As David described in the agenda for the workshop:

“Over the last 3 years, we have seen a dramatic rise in user driven, web 2.0 style initiatives in and around public sector service provision. Initiatives such as Patient Opinion, Farmsubsidy and Theyworkforyou all seek to challenge, disrupt and improve on traditional models of public service delivery from the outside, built on the web 2.0 principles of openness, transparency and sharing.

Against this background the workshop “aimed to bring together the best experiences from all over Europe” to: share experience and knowledge between the people running the web 2.0 initiatives; promote a surge of collaborative initiatives; and raise awareness and better understanding between government officials about why and how to promote web 2.0 in government.

The workshop was a great success across all these dimensions, and the slides and videos for all of the presentations are worth exploring in depth.

On a personal note, one of the joys of the event was the chance it afforded to meet people whose work I have long admired from a distance including James Munro, Lee Bryant, Anna Maybank, Dominic Campbell, Justin Kerr-Stevens, Emma Mulqueeny, Richard Stirling, Ivo Gormley – whose highly recommended film Us Now features Debategraph briefly and tantalisingly on screen at a key moment – and Søren Duus Østergaard.

In the aftermath of the workshop it has been delightful to see the same sense experimental adventure bubbling up elsewhere, and in the European context, the next collaborative step, emerging as spontaneous initiative from the workshop, is to imbue the European Commission’s imminent consultation on the i2020 strategy with more of the same spirit.

Of which more later.

Technorati Tags: #eups20, Civil Service 2.0, Collective Intelligence, Consultation, Debategraph, Deliberation, DG INFSO, eParticipation, EU, European Commission, Government 2.0, i2010, i2020, Public Policy, Public Services 2.0, Us Now, WAVE, Web 2.0

The snapshot below displays the top layer of the map, and you are welcome to log-in and improve both the top layer and the underlying structure of the first draft.

To illustrate how it is possible to develop this kind of mapping analysis further live on the web already, I have started to weave together the map and the transcript of the speech using the Future of the Book’s marvellous CommentPress tool to enable directly addressable, granular access to the text of Barack Obama’s speech, linked to the relevant sections of the map (and vice versa)—with a video clip layered into the latter example for good measure as well.

The granular addressability is shown at the paragraph level in this example; however, CommentPress—which is being applied imaginatively to several public consultations in the UK—allows the user to define a deeper level of granularity, enabling a finer one-to-one correspondence between the source document and the map.

The hope embodied in this experiment is that in the build up to the Presidential election in November it might be possible exemplify the potential of the emerging web technologies to shift the modus of political debate (a degree or two) away from the calculated cacophony of ephemeral soundbites toward a more considered, constructive and cumulative conversation.

If you are willing to help in the pursuit of this goal—working on the transcripts, mapping and tying together the arguments, highlighting inconsistencies and areas of agreement, and holding the candidates transparently accountable to their words—please join us.

Technorati Tags: Argument map, Barack Obama, Berlin, CommentPress, Eparticipatoin, Global Sensemaking, Government 2.0, Map, Obama, Public Consultation, Sensemaking, Transcript, Transparent, Video, Wordle

Popular Science’s revelation of the first wiring diagrams of the cerebral cortex:

Matthew Hurst’s brilliant blogosphere activation simulation / visualization from PdF2008:

.

And Jeff Stibel’s Harvard Business blog: The Internet is a Brain

Technorati Tags: Blogosphere, Brain, Cerebral Cortext, Internet is a Brain, Jeff Stibel, Matthew Hurst, Visualization

UPDATE: With the conference over for this year, here are a couple of video interviews recorded at the event by (the thankfully ubiquitous) David Wilcox:

(1) UK Minister for Transformational Government, and still prolific blogger, Tom Watson, on the announcement of Show Us a Better Way, a laudable and timely £20,000 public competition to find innovative ways of building on and mashing up Government data:

(2) An impromptu interview between Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, and Benjamin Cohen, Channel 4′s technology correspondent, on Umair’s inspiring manifesto for the next industrial revolution:

Technorati Tags: 2gether08, Benjamin Cohen, David Wilcox, Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution, Power of Information, Richard Jolly, Show us a better way, Tom Watson, Umair Haque

Rachel Carson or Monty Python?

Dead or merely resting?*

While the blogosphere ponders the implications of Twitter’s latest Silent Spring, it has been nervous week for twitchers everywhere.

While “Twitter’s down” is starting to develop the inane and comic familiarity of a catchphrase, “Amazon’s down” sounds like a global cataclysm.

Still, there’s always the TV News, isn’t there?

Being wired’s no fun when there’s nothing coming down the wires—and while the absence of Twitter, Amazon, and the TV news might be survivable, I’m not sure that my nervous system could cope with this:

Thank heavens for Dave Winer’s News Junk….

*Resting (and expecting big things to follow).

Technorati Tags: Adam Buxton, Amazon, Dave Winer, Dead Parrot, Monty Python, NewsJunk, No News, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Twitter

Obviously Tom’s closing observations about the importance of teaching of students how to think and engage in rational discourse strike a chord here. And our belief in the potential multiplier gains to society from helping children to develop their thinking skills explicitly rather than implicitly, has been one of our primary motivations in making Debategraph freely available to schools and colleges as an open education resource.

Viewed as a whole, though, what do you think of points Tom’s making? What are the other issues and voices in the debate?

I have embedded a rough starting point for the debate map below, using the arguments presented on Tom’s Not On the Test site, and would welcome input from teachers, students and educational policy specialists to help develop the map into a comprehensive overview of this vital debate.

Technorati Tags: Argument map, Collective Intelligence, Critical Thinking, Debate, Debate Map, Education, Humour, League Tables, No child left behind, Not on the Test, Public Policy, Schools, Standards-based education, Testing, Tom Chapin, Video

“Ultimately speeches are about actions. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. That’s a high bar. But that’s what we should aspire to when audiences give us this privilege.”

…TED uploaded a video of Dan’s old boss putting that philosophy into practice…

…and Tom Lehrer, turning 80, reminded us how quickly time can pass while you are thinking about change:

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, Changing the World, Climate Change, Debate, Debategraph, Global Warming, pollution, Speechwriting, Tom Lehrer

Big Dog walking:

Lego robot solves Rubik’s cube:

UPDATE: One month on, and thanks to Marc Andreessen, the feeling isn’t going away:

Robot reassembles itself after being kicked apart:

Technorati Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Computers, Ethics, Robots, Singularity, Terminator, Video