So much to get my head around
Met with Justin Kerr-Stevens last week and this morning for coffee, along with the usual suspects @trib and @facibus - and now I’m just trying to get my head around all this stuff Justin (currently working for the Department for Innovation, University and Skills ) has been telling us about … some of the cool things that the UK Government and community groups are doing.
So here are some links to some of the sites and blogs and things I’m currently reading through:
http://www.mysociety.org
http://www.theyworkforyou.com
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk
http://www.opendemocracy.net
http://twitter.com/hmgov
http://twitter.com/DowningStreet
Also thinking about the upcoming ACT Election later this year and things we can do to engage our local electorate candidates in this open government, e-democracy, social media space. As for myself, my agenda will be pushing Free Australia Wireless.
Another thing I stumbled across the other day was Future Melbourne, a City of Melbourne council-run collaborative wiki to put together a plan for the future of Melbourne:
Also posted on The RiotACT.
Project Australia is also something you should be keeping an eye on for when they really take off.
It’s hard, because I don’t work with this stuff. I work with HTML, CSS, Javascript. It’s very interesting though - some great opportunities for us, government (both local and Federal) and the future of how this country is run and I want to get involved, applying my particular skills and knowledge where possible but mainly just raise awareness of what can be done and what is being done elsewhere.
Government will never use Twitter in an official capacity? Rubbish - just look at the Downing Street feed. And on flickr. And MySpace, Facebook etc … a whole team of people dedicated to the UK PM’s “digital communications” - and they seem to get it.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
also check out http://openaustralia.org/ these guys are doing something similar to theyworkforyou.com
April 30th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Ah thanks Shoaib - someone mentioned Open Australia at BarCampCanberra a week ago but I’d been unable to find the site … thanks!
April 30th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
BTW Open Australia needs beta testers for the new site - put your name down everyone!
http://blog.openaustralia.org
April 30th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Plus a new site I stumbled on today via The RiotACT:
http://www.canberravotes.com - tracking the ACT Election 2008
April 30th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Interesting stuff Nat!
May 1st, 2008 at 12:19 am
Open Australia is getting a lot of twitter-love this evening!
May 1st, 2008 at 11:26 am
Was great to meet up - I’m back in November for a week or so. In the meantime, lets see what we can do in the lead-up to the ACT election!
May 28th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Great to read of everyone’s enthusiasm for e-governance and collaborative participation. At the City of Melbourne we like to think we’re continually pushing the envelope in terms of the latest consultation techniques.
With Future Melbourne, as far as we can tell, this is the first time a local government has used wiki technology on this scale to enable citizens to directly edit the content of a city plan.
Hope you all get the chance to jump across and check out the Future Melbourne wiki at http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au
We’d love to add participants of your calibre to our growing list of contributors!
Dale,
Future Melbourne Team.
June 15th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
OpenAustralia just went live: http://www.openaustralia.org
June 16th, 2008 at 9:23 am
[...] couldn’t actually find out any information on it until Shoaib mentioned it in response to my blog post in follow-up to my meeting with Justin Kerr-Stevens where I mentioned TheyWorkForYou. So I did a [...]