David Wilcox keeps on humming with his Designing for Civil Society blog:

• MPs get £10,000 each for improved communication: responses mixed – He quotes my list of suggestions from the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange on what I’d do with 10K if I were an MP. I want to endorse Tom Steinberg’s call for a shared e-mail response tool. In fact as I noted to TheOpenHouseProject in the U.S. the missing project in the UK TheyWorkforYou.com, WritetoThem.com, and HearFromYourMP.com collection is “ListentoPeople.com.”

My further response is that the parliament itself should supply joint tools starting with an enhanced member directory – yes, one size fits all experience the rare decent MP websites will offer individually – as an option like the award winning Minnesota legislature does (click on a members name and see contact info, picture, intro video, commitee assignments, news releases, e-mail newsletter tool, rss feed, podcast feed, deep links to bills authored, etc.). I also want a million dollars to commission an open source tool to help elected officials around the world read, understand and respond to their incoming e-mail. No parliament will build a tool and share it with other parliaments much less local city councils – an outside source of funding for the sharing is required.

• Designing for Civil Society: Free conference on new media and society: old-style event – See THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE WEB: Society, Government and the Internet at the RSA – Special event | 25 May 2007
• No 2.0 could be the reality check on Innovation Exchange – The Innovation Exchange reminds of my research for the OECD on “public net-work” (a shortened term like e-democracy that I made up but in this case died on the vine.) This does bring up the question – why is e-democracy/e-participation in governance still focused primarily on input and rarely on collaborative output or participatory implementation of public priorities??? As far as I can tell the interactive tools are pretty much the same. Say if you are working on a bid, why not propose building on the open source GroupServer platform (or other open source platforms) so the technology costs can be brought down around the world and enable similar value-added exchange! I’d be glad to collaborate.
• Social media challenges and opportunities for nonprofits

– I like this Yes 2.0 and No 2.0 disussion.

Cheers,
Steven Clift
e-democracy.org
dowire.org

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under Blogs and Feeds, Citizens and Participation, Conferences, National, Representatives, Technology, United Kingdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.