Catherine speaking at Open Space
It has been a busy few days for Public-i and, in particular, Catherine who has just finished what must have seemed like a whistlestop speaking tour of England.
Starting in Shropshire on Monday last week and winding up back in Brighton on Monday this week, our chief executive has seen a fair bit of the country on her travels…
- The Digital Futures event in Shropshire
- The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, London
- The Association of Police Authority Chief Executives
- Open Space South West, in Exeter
- CityCamp Brighton 2.5 – Digital Inclusion, Brighton
We’re currently in the ‘how do we actually get all the amazing things Catherine has been talking about out of her head’ phase of planning – and she has promised to follow up with lots and lots of blogging. I also harbour hopes that we will sit her down in front of her presentations, recording audio versions for all and sundry to watch at some point.
But that will have to wait. For the time being, we can at least offer a brief overview of the stuff that she’s been up to.
As the list says, Catherine’s tour started at the Digital Futures event in Shropshire, where she was talking about digital engagement. Catherine mentions this talk in her disintermediation post – and shares the Prezi from that event, which you can see below…
I used a long word just back there. ‘Disintermediation’. After comparing notes with colleague Ady Coles, I’ve decided the best way of explaining it is to use his expression: ‘cutting out the middle man.’ Essentially, as Catherine explains in her post, the Social Web has helped to take away a lot of the boundaries that exist between us and institutions – so we can all now communicate directly without needing the help of intermediaries. Wikipedia talks about ‘the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain‘.
The word was to come up a few more times during the week – not least in Catherine’s ad lib presentation on Friday at the Open Space South West event, where she spoke about the challenges presented by a networked world. (There may have been a few mentions of it at the APCC and APACE events, but I think that there will be posts about these events soon.)
A presentation had been prepared, but thanks to a few technical issues it was left unopened. You can see it here…
I scrawled a couple of quotes out in my notepad from the speech – and I know that it attracted a fair amount of comment on Twitter, on the event’s hashtag #openssw.
You can see my own quick notes on Open Space here – and Catherine’s here.
Picture: By Devon County Council, on Flickr, available on a Creative Commons Licence. Click the picture to see more.
