I have just got back from a trip to Slovakia for our latest CitzenScape project meeting. As ever on these trips the hospitality was amazing and we got a lot done – we also seemed to drink rather a lot but that’s also typical of these trips! Some general observations are below. The first thing …
Jurgen Habermas a pre-eminent social and political theorist whose ideas around the “Public Sphere” have influenced much of the contemporary thinking around the information or network society. Habermas describes the public sphere as a shared public conversation which encapsulates political, social and cultural debate. He argues that this public sphere is essential to the functioning …
Busy weekend with lots of literature review as well as proposal writing for EU funded projects. I have also been reading around ideas of co-creation as well the Network Society this weekend. Both of these are going to be fairly central within my literature review. The network or information society is a way of describing …
Well the good thing about this research proposal writing is that it does get me thinking about other things in a massive work avoidance scheme. That and the fact the day is so beautiful means that progress on the main project is slow!! Anyway, I have been thinking more about the tension that councils face …
I am really writing this to put a marker down for future thinking. I am working on my research proposal for the PHD at the moment and this is a idea which is itching me but I can’t scratch it right now as I need to be focusing down on specifics of citizenscape for the …
I probably haven’t mentioned before but my ‘day job’ involves working with Local Authorities in order to help them use technology to enhance the democratic process – either by making old processes work online or helping them to create new models of democratic engagement (hence CitizenScape). The core of this – and our oldest product …
I have had a really interesting week and wanted to write a note on it before it drifted off and got filed somewhere in my memory for later retrieval as a few things have happened which have really helped tie together some thoughts around community building with a social purpose – in essence what we …
I am taking a break from the statistical wrestling necessitated by my exam next week to note down my thoughts on my questionnaire as its been preying on my mind and is a lot more interesting than the stats (or to be more accurate more interesting than SPSS – the stats are fine!). The questionnaire …
The post on the questionnaire has been hijacked by my pressing need to pass a stats course which is being examined next week – ask me about ANOVA if you are not afraid to hear the answer! However I just wanted to note this thought as its been on my mind all day: There is …
I have just spent a couple of days in London for the launch of our new EU funded project: Europetition which has been designed to do two things: To build up clusers of local petitioning organisations – usually Local Authorities – in our 5 pilot regions so that they can share best practice, protocol and …