Here comes a straight press release…  Thoughts, anyone?
As part of the government’s consultation to gain opinions and views on its higher education debate - JISC is hosting a blog on its JISC Involve platform.

The Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), John Denham launched a debate on Higher Education, in February 2008 when he announced the intention to develop a framework for Higher Education for the next ten… read more

I was in Berlin last week for the innovatively-titled ‘Berlin in July‘ e-democracy unconference (beat that for a pair of niche jargon buzzwords!).  I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, the following things all being great:

• the place — Berlin is cool, no two ways about it;
• the people — everyone I met was smart, passionate and interesting to talk to, both about work and, for those rare moments

The latest edition of the excitingly sporadic Delib newsletter is now available to read online: Delib newsletter, June ‘08.

If you’re not signed up to receive the newsletter yet, you’re missing out: it’s free, less hassle and better-looking than an RSS feed, and even comes with a couple of newsletter-exclusive extras.  To sign up to the mailing list now, enter your e-mail address in the box… read more

One of our contacts at the European Parliament has set up a Facebook group entitled ‘I’m going to vote in the Euro elections in 2009′ and is looking for interesting and exciting things to do with it to take its membership beyond the current (very respectable) 260-odd and counting.

He’s keen to stress that this is a personal endeavour, not an official European Parliament initiative, but… read more

Yes, it’s a lengthy title but if I’d abbreviated it you wouldn’t know that we’d done a site for a Parliamentary organisation, would you?

The mission of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association ‘is to promote the advancement of parliamentary democracy by enhancing knowledge and understanding of democratic governance’. Our client, the UK Branch of the Association… read more

Hmm, I seem to remember writing a post on a very similar theme a little over a year ago! Back then, we were launching School Councils UK’s ambitious venture into the world of online interactivity and collaboration, taking them from a small site of static information to a large site with an emphasis on community, attempting to leverage the great asset they had in their… read more

Check out the interview and podcast in the Times from Jay Adelson, chief executive of the news site Digg, in which he says that the internet has brought down barriers and given a voice to all.

A quick read of the article prompted two (related) reactions from me, both of which I’ll hopefully get a chance to blog in more detail soon:

1. the internet is a democratic

I discovered this fascinating local debate site on my Google travels the other day: http://www2.harrogatetoday.co.uk/tesco/tescohome.asp.

There’s all kinds of things to examine and weigh up here, far too many to meaningfully comment on briefly now — the binary nature of the argument, the combination of new and traditional communication methods, the specific features of the site, the central involvement of a media outlet, the matter at hand, the… read more

Following Chris’s post about English Heritage’s ‘Your Place or Mine’ the other week, we were pointed in the direction of a subsequent English Heritage social media project, the aptly-named ‘Our Place’.

‘Our Place’ describes itself as ‘…for people who work in broadening access to heritage. It is an online space where you can network with peers, share and be inspired by project case studies, and… read more

‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ is an extension of Squidoo, a site that lets users collect content on a particular topic from all around the web in one place.  We’re not particularly enamoured with Squidoo itself (to put it politely) but, having first seen it yesterday, I think ‘Hey Monkeybrain!’ looks far simpler, cleaner and with a stronger proposition.  The idea is that you set up two opposing ideas… read more