Skip to content
Archive of posts filed under the E-democracy category.

What should Obama do Next? The Independent series launches…

In the build up to Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, The Independent and Debategraph have teamed up to give the world a chance to map and explore what Obama should do next. Click here for the map. Over the next 10 weeks, Independent readers and the Debategraph team will develop a series of interrelated [...]

Introducing ESSENCE 2009…

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 [...]

Visualizing the American Choice

As Americans congregate at the polls and the world looks on in wonder, I thought that would be interesting to visualize the choice as seen through the eyes of the endorsement editorials of the Washington Post (which came out in favour of Obama) and the Washington Times (which came out in favour of John McCain)… …with [...]

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 [...]

Streaming live from 2gether08

Thanks to Richard Jolly, here’s the live streaming feed from the wonderful 2gether08 conference. The full conference schedule is available here. UPDATE: With the conference over for this year, here are a couple of video interviews recorded at the event by (the thankfully ubiquitous) David Wilcox: (1) UK Minister for Transformational Government, and still prolific [...]

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. [...]

Debate Mapping Obama's VP choice…

In the wonderful way of the web, a generous invitation from Seb Schmoller to guest blog an overview post about Debategraph, led to encouraging and deeply insightful feedback from David Weinberger about Debategraph. In a subsequent post, David called for transparent debate about Barack Obama’s choice of vice-presidential running mate, noting that: “Barack Obama has [...]

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 [...]