Socitm Blog

Good to see a lot of regulars from Socitm's web events at UKGovCamp2010 on Saturday.  

Yes, you read right, 130-odd people so excited by work, they ignored the fact it was Saturday to attend - and then spent Sunday at it as well, judging by the torrent of subsequent Tweets and blogs.........

As is well documented elsewhere, GovCamp is an 'unconference' where a lot of people interested in e-democracy, the social web and the public sector, and a wide range of related topics, get together for a day. Its an unconference because there's no agenda in advance and the content is dictated by the people who come along. On paper it sounds like it will never work, but read the feedback from the webbies and social media types who attended its clear that this was a very, very successful day. You can access write ups from the event at http://www.ukgovweb.org/.

I led a session on Socitm's proposed web professionals group - helpfully written up by Sharon O'Dea in her blog, http://wp.me/pBN9s-3e and attended other sessions on hyperlocal (or community) websites, led by Will Perrin of TalkAboutLocal, http://talkaboutlocal.org/ and open data (Christ Taggart of OpenlyLocal http://openlylocal.com/ and Richard Sterling of the data.gov.uk initiative http://www.data.gov.uk/ leading two separate sessions).

Both issues are going to loom large in the coming months for people managing local authority websites and local authority data more generally. Socitm Insight's Better connected 2010 will carry information on both issues, while Socitm will be developing wider activity around open data, for details of which, keep an eye on this website and the News from Socitm broadcasts each Friday.

I only got to four of the 35 sessions at the event, so if you didn't get to the event, you only missed a bit more of the content than I did - why not visit the event wiki at http://ukgc.wikispaces.com/ and pick up some of the activity there.