ESSENCE is the world’s first global climate collective intelligence event—designed to bring together scientists, industrialists, campaigners and policy makers, and the emerging set of web-based sensemaking tools, to pool and deepen our understanding of the issues and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. The event, starts online in January [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Debate category.
Public Service Broadcasters in the Digital Age
Two quick reminders for anyone thinking about the reformation of public service broadcasting in the UK: (1) The closing date for responding to Phase 1 of Ofcom’s PSB Review is Thursday 19th June. You can read further details here and here about the Review which was launched in April by Ofcom’s Chief Executive Ed Richards. [...]
ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling
Thanks to David Osimo’s highly recommended blog on eGovernment 2.0, I was in Brussels at the end of last month to present our work-in-progress on Debategraph to the European Commission’s ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling Consultation Workshop Framework Programme VII. It was a fascinating day, exploring the Information Society Directorate’s long-term research agenda in [...]
Government 2.0 – only connect…
“Only connect… Live in fragments no longer.” E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910). The lightweight, collaborative, multiway technologies emerging across the web, and the new patterns of social interaction associated with them, are about to transform the shape of government, our experience of government, and our participation in government. To misquote Clay Shirky: government that’s [...]
Don’t think about thinking. It’s not on the test…
A double thank you to Dan Pink (and Mike Sporer) today, for introducing me to Tom Chapin’s guitar-based critique of trends in modern education policy: Obviously Tom’s closing observations about the importance of teaching of students how to think and engage in rational discourse strike a chord here. And our belief in the potential multiplier [...]
Thinking about changing the world?
A week in which: Dan Pink, Al Gore’s former chief speechwriter, told Tim Ferriss… “Ultimately speeches are about actions. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. That’s a high bar. But that’s what we should aspire to when audiences give us this privilege.” …TED uploaded a video of Dan’s old [...]
Changing Climate: live blogging the Progressive Governance summit
Congratulations (and a relaxing Sunday) to Simon Dickson and the Downing Street digital team, for their phenomenal work on Policy Network’s Progressive Governance summit this morning. At short notice, they produced an impressive and engaging microsite built around a live video stream, live blogging and comments, and immediate access to the summit papers. It was [...]
mySociety's Free our Bills! campaign
The ever inspiring mySociety launched its first campaign on Tuesday, with a characteristically simple, pragmatic and catalytic focus: to open up the legislative process to wider and more effective scrutiny by publishing Bills in a semantically marked-up form that can be automatically interpreted and used across the web in imaginative ways. It’s a small, manageable [...]
Mapping Obama's Speech in Berlin
As announced on the Global Sensemaking blog, and building on Tim Bonnemann’s excellent Wordle and Mark Szpakowski’s suggestion, I produced a draft map of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin yesterday, which you can view and explore here. The snapshot below displays the top layer of the map, and you are welcome to log-in and improve [...]