Firstly, an apology: We suggested – as it turns out ambitiously – that we’d write a quick post about our plans for the user group before the end of last week – as you can see from this tweet…
Well, as Robert Burns once pointed out, the best laid plans of mice and men… shall we just say ‘often go awry.’ In this case, a very busy week at Public-i Towers left no time for me to pen said blog post and that’s why I’m doing it now. So sorry…
The next user group – as we pointed out in that tweet – will be on the 1st of December (we promise there’ll be mince pies!). We’ve not confirmed the location as yet, but we’re planning on going back to the Hallam Conference Centre in London, where we held the last user group.
That was in May – and we were pretty happy with it because we got to test out a new format giving the meeting a new focus, citizen journalism, and outside speakers. We were joined by Carl Whistlecraft, head of democratic services at Kirklees, and by Nick Booth of Podnosh. You can see much more about it here.
This time we’ll be trying a similar approach, but we’ll be talking about several things – including the relatively new phenomenon that is councillors tweeting in meetings. It’s got a lot of attention in the press – and South Cambridgeshire recently held a debate about it – so it feels like a good time to have a discussion about how you can learn from this, deal with it and set protocols that will help this process to be a positive one.
If you have got views on this – and if you’ve actually got a policy – please tell us (by all means leave a comment below). We’d love to find out more about how councils are handling this issue.
We will, of course, be holding the Dr Lewis section, a technical Q&A on webcasting, as we always do.
We’re yet to confirm the guest speakers but we’ll keep you informed as soon as we can on this. In the meantime, please follow us on Twitter and set a search for the hashtag #piug2011…
Annd… don’t forget: there’ll be mince pies.
