Last night we held our second community meeting for We Live Here in the lovely Electika Cafe on Western Road (yes – that was a plug – it is lovely and they were kind enough to open for us in the evening – they also followed through on our project meeting promise of cake at …
Just when you thought it was enough trouble to try and get your community to create a hyperlocal website then you realise that you also need to create a process of renewal and regeneration. This post has followed on from a social media audit we have been doing up in Cumbria which has given me …
I spent a couple of days last week with the We Live Here Team at the Creative Councils Camp in Birmingham so this post is an attempt to capture some thoughts from the experience. My first thought is that I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with the team – thank you all…. The point of the …
One of the reasons I started this blog was as an action research diary to support my PHD. I’ve found it hugely useful and having just gone through the process of analysing and writing up my reflections on the Virtual Town Hall project for my thesis I am reminded how valuable it is to reflect …
As regular readers will be aware….I have a bee in my bonnet about the need for someone to start building civic spaces online – spaces which are designed to support civic and political discourse rather than designed to sell us stuff. However it’s all very well having the idea – you then have to figure …
I have been trying to separate and then reconcile ideas of identity and place online – this post is an attempt to explain where I have got to. I sometimes describe the social web as digital wrapper around our physical world. I imagine it in my head as something like a spun-sugar cage of chaotic …
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. (Winston Churchill) I have been exploring finding the narrative in my research to try and make my thesis a less painful document to read…..here is the first attempt. There is a problem that needs thinking …
This may be a little dull for anyone not interested in the process of actually writing a doctoral thesis – feel free to look away. Meeting with my supervisor this week its clear that I need to step it up a gear and start worrying about the right things. While I have been quietly obsessing …
I picked up a conversation on twitter last week where someone was attacking the role of academics and suggesting they shouldn’t criticise practitioners as writing and thinking aren’t as important as doing. I disagree – the act of reflecting and studying action is in my view essential if we are to learn from our actions …
This post is a bit of a hodgepodge of follow up from stuff I was working on last week – we’ll see if it weaves itself into one piece by the end. First up is a follow up on the social network analysis. Ethnobot was good enough to point me at the work of Damon Centola …