew Internet and American Life Project they have been surveying the way we use the web for some time now and have created a typology system based upon this data.

Take the survey and find out what kind of web user you are.

The  pdf. report is available to download and goes into great detail – but here are some of the topline stats:

• 8% of Americans are deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications
• 23% are heavy, pragmatic tech adopters – they use gadgets to keep up with social networks or be productive at work
• 10% rely on mobile devices for voice, texting, or entertainment
• 10% use information gadgets, but find it a hassle
• 49% of Americans only occasionally use modern gadgetry and many others bristle at electronic connectivity

The types identified are as follows …

• Omnivore, Mobile Centric, Connector, Lackluster Veteran Productivity Enhancer, Infrequent but Hassled, Indifferent, Inexperienced, Experimenter, Light but Satisfied

Where do you fit? Take the survey to find out.

—-

PS. I’m an omnivore – this is also true in real life!

PPS. I actually found the typology result to be very accurate - if you take the test, let me know what you think.

:)

My very own netvibes

After yesterday’s del.icio.us organising fest I’m feeling very sorted – so much so that I finally organised my own netvibes homepage into a more ordered and beautiful looking state now featuring a small grassy field ontop.

If you haven’t come across a page like netvibes or pageflakes before it’s worth checking out – very useful for ordering all of the information that flies at you every day – saves alot of time accessing different sites. Here’s a good explanation as to how it works.

Now I just need to clear up the 1490 unread emails up in the top right corner….. hmm

 Motto: Make the net come to you!

RSS feeds are at the heart of how pages like netvibes work.

See Phil Shapiro’s clear explantion of what RSS is/does for you.