The first of many bits and pieces we're bound to share with you after our visit to the fantastic Personal Democracy Forum in New York last week, here Marc Smith gives you the run down on what he and his colleagues are working on around social network analysis and online relationships.

As I say more of this sort of thing as we catch up on our post-event reading, but for now take a look at the event summary from FutureGov's Carrie as well as what was said on Twitter during the 2 day event.

Oh, and then there's always the recordings of the keynotes brought to you by Civico of course... :)

Over at TweetyHall we are asking if and how we should create hashtags for councils on Twitter.We’re looking for opinions on whether this is something worth doing. We would like to work with you (as residents, politicians and councils) to allocate each local council area a three letter tag. In this way we hope to be able to help keep thin.... Read More

Classy, thought provoking presentation from Georgetown University's Evgeny Morozov.

Many thanks to @odilas for sharing.

Great advice to local government from @demsoc as follow up to their talk at the LGIU Social Media Conference last week.

Following on from Dominic's presentation at the snappily titled 'LGC Developing Public Sector Communications for Social Media' conference this morning, I thought I would post the video he played of some vox pops we did.

A couple of months ago we ran around London's South Bank asking people what they thought of local government and how it could be improved.  I recommend it as a great way to spend a morning for anyone who works in a council. 

Whether you work in the corporate centre (e.g. in communications) or in a service area there is nothing more grounding than finding out what people really think, and you can use the results to push for change.

This is a really great paper on using technology to get citizens involved in decision-making.

Some great case studies and lessons learned, as well as some useful pointers, with some UK examples as well as some USA ones.

Well worth a read if you're trying to convince your organisation to do things a bit differently.

http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/promising-practices-in-online-engagement

Carnegie Trust UK and Open Democracy are hosting an event focussing on media, state/international governance, poverty and civil society to identify civil society's role in enabling dissent.
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