A colleague pointed this out to me today, a new site ‘Politics and the City’, ostensibly run by television presenter June Sarpong. It’s designed to engage women more in the political process by presenting a regular mix of political news and celebrity gossip. It will also feature a range of guest bloggers, celebrities in the main, and the bulk of the main content at the moment seems to… read more

We’ve just put together an interesting little package for North East Connects, aimed at informing elected members about what e-Demcracy can do for them, and encouraging them to take up some or all of the benefits it can offer.

When we got the brief, it soon became apparent that the key objective in this project was presenting information in a clear, usable and engaging manner. So, we decided to dispense with… 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

It’s been talked about for a while now, but last week saw the launch of ICELE’s new ‘Blog in a Box‘ platform/toolkit.

A follow on from the ‘Read my Day’ project, Blog in a Box is meant to make it really easy for councillors and other local authority figures to put together a blog, get guidance on how to make it work, and have their blog listed… read more

I’m not sure who made this or what it’s for, however it’s a v.good pastiche of political campaigning in the US.

I particular like the Apathy Party’s campaign slogan of “whatever”, the idea of having a “nonifesto” and it’s poll on climate change which includes “staying inside more” as a way of helping stop climate change - which is kinda true in an obscure way, and no… read more

This has been our for a while now, but I’ve only just caught it… but better late than never…
Queen Rania (Queen of Jordan and general looker) is running (or was running last year) a campaign to try to get people to change their views of the Arab world through dialogue with each other - using the power of YouTube.
Her stereotypes campaign is interesting to us not just because she’s using… read more

Over the last few years, e-Democracy has generally focussed on what ‘tools’ you have available for your online work, and far too little on how these tools are actually used.

One interesting discussion I’ve been involved in recently is around the persona that should be adopted when undertaking online activity. It’s not an area that’s really considered much, if at all, but it could be important.

It’s taken as granted that from… read more

Maidstone have just closed their budget consultation for this year, including their Budget Simulator which, in the month it was live, collected over 770 responses.

They incentivised use of the Simulator by entering participants into a prize draw for a £250 shopping voucher and did a good job of promoting the Simulator through various council and associated websites.

Congratulations, Maidstone, on another successful implementation!… read more

I set up a new blog on wordpress about a week ago, not work related, but a handy opportunity to have more of a play with wordpress. I’ve spent the first week working on it, populating it with content ready for launch, all the usual stuff. As I did so though, something reasonably unexpected happened, I started getting a fair bit of traffic to the site, and even people commenting… read more

Drum roll . . . trrrrrrrrrrr . . . we’re proud to announce the re-launch of CitizenSpace.com!

Citizenspace was originally launched as a consultation portal in 2005, however in the last few months we’ve been having a re-think about what best to do with it and we decided on . . . well . . . a space for citizens (hence the name).

The overall (and fairly loose) idea is… read more