OpenGov
On Wednesday last week I attended the OpenGov conference:
A practical one-day conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities of social technologies to enable engagement, collaboration, and transparency in government
In a previous life I was a bit of an eDemocracy obsessive – so it was good to spend a day getting back into it. It seems things have moved on considerably in the last few years – the views that were previously held on the ‘outside’ seem to have seeped slowly into the ‘inside’, which is great news. However, there still seems to be a real lack of significant successes to point at (as well as a lack of consensus on what ‘Open Government’ actually means).
The conference was covered live by Andy Powell and has been written up by Carrie Bishop, so I won’t go into the day in detail, but Alex Butler’s contributions were a real highlight – both during her speech and in her refreshing interactions with the audience throughout the day, especially in response to Harry Metcalfe’s talk about Jobcentre ProPlus.
It was also great to meet some interesting people during the breaks, including Dave Briggs, Steph Gray, Paul Evans, May Race, Tim Davies and Paul Clarke. I’m looking forward to next time…