I have received another thinkpiece for our next report from Ross Ferguson of the Hansard Society. Ross has deliberately written a thought-provoking piece (as requested by me!) and is keen to hear other people’s thoughts.
Commons in Cyberspace
In 2001 Jay Blumler and Stephen Coleman set out a vision of a ‘Civic Commons in cyberspace’ (Blumler, […]
Today we published the first in our series of ICT Foresight reports, which we wrote with Ross and Milica at the Hansard Society. This first report examines the impact of ICT on the sector’s ‘voice’ and representation roles by looking at the activities of consultation and campaigning. It explains technological, political and social […]
We have finally finished writing the first ICT Foresight report and it will be published in September.
It looks at the VCS’s crucial ‘voice’ and representation role, specifically through looking at how ICT is being used (or could be used) for campaigning and consultation. We don’t think there’s anything ground-breaking in there but it will […]
The sense trend index recently alerted me to Google trends, which allows you to compare up to 5 terms and see the volume of searches across a time period of your choosing. Search results are returned as a time plotted graph together with details of the city or region from which the search originated. […]
The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth in the Economist’s recent supplement Among the audience – a survey of new media. A series of articles look at blogs, wikis, podcasting and journalism.
We will be exploring the impact of these for the voluntary […]
Discussions about e-democracy usually start from the perspective that the UK (and other western societies) is suffering from a drop in electoral participation and poor levels of trust in political institutions and politicians. The Power Inquiry, an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy, has published its final report and recommendations.
The Executive Summary doesn’t […]
This deliberately provocative question is the title of a seminar I am organising at NCVO’s annual conference on 21 Feb. Debating the question will be Will Davies (formerly head of ippr’s Digital Manifesto programme), Milica Howell (Hansard Society’s e-democracy programme), David Wilcox and Karl Wilding (NCVO’s Head of Research and my boss!)
Of course, I […]
Tom Steinberg (of mySociety and a member of the ICT Foresight panel) has written a story to explain how he thinks VCOs could use the internet to campaign in a new way. The story is based on several characteristics of ICT:
Networking
Clustering by geography
User generated content
As Tom says “This is a […]
My question for the day: What will be the impact of open source software for voluntary and community organisations?
I wonder whether voluntary and community organisations, often without dedicated IT staff, are ready to use open source software. Several organisations, including East of England FOSS in the VCS and Midlands Open Source Technology, […]
Karl Wilding identified 10 trends in the use of ICT in the Third Sector Foresight Project’s annual analysis of the changing operating environment for voluntary and community organisations.
Productivity - ICT driving government efficiency gains
Ubiquity - new technologies increasingly embedded in everyday objects, transactions and processes
Familiarity - a generation of ‘digital natives’ who transact over the […]