An enthusiastic gardener friend mentioned a local initiative called the Foodshare Network last weekend. I think it’s a brilliantly simple idea. People who grow their own food can join the network, form groups (e.g. at their local allotment) and donate surplus home grown produce to local charities. The network has been developed on Ning, the [...]

Earlier this week I attended a workshop in London led by the authors of a new book entitled ‘Social by Social‘, which provides practical guidance about using social web technologies for social good. The workshop brought together a number of people who work in central government, social enterprises or charitable foundations who are developing programmes [...]

Since finishing my MSc exams in May I’ve been busy researching all things social media and gov 2.0. I’ve built up quite a collection of RSS feeds in Google reader and have been collecting bookmarks and resources via other sources like Twitter, so I thought I would start to share some of the links I [...]

I’ve been looking around at quite a few emerging ideas and practise for public engagement recently. At the moment consultation processes in local government are generally still fairly archaic and ‘having your say’ might mean filling out a survey or attending a public meeting, exhibition or focus group. The Power of Information report highlighted a [...]

A few weeks back I posted about the Google localgov event. My thoughts on whether Councils would adopt cloud computing went something like this: I have no doubt that the migration to the cloud won’t be driven so much by business strategy so much as by social needs and expectations. As time goes by our [...]