Designing for Civil Society

Do e-petitions make a real difference? We may never know

The e-democracy project with the biggest media and political impact over the past year has been the No 10 e-petitions project ... but we may never know whether it made much difference to democracy.

At the recent e-democracy 07 conference Professor Stephen Coleman was pretty scathing about the system because it isn't clear what happens after people have posted their petition, and collected support online. It disappears into the government machine, but no-one knows whether policies change. Jimmy Leach, the No 10 civil servant responsible for introducing the system, was at the conference, and Stephen pressed him hard on the question of an evaluation study. Jimmy said something was being planned with mySociety, who designed the system .... and it would be independent.
It now seems that any study has been dropped and the whole thing is something of a mystery to mySociety too. The  E-Government Bulletin, produced by conference organisers Headstar, reports:

E-Petitions Review Plan Shelved By Downing Street.

Plans for an independent review of the Prime Minister's e-petitions system have been shelved following the departure of Downing Street head of digital communications Jimmy Leach to join a PR agency, E- Government Bulletin has learned.
At this month's e-Democracy '07 conference, hosted by the bulletin, keynote speaker Professor Stephen Coleman of Leeds University blasted the lack of an independent report into the first six months of the e-petition system. The e-petitions had captured the headlines, particularly in relation to road pricing trials, but there needed to be proper analysis of what types of person engaged with the process and what its results had been, Coleman said.
"Has there been a report? If not, it is just a gimmick. If there is, and it is now languishing on the desks of civil servants, then what does that say about transparency and integrity?"
At the time, Leach responded by saying an independent academic report would be commissioned and published in the months to come.
However, E-Government Bulletin understands that such a report has yet to be commissioned, and all plans have been shelved following Leach's departure this week.
The record of the Downing Street electronic petitions system was defended by Leach at the conference as a useful tool among many for gauging citizens' views.
"It had its uses and had its impacts, but it shouldn't and won't be the only solution favoured by government. It is a digital manifestation of a single strand of the constitution."
And while there was no direct line between electronic petitions and Parliamentary debate - just as with paper petitions - he said the triggering of a policy reply from a civil servant to all petitions signed by more than 200 people had already represented a significant cultural shift in government.
"It has been quite a shift, to have civil servants sit down and explain why they are doing something. So far, three and a half million people have received answers. If we were to do that physically it would cost £1 a letter, which would be unsustainable. But we have spent so far £140,000 on this."
Meanwhile, the House of Commons moved a step further to installing its own electronic petitions system this month, with the announcement of a new inquiry into the topic by its Procedure Committee. The committee proposes that electronic petitions to Parliament would have the same status as paper petitions, and is seeking views on how the process could work. For details see: http://fastlink.headstar.com/parl3 .

The question of the evaluation study was raised on the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, where Tom Steinberg of mySociety says he knew nothing of the plans announced by Jimmy Leach. Message thread here. Tom adds:

We're just starting to conduct an independent evaluation of our own sites, some of which are 3 years old, having systematically failed to find an academic partner willing to take on the cost of doing this before then. So I can't be too holier-than-thou on this front.
Obviously it's a site worth evaluating though, so I'll ask about it.

I was at the conference doing some video blogging on behalf of Headstar, as you can see here. Further specific links below, where I have reposted to this blog.

Interviews with Jimmy Leach and Ann Macintosh on Westminster and Scottish e-petition systems
Stephen Coleman on people's loss of trust in politics and TV
Publictechnology.net provides an overview of the first year of operation of the e-petitions site
Other posts about e-democracy on this blog

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

Ross rounds up UK Government & Social Media initiatives

Ross Ferguson, until recently the Director of the Hansard Society's eDemocracy programme, has now returned to his native Scotland to work at Dog Digital, started a blog, and is able to offer us some useful insights from his new perspective away from the Westminster bustle.
I talked to Ross at the e-democracy 07 conference just before he left, when he reflected on the past few years in e-democracy. Steady progress made, he felt, but in order to achieve more a greater number of politicians need to engage with the possibilities offered by engagement online. At present developments were too often  driven by officials, companies and activists. Gaining more commitment would involve paying more attention to the way that online working can integrate with politicians'  day-to-day work - rather than focussing solely on their external communications.

Click To Play

Ross has now posted a piece to his blog - UK Government & Social Media… Ones to Watch - which gives us a round-up of initiatives that he sees as promising.

I was lucky enough to start work with the UK Government just as it began to take an interest in what we are now/currently calling social media. That was 2005 and there was hardly anything happening. Today, it's a different story.

With a host of initiatives on the go, I thought I'd pick out 10 that I think are particularly interesting:

1. Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea floating about waiting to happen, and Jeremy Gould got it off the ground. It's the first event of its kind for government.
2. National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components. The issue is meaty and its an intriguing opportunity for NHS stakeholders to direct its development. But will the people come? And how will the government tie up their online with the offline activity?
3. Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get in on the action and duly did.
4. Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities, being led out of the GCN, is taking on the challenge of helping an area of government so used to controlling the message to adapt to a new communications environment.
5. Downing Street - it's use of ePetitions was the biggest UK eDemocracy story yet. But will it see out the winter? Well, yes, but with parliament planning its own online petitions system, will time be called on the government's biggest and most infamous social media experiment yet?
6. Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software. The CLG was one of the first departments to make a conscious effort to utilise social media. The use of deliberative forums by a range of policy teams is worth watching alone, then you factor in the blogs and wikis and you start to realise the importance of this department's activity.
7. Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with the government data, has been made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.
8. DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK's web users have accessed government services via DirectGov. So, where to now? Is there room for a social media angle in the next phase of development?
9. Ministry of Justice - OK, I'm a bit bias but Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain since all this social media interest kicked off.
10. SS/SIS - a bit of a flippant inclusion. I've no idea what they're doing with social media but whatever it is, it's bound to be worth keeping an eye on.

Please flag up any others you know about. Maybe there's some similar stuff going on elsewhere in this big globe of ours.

You can see other videos from the e-democracy conference across on the Headstar e-government bulletin live blog.

Technorati Tags: democracy, e-democracy, e-democracy07, politics, e-government

RSA launches re-invention, gracefully

If you are interested in the process of re-inventing the 250-year-old RSA,  which is being led by Matthew Taylor, do take a look at the OpenRSA blog where I've posted videos from the Networks event last week.

Some 250 members (Fellows) spent a day in Open Space sessions facilitated by Sean Blair, and in that time came up with scores of projects for the planned civic innovation network that is Matthew's vision for the future.
I thought that the whole thing went extraordinarily well. It had been planned for months by Susan Butler and other staff, and project ideas will now be taken forward by Fellows assisted by network facilitators. There's an online system developed by Saul Albert and Andy Gibson where Fellows can propose projects, discuss, and organise meetings. As you'll see here, Saul and Andy put a lot of effort into prototyping.

There's a lot of issues to be resolved, including how far the online system is open or Fellows-only, (for now registration is open) and how far Fellows will self-organise to move things forward. As Charles Leadbetter reminded us in an opening presentation, there's a lot of social structure needed for effective mass collaboration ... but dealing with those challenges is all part of the collaborative re-invention process, which is funded by NESTA as part of their Connect programme.

It wasn't all serious. As Mick Fealty reports on the official RSA Networks blog:

The plenary last night in the Great Hall was abuzz from start to finish, but last word goes to Angus Stewart who noted that it had been a great day and that everyone was polite and pleasant. "But the one thing that's missing is any disgraceful behaviour. There seems to be an assumption that this place has always been a mausoleum, but when I joined as a young man in the early sixties, it was full of life with politicians and other public figures running about the place. They were people who had been through the war and they knew the value of their own life, and they weren't afraid to say what they meant."

At which point we removed to the vaults for a drink, and some practice.  Well, maybe next time. It was a long day.
If you want to join in, here's where to go. If you are just interested in how an old-style membership organisation can use a mix of face-to-face and online social networking tools to re-invent themselves, we will offer a window through OpenRSA blog and wiki. Personally I reckon it is worth a £140 membership fee for a front seat (US readers check in here.)

Previous posts here on re-inventing the RSA (scroll to the bottom to start)

Technorati Tags: openrsa, rsa, rsanetworks

Free software reads the web for blind

Click to Play

One of the most interesting people I met at the e-democracy 07 conference was Roger Wilson-Hinds, who was demonstrating some amazing screen-reading software for blind and visually impaired people called Thunder. Amazing because Thunder works really well, and because it is free.
Roger explained to me that in the past such software has cost £700, but he and his wife Margaret are passionately devoted to providing it free to any blind person. They cover their costs by undertaking project work, which in their first year has brought in £150,000. Both Roger and Margaret are blind.
What they need now are public bodies and others to work with them on promoting the software, and also making their own sites more accessible.
You can download the software from Screenreader.net - currently only Windows - and read more from Roger at The Blind Blogger.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

Cisco champions the Connected Republic - and its citizens

Click to Play or go to blip.tv

Some of the strongest advocacy for the democratic power of online networks that I heard at the e-democracy conference 07 was embodied in the work of a private sector company - Cisco Systems.
As Professor Stephen Coleman says in his interview it is the people-to-people power of networking rather than the institution-to-people connection that is proving most powerful these days. Cisco agrees.
Cisco weren't making a great fuss about their proposals, but I was struck by the clarity of the White Paper The Connected Republic 2.0 that they produced recently, and the associated web site. It is a set of resources and a community space for "anyone interested in exploring how connectivity can help transform public services."
The White Paper sets out three imperatives:

• Use the network as a platform for collaboration and creativity
• Make the best use of all available expertise and and experience by "empowering the edge".
• Harness the "Power of Us" to create knowledge, solve problems, and deliver better services.

One of the authors of the paper, Paul Johnston, Head of Cisco's European Public Sector Team, was at the conference chairing a session, so I was able to asked him to elaborate.
He explained that Cisco aims to explain to the public sector - who are of course, major customers - just what the implications of the networked world are. In doing that, Cisco recognised they couldn't just talk it all up, they had to set up a networky site to engage with other people with similar interests. They see it as a voyage of discovery.
Paul is blogging on the site, demonstrating he is prepared to take a critical look the way things are going at present:

The final session had three UK politicians (Andrew Miller, Theresa May and Ed Davey) giving their thoughts on e-democracy. Not surprisingly, they were strongly focussed on the use of Web 2.0 by politicians, political parties and representative assemblies and all three of them made clear that they wanted to embrace these tools. None of them of them, however, seemed to have much sense of the real transformational possibility of Web 2.0. There was very little sense of the scope for opening up all sorts of decisions to public scrutiny and public involvement. It was much more a case of - how can some of these tools give a bit of a boost to our existing democratic processes? Not surprising but it does show there is still a huge amount of work to do in getting people to see the real possibilities of a connected world.
More generally, the conference was a lively event, but there seemed to be quite a lot of ambiguity about what e-democracy really was and could deliver. Professor Stephen Coleman made a typically challenging speech where he called for more e-democracy projects that involved real deliberation and generally more rigorous analysis of the impact different e-democracy projects had had. Interestingly, he wondered whether a key aspect of e-democracy was really citizen-citizen rather than citizen-government. In other words (if I understood him rightly!), projects should be aiming to get citizens interested and talking to each other rather than holding out the illusory possibility that they can interact with government on an individual basis. The most obvious UK examples of Web 2.0 in government are things like the No 10 petition site and David Millibands blog, but I tend to agree with Coleman and think they are a transitional phenomena. The real future are sites that - with or without government support - bring citizens together to discuss and take action on public issues. That, of course, and the much wider issue of moving to a public sector culture of openness and feedback the like of which has never been seen!

I wish we had heard more on the day. I think the Cisco view chimes with that of Matthew Ellis, chair of ICELE, but not necessarily - as Matthew said in his interview - with many of those in charge of our democratic institutions.

Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

TV voting scandals and poor e-democracy both destroy trust

Click to Play or go to blip.tv

The keynote speaker at last week's e-democracy 07 conference, Professor Stephen Coleman, draw a direct parallel between interactive TV voting scandals, and people's loss of confidence in political engagement processes.
Deceptions over the naming of the Blue Peter cat, and location of the pink pig in Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway might seem trivial - but were enormously important in terms of trust, he explained in more detail in an interview after his presentation.

People assume that if you are asked to make an input there is a consequence, and that consequence is transparent, tangible and makes you feel you have influenced something. People feel cheated when that doesn't happen
I started from that basis because I wanted to say that politics is often a very similar experience for many people, and the question I wanted to ask is whether e-democracy is the panacea to that feeling of frustration and being cheated, or is it in fact a part of the problem.

They key issue, said Stephen, was that people want to be respected. If politicians and officials are to be trusted - as they wish - then they have to respect people.
After 10 years of the Internet in politics, the argument that it makes a difference has been won.

The question now is how do we re-establish rules of the game that make it fair, make it meaningful to provide real efficacy for people - that's where we need to be thinking now - not shall we do it, but how do we do it. For me that has to be about a contract between the public and politicians that sets out very clear standards of engagement.
If you are asked, whether it is to sign an e-petition, or to engage in an online consultation, or to send an email to your MP, there have got to be transparent procedures for what is expected to happen to that and where the process is.

Stephen went on to say that e-democracy has not significantly build trust between politicians and voters - the Consumers to Business relationship. What has happened is that social networking has developed the Consumer to Consumer relationship. That is where new ideas and better collective action is being developed. Government now has to have the humility to enter that social networking space to learn, and to make sure that there is equality of voice for the potentially socially excluded. What we need - among other things - is a common online space which is trusted and protected for online deliberation.
BBC conference report: E-petitions: Godsend or gimmick?

Other conference views on e-petitions

Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

Two views on e-petitions, from e-democracy 07

Westminster and the Scottish parliament have very different e-petititoning systems, and last week's e-democracy 07 conference offered an opportunity to hear from two of the key people involved on each system.
The 10 Downing Street system was launched a year ago, allowing people to collect names and petition the Prime Minister online instead of by the traditional means of presenting boxes of forms on the doorstep. You may create a lot of media interest if you are lucky - as with road pricing - and get a response online from the Prime Minister, but there's no scope for discussion and you don't know what real impact your effort have made.
Professor Stephen Coleman, of Leeds University, kicked off conference discussion with an assessment of the No 10 site as "a combination of technological enthusiasm and a lack of any political connection" as the BBC reported.
The Scottish Parliament system allows you to have a discussion forum, and you can track its progress. It may help build a campaigning community.
Jimmy Leach, who won an award this year for greatest individual contribution to new media, has been responsible for e-petitions as  head of of digital communications at No 10.
He argued the fact that any petition receiving more than 200 signatures will get a reply has made a real difference to accountability.

"It is quite a culture shift for government, for civil servants to sit down and write back to citizens to say 'this is why we are doing something'."
Even if, he added, some government departments had been more helpful than others in providing prompt replies.
As for political influence, there have been signs of a shift on the government's thinking on road pricing, but it is difficult to say how much real impact it has had.
"What you will not get is a policy maker, a civil servant, a politician, saying 'well, yeah, that petition didn't half put the wind up me so I changed it. I changed my mind'. You will not get a direct line of causation from a petition direct to a policy change.
"What we do get is, it's part of the landscape of politics, it ratchets up the pressure, it's a way that people let the government know how they feel about something."

Jimmy is leaving government for the world of digital PR, but he's still a civil servant for a few days, so I lobbed him an easy question about what he was proud of during his time at No 10. He focussed on e-petitions, which gave me more of the Westminster slant. One telling point he made about introducing new engagement methods to government was that in the Prime Minister's office it only took a few people to "sign off" a project and get started. Things are much slower elsewhere ... so a lead from No 10 is important.

Click To Play or go to blip.tv

Also at the conference was Ann Macintosh, responsible for designing the Scottish system and others in UK local authorities and the German Bundestag. She is now Professor of Digital Governance at the University of Leeds. She explained to me that the reason the Scottish system works is that it is embedded in the overall process of government. This was a theme that came up a number of times at the conferences: e-democracy is not about technology, it is about changing the way politics works, with new tools as the levers.

Click To Play or go to blip.tv

One of the criticisms of the Westminster system is that it isn't clear what effect the e-petitions have - a point made strongly at the conference by Stephen Coleman. Jimmy said that an independent study was being commissioned - but didn't elaborate.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

What's the role of trustees now we are networked?

The BBC's new Internet blog is proving a useful place to engage with BBC techies on how they develop new media and run bbc.co.uk. It covers hot topics like provision for Linux users, DAB, DTT, DRM, Dirac video codecs .... no, don't turn off, there's more to it than geek talk. I think it raises again the issue of governance, and how we licence-payers get to influence that we get for our money - as already highlighted by Ben Whitnall and Simon Dickson. Here's why.
The purpose of trustees and regulators is to stand on the side of beneficiaries and consumers, and make sure they get a fair deal from those providing products and services. It's a particularly important role when there's little competition, and donations or public monies are involved.
But what should the trustees do when those producing the services open up a direct conversation with their customer/beneficiaries?
That's what Ashley Highfield and BBC Future Media staff have done in setting up the BBC Internet blog, to complement existing Editors' blogs for News and Sport. It's in line with a trend for companies to use blogs to push at the corporate membrane, as Robert Scoble helped pioneer at Microsoft. There's now lots more examples, and as Alan Moore has remarked, once customers have stormed the Bastille, they don't want to go back to their boring days jobs ... or indeed, ineffective ways of complaining about service.
The BBC Internet blog is very timely because the BBC Trust - which represents licence-payers - is currently carrying out a review of bbc.co.uk, and consulting licence-payers. I recently helped run a workshop on behalf of the Trust, with colleague Lizzie Jackson and Ed Mitchell, to involve bloggers in the process. This prompted a number of blog posts - as we hoped - including one from Anthony Mayfield, who made these points among others:

The shift from channels to networks means that the concept of governance must be challenged and reassessed: Power is shifting out (not down, as some condescending types out have it) from large organisations. The BBC Trust needs to understand the nature of this change, of the shift to networks, and be clear (to itself first of all) about what that might mean for its role. The opportunities to involve and engage with the people that pay for and use the BBC and the organisation are increasing - and it's about more than just engaging with the "blogosphere". In short the Trust needs a strategy for responding to the media and social revolution going on around it. Social media is not just another channel for consultation and governance as usual.
The BBC Trust needs innovation as much as the BBC does:  The Beeb has had some stumbles of late to be sure, but I'm generally admiring of its past efforts at innovation that have been generally helpful to the new media industry in the UK and beyond. The BBC Trust needs to be an innovator too in how it carries out its duties. It needs to innovate around how governance is carried out and, I say again, what governance means in the age of network. These review exercises are, I think, carried out every five years - imagine how much larger and sophisticated online conversation will be in 2012... The techniques of engagement and listening online that the Trust uses now will be far important, perhaps even central, to any kind of meaningful review then...
Governance / public consultation needs to be *live* if it is to be relevant today: It's neat and tidy to carry out a one month consultation with stakeholders, but it is limited. People interested in all sorts of aspects of the BBC on and offline are offering their thoughts all the time. To remain relevant, and indeed legitimate, I would say that it was in the Trust's and all our interests that listening and engaging with their publics was something that was happening all the time. The BBC Trust should be thinking about a retainer for Market Sentinel, or developing their listening skills and process networks in-house. 

Nico Macdonald has provide a range of suggestions on how the BBC Trust could extend its engagement, and Anna Coghen for the Trust confirms that "We're currently looking into some sort an online meeting/aggregation// linking space."
All this highlights the wider questions of governance in a networked age, raised by Anthony. As I wrote earlier audience isn't "audience" anymore when it is online, contributing content, and now in direct dialogue with the professional content producers. Trustees are no longer mediators ... they are (or should be) part of a system of co-creation and co-governance. The Ideal Government project is discussing similar issues around the transformation of government services.

The basic lesson is let’s transform government services for the benefit of users. But the Web 2.0 way is to invite users to help co-create the e-enabled public services they want, in the style they like, and share it.

Similar issues will emerging in the world of nonprofits, where Dan McQuillan is suggesting Charities are broken and may get by-passed.
Of course, it can be argued that this is all very well when the customers and providers are online, as in the case of bbc.co.uk, but rather different in many other circumstances where the services are not digital, and the customers or beneficiaries are the other side of digital divide. In that case trustees have a particularly important role to play ... and should think even more carefully about how they ensure that they are in touch with those they represent. As so often is the case, the opportunities and challenges posed by the Internet just raise old issues of organisational relationships that need refreshing or redesigning.
Meanwhile the BBC is not standing still in its own formal submissions to the Trust review, and as Nico Macdonald reports, has commissioned essays from a number of people in the field. You can read Nico's outline here.
Direct responses can be made to the BBC Trust here until December 14.

Technorati Tags: bbc, bbccouk, bbctrust, governance

Are charities broken?

Dan McQuillan, who has an impressive track-record of online innovation with Amnesty and other nonprofits, is now saying openly what others are muttering: the charity model is broken for many cause-related purposes.
He said this briefly at a recent get-together for a possible UK version of Netsquared, aimed at promoting web-enabled social innovation.
He has now filled out his thinking in a blog post advocating seedcamps for social innovation. These are competitive-collaborative events where entrepreneurs meet investors and mentors.

Dan writes:

I've heard quite a bit about seedcamp  and it's high octane approach to incubating web innovation. I wonder if the same model could be applied to social innovation? For sure, we need some new methodologies, because it looks like the old way of organising into charities and NGOs is broken.

UNDERMINING INNOVATION
At first sight, seedcamp is a purely business proposition, mentoring startups on competitiveness and providing injections of venture capital. What's that got to do with alleviating social problems?  But compare and contrast with the characteristics of many charities. In my experience, the amount of innovation that makes it out of the door of an NGO is a tenth of what it could be. And the limiting factor isn't rigerous testing of ideas against reality, but institutional conservatism. Anyone who's worked in the sector knows the score; anxiety-based leadership, a focus on internal politics, inter-departmental struggle and an unquestioning conflation of the issue and the organisation.

CATCH UP OR CATCH 22
But charities don't own social issues. And it's lazy behaviour for the rest of society to assume that bunging charities a regular donation is actually good value. We'll see what happens as more sousveillance and web-enabled transparency is applied to the third sector.  The web-savvy minority in nonprofits know that it's urgent for their organisations to catch up with the digital age. "If only the CEO would blog more, if only our campaigners understood facebook..." But are these the core issues? Or is the starker question that the inherent nature of charities as institutions makes them anithetical to the participative and post-deferential nature of the social web?

ROUTING AROUND BLOCKAGES
Personally, I'm more excited about the new modes of collaborative innovation  opened up by the web, and how these can be powerfully applied to solving social issues . I don't just mean web tools themselves, but the wider social modes and processes opened up, from the virtual organisation to crowdsourcing, and from open IP to self-organising networks. There are already examples of NGO startups; GetUp systematically applied the accidentally viral success of MoveOn  to the Australian third sector, and in six months had more members than Amnesty Australia. So if we want to encourage social innovation that leverages these possibilities we need ways to incubate it that are native to this space rather than native to the nineteenth century. Roll on, social innovation seedcamp.

I think Dan is right in doubting whether adding new social media to old models will work, as I wrote here when the Government announced plans for a Third Sector innovation exchange. We need a different approach - and Simon Berry, I and others, tried promoting that through an Open Innovation bid for the innovation exchange. We didn't win, but the process give us some insights into what a different way of doing things might be like. More here about the "official" innovation exchange that's now up and running.
I'm fascinated by the idea of an innovation development process that would mix seedcamp events, online exchanges and many other elements to really put some buzz behind different ways of promoting and supporting social action. I think it's what Matthew Taylor has in mind for the RSA, as I've covered in posts here (scroll down to start at the beginning). But can you innovate successfully from within such a venerable structure, or does the internal change process sap so much of your energy there's too little left for the real work outside? Dan has been brave enough to pose the question. More ideas please.

Technorati Tags: innovation, nonprofit, nptech, nptechuk, rsa

Announcing UKGovweb barcamp - with an open invite

Whitehall Webby Jeremy Gould, whose day job is web manager at the Ministry of Justice, is making a very direct contribution to the promised new politics of Government-citizen collaboration: he's inviting us to help transform government by sharing expertise in the use of social media tools.
Jeremy's Ministry is responsible for the Governance of Britain initiative, which underpins Gordon Brown's enthusiasms for promoting engagement, as I outlined here.
Jeremy has just announced a get-together in January for anyone interested in innovation online as applied to government. Although it is billed as UKGovweb barcamp, and mainly aimed at people in or near to government,  the wiki page offers a pretty open invite to enthusiasts:

This event should be of interest to all who work in the UK government digital media community: permanent civil servants, contractors, consultants, agencies, advisers, supporters, observers, and critics.

Here's the full post:

Announcing UKGovweb barcamp:

Those of you who read this blog regularly, or get cornered by me in the real world, will know there are two things in particular that I am particularly passionate about

* clarity around government online strategy, and
* how to innovate online, especially piloting the use of social media tools

I think these are important issues for government webbies (and by government, I don’t just mean Whitehall but right across the public sector). Talking to colleagues I know that these issues important to them too.

I’ve been talking for a while with colleagues in the transformational government team (they who are driving the website rationalisation / convergence, and other related, initiatives) about how we can harness the collective knowledge and intelligence of all those with an interest in improving how government does all this web stuff. Its becoming more important as we start to explore the possibilities and opportunities of government online beyond our corporate websites and intranets.

My proposal was to run a barcamp event, where those who want to participate in  developing ideas, sharing their expertise and swapping tips can come together as a community. For those not familiar with the barcamp concept, check out the wikipedia page. The key point is that you come if you have something to offer and you participate, rather than simply observe.

I’m delighted to report that they agree, so I’m pleased to seed the message here that we aim to have the event run across the last week of January 2008 (Saturday 26th/ Sunday 27th). I say ‘aim to have the event run’ because it will only work with the input, energy and enthusiasm of the participants. We have suggested a proposition and date, we’re hoping that enough people will want to be part of this to come along and also to help organise the event.

A page has been set up on the barcamp.org website. Please visit it, and sign up if you want to be part of this event.

If you know others who might be interested, let them know about it. In particular, if you blog then please point your readers to the page on the barcamp website.

I really do hope that together we can work together to get a common sense of purpose, and share some innovative ideas about government’s approach to all things online.

Maybe I'm wrong to make a direct link to the Governance of Britain/new politics initiative - and the barcamp is strictly apolitical - but I find it incredibly heartening when a civil servant goes that bit further to practice emerging policy, and notions of openness. At a weekend too.
Disclosure: I have done some consulting for MoJ, helping civil servants use this engagement design game. Maybe barcampers would like to play too.

Technorati Tags: socialmedia, socialtech, ukgovweb