I only organised three and still haven’t managed to blog about two of them yet. Still, they were good: Simon Whitehouse talked about ‘Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey‘ and Ordnance Survey OpenData, I looked at the Hansard Society’s recent report ‘Digital citizens and democratic engagement‘ and Stuart Harrison discussed SOCITIM’s ‘Better Connected 2010′ report on council websites.

So would you like me to organise another set of these? There’s been a suggestion that we look at Digital Britain, although it’s more relevant now to discuss it in the context of the new, controversial Digital Economy Act. We could also look at the digital engagement policies of whoever’s in power after the election.

If I do do more of these I will want to stick firmly to the theme of digital civic engagement, but I’m happy for them to be more focussed on public policy if that’s where people want them to go.

Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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Socitm is the membership association for ICT professionals in Local Authorities and the public and third sectors. Their Better Connected report, now in its twelfth year, compares local authority websites against a set of criteria designed to:

“…provide an informed view of the quality of the experience that members of the public are likely to have when engaging with local government through a website. We do this by examining how well each site deals with common queries and situations.”

Considering that claim, it seems a shame that in order to acquire a legitimate copy of the report itself you must pay £400 to subscribe to Socitm Insight. (You can, however, download a free spreadsheet showing how each council was ranked.)

So Stuart has kindly agreed to share his thoughts on the report with anyone who’s interested.

The discussion is being held in Moseley Exchange at 6.30pm on Monday (26 April).

If you intend to join us please take a moment to register on our Eventbrite page just turn up.

Update:

I’m going to try live-streaming the audio on Bambuser, and if I can find time I hope to release the audio mapped to any slides that Stuart might use. I might also get round to live blogging it here.

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I realise that even among beginners there will be a wide range of expertise levels. Therefore I ask attenders to have at least started trying to write a Rails application.

It doesn’t matter how far you’ve got with it – you may only be halfway through the first page of a tutorial and are stuck trying to install something – but this approach should give everyone a context for being there. In other words: rather than trying to learn together from different starting points, we can each bring a problem that we need help with and collaborate on concrete goals.

When?

If you’re interested please indicate on Doodle your preferred times for a first meeting.

Update

The most popular time for a first meeting was 7.00pm on Tuesday 4 May, so that’s when it will be.

Where?

The first meeting is being held in Room B225, Birmingham School of Media, Perry Barr. (Many thanks to Paul Bradshaw for arranging the room.)

We’ll see how this first one goes, but we might try for any subsequnt meets to be more central. If you have any suggestions let me know in the comments below. We need a space that:

• is free to use;
• is available late on weekdays;
• has free, reliable wifi;
• can comfortably accommodate a number of people working together, without disturbing others.

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I promised to plug this, so here goes.

Over the weekend of 15, 16 and 17 May, museums across the country will be running a range of fun events in the evening. There will be ‘tours by candlelight, battleship boogies, after-dark fire-spinning and lots, lots more’.

Information about what’s on near you is available on the Museums at Night website.

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