The folks at Kent very kindly asked me to guest blog over at their innovation site – The post goes into some ideas around choice architecture and what this means for democratic spaces – all very relevant I think to Virtual Town Hall stuff. Full post can be found here.
I meant to blog this at the weekend but annual tree decorating party got in the way. As the halls are now fully decked with boughs of holly (and a lot of paper chains thanks to extensive child labour) normal blogging resumes….. I wanted to capture some thoughts about the community ambassador role which is …
Ok then – this is the last of this year’s workshop posts as I think the Redbridge session will fall into next year now. We had an excellent day at Kirklees which also spent some time talking technology and trying to develop the fit with the existing 21st Century Councillor work which is being undertaken. …
The workshop at North Lincolnshire was slightly different to the others because it also involved some potential community ambassadors for the first half of the day. The team had put out a general notice about the event and so we were joined by a range of people from the council (including someone who works with …
Just a quick note on my excellent day in Chorley on Monday. We were running through the internal workshop agenda for the Virtual Town Hall project which is aimed at: Project management stuff: Getting the internal team fully briefed on the project Getting support from senior managers and from key members Giving an overview of …
Spent the day in Chelmsford today meeting loads of people re: Virtual Town Hall. This is by way of some observations and notes for me to remember for research purposes: Meeting the districts: We spent the morning with 3 districts who are considering getting involved and we had a very in-depth discussion about the concept …
We had our second VirtualTH project meeting yesterday so this is just a short update on that. The pilot is now full with Kirklees and Redbridge joining Chorley, Essex CC and North Lincs as pilot sites. We are also lucky to have Carl Haggerty participate as a ‘critical friend’ on the technology strand which is …
I had the excellent pleasure of someone not only having read my post on life leaks but then having them point out that I was contradicting myself at the very moment we were discussing it – it was such a good point that I didn’t even mind not having made it myself!! We were talking …
I’ve been rather focused this week on getting the paper I needed to get finished in order to explain the Virtual Town Hall concept and finish recruiting people for the pilot. I’ve spoken to a lot of people in principle and had some very positive noises – now is the time to actually get the …
Brace yourelf – its a long one….. I am working on the theoretical framework for my thesis at the moment and so trying to establish its firm roots in the idea of a ‘network society’. The idea that we have moved into a post-industrial information age is well entrenched in current thinking (Webster 2006) with …