Yesterday a new website launched, Action London 2010, providing Londoners what promises to be a textbook perfect case study on dos and don’ts of civic engagement in the digital age. They say (and have demonstrated they are) working to improve the site quickly, to their credit. I wasn’t going to post this but I eventually decided to lay [...]
Tagged as:
accountability,
cities,
civic engagement,
democracy,
digital democracy,
generativity,
government,
openness,
transparency
If you’re in London Ontario this Saturday afternoon come to the Central Library for the Indie Media Fair. I’ll be doing a workshop at 3 pm on the convergence of social and independent media. I didn’t come up with the theme but it certainly resonates with me. I went to the fair last year and [...]
Tagged as:
culture,
groups,
indie media,
networked publics,
networks,
social media,
society
A few of us travelled from London to a ChangeCamp event in Toronto Tuesday night to help design a civic engagement toolkit: We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations [...]
Tagged as:
change,
changecamp,
co-creation,
collaboration,
collaborative democracy,
conversation,
democracy,
ldnbeta,
participation,
politics,
rhetoric
Today I was trying to answer this question in a group discussion at AgendaCamp. Most of the time we talked about reasons to not stay in London. Personally, I moved back to London in 2000 after finishing school to regroup before figuring out what to do with my life… And I stayed in London because [...]
Tagged as:
cities,
citizen engagement,
culture,
demographics,
generations,
marketing,
openness,
signaling,
social media,
strategy,
youth culture
2009 was my first full year of regular and earnest blogging. I’m usually surprised by which posts do poorly and which ones are successful. Sometimes I’m not really happy with something but I hit “Publish” anyways and people love it. Sometimes I put hours of extra work trying to popularize something and it vanishes. Here [...]
Tagged as:
2009,
2010,
blog,
blogging,
personal,
writing
Few people can resist talking about end-of-year favourites — bloggers especially. Since a lot of us are already going to be posting our picks we might as well try to aggregate them into one stream for everyone to admire together. It’s the holiday season, after all. It’ll be pretty easy — as long as people [...]
Tagged as:
aggregation,
blogging,
gdldn,
ldnfavs09,
social media,
tagging
Looking at the news, everyone in London seems to be very excited about the CARGO HUB PLAN: Ottawa and the city will unveil big bucks to help London become an international air cargo gateway Whether or not this plan makes solid business sense in the near term is not my concern [clarification: I should say, [...]
Tagged as:
cargo cults,
cargo hub,
culture,
digital interactive gaming,
digital media,
innovation,
innovation clusters,
new economy,
signalling,
transportation
Last week when I read Titus Ferguson’s post about the fact “‘social’ is in ‘social media’ for a reason,” I was reminded of Dan Brown’s column at LFPress.com about how his blog has led to offline friendships. I can relate. Since I started actively engaging people on Twitter a year ago my little bubble has exploded. I [...]
Tagged as:
community,
gdldn,
groups,
social,
social media,
twitter,
web
There’s no way to avoid the reality that strikes will make people upset, but maybe we can do more to avoid them altogether. That suggestion was made by Larry Cornies in great column in Saturday’s London Free Press, arguing we’re overdue to consider the damage caused by strikes and lockouts, time to think more imaginatively about [...]
Tagged as:
deception,
government,
labour,
london transit,
manipulation,
negotiation,
open government,
openness,
politics,
society change,
strikes,
transparency,
unions,
work
When Larry Cornies tweeted, “Attention, citizen journalists: Grand Theatre (London, Ont.) annual meeting,” for a moment I thought he was talking about an annual meeting of citizen journalists… “Oh?” I thought to myself, “I wonder who put that together?” No… Once I regained my literacy I realized the annual meeting was in fact for The [...]
Tagged as:
citizen journalism,
community,
engagement,
grand theatre,
non-profits,
participation,
theatre
