I’ve been neglecting my blog recently as I’ve been in Australia on personal business. I’d hoped to attend the first Canberra Barcamp but wasn’t able to go at the last minute. As a result, I spent much of the weekend watching the coverage of the Australia 2020 summit. 

The similarities to a barcamp, even with 1,000 people in attendance, were pretty significant. Participants were equipped with white boards, sticky notes and some even sat on the floor in the more popular sessions, like Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in the session on the Australian economy.

Kevin Rudd said the purpose of the summit was:

‘…to do something new. Today we are throwing open the windows of our democracy, to let a little bit of fresh air in. Rather than pretending that we, the politicians of Australia have all the answers, and the truth is, we don’t, we are turning now to you, the people of Australia.’

The event started on Saturday and was broken into 10 separate sessions on the Australian economy, sustainability and climate change, rural change, health, communities and family, indigenous Australia, creative Australia, governance, productivity and Australia’s future in the world. Each working group was asked, by the Prime Minister, to deliver the following:

‘…First, to nominate at least one ‘big idea’ in their area for the future. Second … submit at least three, and I am sure there will be more, concrete policy ideas, at least one of which is to involve no cost or negligible cost… Third … identify at least three specific goals for which we should aim by 2020.’

As with most large gatherings there remains a degree of scepticism that the goals will be achieved. But, there is also a degree of hope. In 48 hours 1,000 Australians came together to suggest Australia should, amongst other things, open up schools 24/7 for ‘after school care; develop a bionic eye; lead the world in creating a green and sustainable economy (less than 12 months ago Australia hadn’t signed the Kyoto agreement); encourage retirees to act as workplace mentors; provide rural-city student exchanges; provide universal first aid training and digitally archive Australia’s art collections. Oh, and that republic thing seems to be on the agenda again.

I have to say that I was one of the sceptics when the Australia 2020 summit was announced. Though the public was asked, and did, contribute to the agenda, I thought the overarching event with 1,000 of Australia’s ‘best and brightest’ might tend to be elitist. I still have some reservations, but I can’t help feel a resonance with many of the ideas and suggestions. I think there were a few things that the summit organisers could have done to increase participation even further, but on balance it was well organised and aggressively covered by the print and broadcast media. Where the organisers may not have thought of ways to keep the debate alive, bloggers are rising to the challenge.

It will be interesting to see how the Australian government goes about implementing some of the ideas; there are some big, although not impossible, challenges  (Kev, if you’re reading - try this: http://www.sicamp.org/). The Australian Prime Minister has committed to a public response by the end of the year, although I have a feeling some of the suggestions will be implemented far quicker (he announced a couple as policy objectives in the last election).

For me one of the most interesting things has been the reaction of friends, family and colleagues who have all said they feel there is a better chance of being ‘part’ of the way forward, one in which people, not just politicians, ’own’ Australian policy. It might be a tall order for the Australian Government to make good on some of the ideas that have been suggested - but they’re willing to get stuck in and give it a shot.  As Kevin Rudd said:

“We can either take command of the future, or we can sit back and allow the future to take command of us.”

So, anyone up for UK 2020?

Tom has made an interesting announcement about the Power of Information review and a new taskforce

I had hoped that at some stage I might blog about something other than twitter, but yesterday brought news of the Prime Minister’s arrival to twitter.

There are lots of reasons why the Downing Street tool is better than the HMGOV news feed , but for me the top three would be:

1. It’s official

2. It’s [kinda] two way

3. Its one source of information - not many.

I’m really pleased that the take up of Downing Street twitter feed has been so significant, as Nick Booth points out, there wasn’t exactly a rush to follow the HMGov tool when I published it.  It’s how the take up occurred that I find really interesting. As Simon Dickson said

‘Just as interesting: I think I broke the story when I mentioned it to my own (relatively) select band of Twitter contacts. I was subscriber no3. Two hours later, we’re up to 23. Word travels fast.’

Stuart Bruce goes into a bit more detail:

‘I (245 followers) was NOT the first to Tweet or blog this story. That honour goes to Simon Dickson (39 followers) at 12:04 yesterday, mine was second at 13:18. It was just that mine got picked up by Marshall Manson (followers 150), which in turn was picked up by Steve Rubel (4627 followers). I think it’s down to the number of followers.’

With 234 followers (at last look) Downing Street has a pretty powerful conversational tool on it’s hands - It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they start talking.

I’m particularly interested in how political campaign teams are using social media to extend the reach of campaign messages, so I’ve been watching the US primaries with interest. From this side of the pond, the level of adoption by most campaign teams appears quite high and there is clear evidence of a range of ‘blogger outreach’ programmes to support on and offline activities.

It’s not surprising then, that with increased use of online tools to recruit, manage and leverage communities, that there is also a higher degree of focus on what is being said and by whom.

Friday brought news of Soren Dayton, a McCain (remember him?) staffer that has been suspended for tweeting the existence of a video mashup on you tube: Is Obama Wright. 

I’m not sure what the conditions of Soren’s employment were, but his twitter profile left little in the way of speculation to who he was and who he worked for. Obviously enough people were following Dayton to break the news about his linking to the video, and the McCain campaign felt that this provided sufficient grounds to ’suspend’ him.

Interestingly, social networking tools are also being used to spearhead the campaign to defend Soren. Joshua Trevino from the Pacific Research Institute was quick to respond with a ‘Save Soren’ campaign on Facebook.

It would be easy to dismiss this as another case of an employee not understanding the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ communications. Unfortunately, as Soren is an experienced political campaigner and was using his profile to promote the McCain campaign, he should have understood that his tweets could be perceived as tacit endorsement by the McCain campaign for the video. So, as far as I can tell, Soren either:

(a) made an honest mistake

(b) is part of a very clever political machine working to keep the Obama/Wright issue in the news

(c) wasn’t told, or didn’t understand, what he should and shouldn’t say.

I’m going to go with option (c).  

Soren either didn’t know what he should or shouldn’t say, or didn’t understand the guidance he was given (hoping, of course, he was given some). Without a clear steer on what campaign staff should and shouldn’t say online, there are bound to be more mistakes like this.

Given recent discussions in the UK about links and libel, civil servants blogging and the implications this has, I wonder how many employees and employers have considered this in the same way for twitter?

Of all the social media tools I use, twitter is my favourite (well, it is this week).

One of the reasons I started blogging today, a bit in advance of when I wanted to, was some activity on twitter and in some blogs by some colleagues.

A lot of my time is spent on twitter and I thought it would be useful if I could quickly scan bits and pieces of info released by government. So, with a bit of playing around, I pulled together an aggregated twitter feed for Her Majesty’s Government News. I’ve done my best to capture RSS feeds from as many .gov.uk websites as possible. The volume of news produced by the government can vary and it might not be right for everyone - but it works for me.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. There are a range of twitter streams that aggregate RSS feeds and there have been some practical demonstrations and a lot of thinking on how twitter and other social media can extend the reach of communications used in emergency situations.

I expect to have similar feeds up for UK government consultations; I was going to do one for local government, but Mr Briggs beat me to the line on that one.

I have also developed an aggregated twitter feed for travel advice that pulls in alerts from the US and Australia - it’s still a little clunky, so don’t rely on it if you are about to go to Tibet.

If I have missed your feed let me know: hmgovnews[at]google[dot]mail[dot]com

So I figured - make some friends.

Welcome to my blog.

I actually prefer to use twitter, but recognise there are advantages to having a home for a bigger discussion on issues that matter to me - so this would be it.

You’ll need to be a little patient with me as I settle in here. Expect a couple of format changes.

The dog isn’t dead. He’s just sleeping on a sunny day on the steps of Syntagma Square.

More details about me in the… well, the about section I guess.