I’ve finally finished my MSc dissertation which is a massive relief. After four years of part-time study I am looking forward to having my weekends back! And I plan to get back to blogging, now that I’ve more time on my hands. My research study investigated: Attitudes and perceptions of Council officers and citizens to [...]

I noticed an interesting article in the Guardian today about the coalition Government’s recent crowdsourcing experiment. The article reflects on how despite thousands of suggestions being received from members of the public, the Government’s published responses indicate that no policies are changing as a result. The coalition asked the public to respond to its programme [...]

For anyone that’s familiar with my posts on social media or usability this one is rather academic and self-indulgent, so bear with me! I’m making fairly good progress with my MSc research, having completed a few interviews and some of my literature review. Every so often I take stock of the approach I’m taking and [...]

I’ve been working on a project for the last few months up in the rural Fens of north Cambridgeshire. We’re piloting the use of social media by public sector agencies to engage local communities. I’ve blogged about governance and a digital engagement framework in relation to this project before. We’ve now set up a project [...]

Well I had a great day today at Localgovcamp in London catching up with my localgov Twitter friends and meeting lots of interesting new people. Many thanks to Anke Holst and Hadley Beeman for organising and for all the sponsors and participants for making it such an inspiring and enjoyable day. Check out the Twitter [...]

A thought I’ve been bouncing around in the last few days is how the 2010 UK elections will play out through social media. Not only from a national perspective, but from a local campaigning perspective. A number of blog posts have pointed to the fact that the two main parties have not yet managed to [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of research into citizen engagement models for my MSc research and started to think about how these models relate to digital engagement. I looked at various models and frameworks and combined them to help me conceptualise digital engagement. Firstly I evaluated the participation model provided by David Wilcox in his [...]

I’m pretty lame at blogging bookmarks, but I’ve found a few juicy things recently. Promote the Vote is a fantastic site promoting the vote (obviously) for people with learning disabilities which has been led by Speaking Up in my home town Cambridge. Great design, content and videos. Designed by Easy Read Online. On a similar [...]

I’ve just started working on a project where we’ll be exploring digital engagement methods, using social media alongside offline forms of engagement such as neighbourhood panels. The aim of the project is to improve community cohesion in a semi-rural community. The project is being developed as a partnership between the County Council, District Council, community [...]

Social Media and Networking We’re doing a Social Media & Networking project at work. The aim of the project is to develop a ‘toolkit’ for staff. I found this online database of social media policies a starter for 10 – no point re-inventing the wheel. Community Engagement I recently started a project where we’ll be [...]