(UPDATE: if you’re looking for the Public-i user group and it’s between 10:30am and 4pm on Tuesday April 17 you need to follow this link to our Connect player.)
On Tuesday 17 May, we’ll be holding the latest edition of our user group in London. Nothing unusual there, perhaps, but this event is… well… a user group with a difference.
For the first time, we’re inviting folk in from the outside to talk – and doing a bit more than just webcasting the event (as we have always done). We’ll be adding more social reporting and general social media activity – and blogging after the event – so folk who aren’t there can get more involved. Partly that’s because we know these events are expensive and we want to provide as much value for a visit to the capital as we can, but it’s also because there’s rather a lot to talk about…
What’s happening…
Over the last few months, we’ve seen Eric Pickles call on councils to welcome ‘citizen journalists’ and we’ve invited Nick Booth, aka Podnosh, to do one of his very good workshops, explaining more about what all this ‘citizen journalism’ business actually means.
For those who don’t know much about Nick, he’s the man behind the Social Media Surgeries, which help to give community and voluntary groups as far afield as South Africa the online skills they need to transform their ability to organise, communicate and influence others. For a potted history of this marvellous man you might want to visit this little biography.
We’ll also be joined by the brilliant Carl Whistlecraft, from Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire (he’s @Gr8governance on Twitter, by the way). Carl will be talking to the group about how the council has been using live tweeting as part of coverage of its council meetings (with the hashtag #kirkcouncil).
Dr Lewis…
All of this, of course, will be additional to the normal package of entertainment that we have lined up, including Lewis (head of customer delivery) who’ll be there for the usual Best Practice exchange
Getting involved…
The webcast will be available from our Connect page here – and we’ll be liveblogging on the day to keep people up to date with what’s happening – with chatter on the twitter hashtag #piug2011 (update: this will now be #piug11 after tweets started appearing for something else on that tag). After the event, there’ll be blog posts and we’ll make sure we share slides and other information from the talks as soon as we can with you.
If you’re thinking about coming along, there might be a few places still available. Send us an email to info[at]public-i.info to get in touch or you can tweet @public_i to find out more if you’re interested.
