7 tribes of digital?

This is my half of a conversation that @Sarahlay and I had at @Localgovcamp.  She has written an excellent piece about it here which you should probably read first. Its also the next post in my thinking around networked or digital leadership which you can read about here. Sarah and I were jointly frustrated by the way in which the conversation at the LGComms Academy seemed to be turning the term...

Policing social citizens – or helping them to police themselves

This blog is a summary of my talk at the recent policing social citizens unconference – you can see the webcasts here and catch up with other blogposts as well and I really recommend going to take a look – lots of great presentations but Prof. John Grieve and Peter O’Reilly from GMFRS were stand out for me. This was an event about community engagement and wanted to put on an event which properly...

Why email when you can blog about networked councillor?

We’ve been working on the networked councillor programme for a while now and so its really exciting to see the first two groups up and running in Suffolk and West Sussex (two more to follow in Cambridgeshire and Solihull as well). I have said all along that I expect to learn as much from these as the participants will and this post is my first action learning reflection on this. This first module is all about...

Digital civic space – the diagram

This post was inspired by Andrea Siodmok, Anthony Zach and my friend Meriel – each of whom in their own way pushed me over the edge (in a good way) to actually submit the corrections to my thesis rather than hoarding them gollam-like and simply muttering “my precious my precious” in my study. Thanks folks WHAT NEXT???? The most amazing thing about getting the thesis out of the way is that I can...

NHSCitizen on tour at expo14NHS

This blog post is going to be a quick one – I promise! I’m writing it on the train on the way back from #expo14NHS – a two day exhibition and conference about innovation and change in the NHS. It was the perfect place to launch NHS Citizen! You can see what we have been up to here. We’ve asked all of the project team to collected their initial impressions from the event and then we will also...

Democracy in its many forms

This post is as a result of a single line in the suggested corrections for my thesis:  “The candidate should provide a brief overview and/or explanation of what form of democracy is being referred to as there appears to be a conflation of normative forms of democracy”.  It’s a fair cop – while the question of democratic deficit is central to my interest in digital civic space my thesis ended up being...

Mapping the NHS: Prototype questionnaire

So, this post is a run through of what we plan to do to test the mapping process which evolved from the mapping event I blogged about here. We are going to test a paper based process with the intention of turning this into an online data collection tool. We will try two different things at this next workshop: Ask people to map the system based on their own perspective Some group work to see if we can create a...

Defining civic and reconsidering critical theory

This post has been provoked by reading “The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy” by Peter Dahlgren (Kindle edition, 2013) as part of the viva prep.  Rather than a full write up (which I will do at a later date I hope as the book was excellent) its more a set of notes as a basis for a discussion of what I mean when I talk about ‘civic’ participation as this is very much central to...

Leeds – what a day!!!

So – if you follow me on twitter you will probably know I spent an intense but brilliant day in Leeds on Tuesday meeting all kinds of fascinating people. This post is an attempt to capture my initial reflections – I know that lots more will come of it as I mull over the many and various conversations.  I have started a twitter list appropriately called fabulous Leeds which I will populate when I am on a...

Social Council: Thinking in Public

I spent last Friday in Solihull for the first ‘proper’ meeting about the Social Council – this post to an attempt to explain what it is – but not too much as I will explain. First then the current working definition of the social council: The Social Council will bring together social values, representing the best of public service, with the social behaviours that represent successful...