Spent yesterday at the Consultation Institute’s ‘Technologies for Participation’ conference in Birmingham, and what a marvellous day out it was. I’ve spoken at a good few Consultation Institute events over the past year or two, and this was their first formal venture specifically into our home turf of e-participation.

Lots of interesting speakers at the event: Nick Hewson gave an interesting talk on the market for e-participation at the moment (as we thought, not as much as there rightfully should be), Rita Wilson of ICELE gave an excellently balanced view of whether e-democracy is myth or magic, and Lisa Valade DeMelo from Ipsos-Mori as ever did the fascinating stats wizardry and analysis of the current situation that Ipsos-Mori is famed for. Andrew Acland’s talk helped me put together the final piece of the jigsaw of something I’ve been puzzling over for a while too, thanks Andrew, shall blog that separately.

Next up, there were five presentations from five ’suppliers’ (not that all but three of the other speakers weren’t suppliers too, but such are conferences) of which we were one. I’d battled for a while with what to say for a number of reasons, but finally came down on the side of abandoning powerpoints, screenshots and ‘product’ demos in favour of just telling it how it is from our point of view. There’s been a lot of good stuff in e-Democracy so far, but there’s been some silliness and missed opportunity too, and it’s time someone started pointing this out and standing up for what actually makes great e-participation that people actually use. I’ll be setting this stance out later too.

So, for a trial run of a new approach, it seems it worked, met lots and lots of interesting people, heard about lots of great projects, and hopefully made some new friends.

In the meantime, if anyone reading this was in fact disappointed by the lack of screenshot based powerpoint action, drop me a line and I’ll send some over.