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...

RSA Catalyst Project: Network of Networks

It is now some time since we got the RSA catalyst award and this post is an attempt to kickstart this work. Its also preparation for a project meeting we have later today so its just in time blogging. The project is seeking to address three questions: What is the simplest thing we can do to connect all the many excellent civic networks we can find in Brighton? How can we give that network of networks a stronger...

Networked Individuals and the creation of elites

So – here we have more from the box of dangerous ideas* in the form of a write up of Networked by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman. Once again this is really just my notes and ideas which have caught my eye rather than a proper review so please look away if this is not your thing! In common with Net Smart by Howard Rheingold the book explores what the network society might mean for the individual and both books are...

Networks of Outrage and Hope

This is the first of a number of posts I plan to write as I prep for my viva*. If you prefer my less academic stuff then look away now! The prep involves re-reading the thesis and noting all the bits I would now like to have done differently (eurgh) as well catching up on the reading that would have been in the literature review if it had been published before I finished writing up. I have been gathering this...

And the answer is….its Leadership!!!

I think I hit a nerve!  Lots of responses on comments from the blog post last week so I wanted to follow up on them, there is clearly an interesting debate to be had here. The crux of the debate seems to be around two main questions: Is it reasonable or appropriate to expect our leaders to have a minimum level of knowledge with respect to digital in the wider social as well as technical sense? If we do have this...