PdF '09 is on again (Mon 29 - Tue 30 June) and this year's forum is set go off with keynotes from the likes of Michael Bloomberg (Mayor of New York), danah boyd (Microsoft Research), David Weinberger (Author), Jeff Jarvis (Journalist) and Mark Pesce (Future St).

You can see the schedule here and follow the twitter backchannel using the hashtag #pdf09

Our very own Mark Elliott wil be participating in a panel titled "What could a future White House 2.0 look like?"

How could millions of people collaborate to help govern the country? Jim Gilliam's web site, White House 2, is one possible answer, but there are many others. This session is going to start off with a presentation from Jim looking at the top challenges that came up when building the application, to see how his lessons learned might be applied on a larger scale. In an email note to his fellow panelists, Jim said he was going to focus on seven areas:

-virtual ballot stuffing
-how do you encourage good contributions?
-how do you find the good contributions?
-how do you build consensus with thousands of people involved?
-how do you balance competing interests?
-what about all those crazy ideas?
-how do we get more people involved?

Then, Fabrice Florin of Newstrust, Mark Elliott of CollabForge and Craig Newmark of Craigslist are each going to offer insight on these questions, drawing on their own experience building and managing online collaborative projects.

Mark Elliott has arrived back in New York and is very excited to be involved in Participation Camp '09 this weekend (27-28 June). The event is being organised using the open space method meaning people can nominate themselves as speakers and the event will be totally interactive as the organisers are encouraging people to get involved virtually.

The Participation Camp schedule can be found here and you can watch virtually through this link. Some presentations are being webcast via this livestream.

Remember to follow Twitter activity through the hashtag: #PCamp09

Speaker highlights include:

Mark Elliott (Collabforge) will lead a presentation on engaging citizens in collaborative planning and policy-making using participatory tools and methods.

Gale A Brewer (New York City Council) will host a discussion on her proposed legislation for making New York City’s public data accessible and machine readable.

Peter Corbett (iStrategy Labs) will discuss the innovative approach they’re using for the second instalment of the Apps for Democracy contest.

Tim Hwang (The Cooperation Project) plans to speak about the potential for gaming open government data.

It's been a busy time for us here at Collabforge HQ and we're gearing up for some more exciting activities over the next few weeks that we want to share with you.

Web 2.0 in Government - Sydney

Mark Elliott & I are heading to Sydney to speak at the Web 2.0 in Government Conference 2009 on Wednesday 24 June. It's the first commercial conference on Government 2.0 being held in Australia and we're really excited to be on the program.

Mark will be part of a panel session on the challenges of Gov 2.0 and will also be presenting on "Public consultation, wikis & internal collaboration" using
FutureMelbourne and wePlan Alpine as case studies. I'll be speaking about "Citizen Innovation" and how government and public sector organisations can harness collaboration for service delivery, legislation and policy development by leveraging the participation of their stakeholders in the interest of co-creating pubic resources.

Participation Camp - NYU

From there Mark is jetting back to the USA to be a featured speaker at Participation Camp '09, an un-conference organised by Matt Cooperidder which aims to "use our collective knowledge to solve the problems of participation [and calls] on all government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists to join us as we share knowledge about new technologies and new methods for public participation."

It's being held on the weekend of 27-28 June at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program @ the Tisch School of the Arts 721 Broadway, New York. For those of us unable to be there in person they’ll be holding a simultaneous virtual un-conference and participants should register for a “Virtual PCamper” ticket here and use the chat service Skype which is available for free download here.

Personal Democracy Forum - Lincoln Center, New York

It's then over to the Personal Democracy Forum "the world's largest and best known conference on the intersection of technology and politics" where Mark has been invited to speak on a panel titled "Imagining White House 2.0: Making Open Collaboration Platforms Work", which will be chaired by Ellen Miller co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. PdF (as it's affectionately known) is the premiere conference on politics, democracy and the Web and this year's stellar line up includes danah boyd, Craig Newmark, David Weinberger, Mark Pesce and Vivek Kundra.

We'll be live tweeting, blogging and updating our involvement in these fantastic events so please join the conversation.

Photo courtesy of freeparking - thanks!

Last year Collabforge participated in One Web Day by presenting on our experience with the Future Melbourne wiki project (collaborative development of Melbourne's 10 year plan).

This year looks exciting as there's some big changes to the organisation with a Ford Foundation grant and Mitch Kapor and Nathaniel James coming on board.

A question I'm often asked by clients, friends and people just passing by on the street is, 'so what's the big deal with Twitter anyway?'

This is of course a great question - that is, how is Twitter different than Facebook or any other social networking platform and why should one dedicate their precious time to learning and engaging with yet another web community?

There are a few reasons why Twitter is a big deal, but from my perspective, the primary one is that,

Twitter spreads ideas like air travel spreads the flu

Simply put, Twitter spreads ideas by liberating them from the 'Facebook social graph', enabling them to quickly and effectively leap across networks. This is due to the fact that when you post a message to Twitter, it is sent to the entire 19 Million strong network.

So effectively, the tweets of all 19 million Twitter users are thrown into one big heap and then sorted after the fact by followers, or, by hashtags. For example, this allows one to follow the tweets associated with a specific conference - here's the tag for one I recently attended using: #ccisumit - or discover people interested in and providing information surrounding social media marketing.

Collabforge founder and chief consultant Mark Elliott is returning home from a whirlwind trip to the East coast of the USA. Mark was invited to keynote the City Planning, Civic Engagement & the Internet Conference at Princeton University - detailed post on this to follow soon.

Mark spent the first two days in New York and was a guest on acclaimed author and Frontline presenter Douglas Rushkoff's new radio show The Media Squat on WFMU. Mark's interview with Doug about participatory democracy can be found here.

There's a real movement under way in the US towards Open Government and one of its key proponents is Matt Cooperrider from the iYear Foundation. Matt is the driving force behind the OpenGovNYC meetup group which aims "to improve government from the outside in, working together with cooperative government officials."

Matt invited our very own Mark Elliott to lead a Collaborative Policy Building Workshop on April 28th to develop the process for running a 'policy sprint':

“Techies will be familiar with the idea of a coding sprint, at which coders will choose a particular project on a particular day and code like hell until it’s done. We want to do the same thing with policy, so that by the end of the day we’ll have something that we can present to Albany or City Hall.”

You can help take the 'policy sprint' idea further by participating in this wiki which captured the main themes to emerge out of the workshop. Mark then dashed over to Washington D.C. as guest of The Sunlight Foundation where he spoke to a group of people about Collabforge's work on Web-based public engagement and mass collaboration. Sunlight are trailblazers in Open Government through a number of exciting projects that are committed to "creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency." Something all of us here at Collabforge are also very passionate about.

And all of these activities took place before the actual conference. Well done Mark on such a successful trip! Stay tuned for a full update on Mark's Princeton keynote and more news to follow soon.

The term "Government 2.0" (Gov 2.0 for short) has been around for a few years now and grew out of the Web 2.0 movement which is all about amplifying the Web's inherent capacity for openness, participation, self-organisation, decentralisation, group-forming and network-enabled collaboration.

Gov 2.0 is about applying these Web 2.0 principles to the planning, management and delivery of government services by utilising blogs, wikis and social media to catalyse more participatory forms of democracy that can in turn facilitate stakeholder engagement, community consultation and citizen innovation.

Collabforge is at the forefront of the Gov 2.0 wave at both a strategic and IT development level through the successful delivery of exciting public sector projects like the Future Melbourne wiki (City of Melbourne) and the wePlan Alpine site (Parks Victoria) which extend our clients capacities for internal collaboration and community consultation.

The wider implementation of Gov 2.0 has received serious consideration and gained prominence only recently through President Obama's 'Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government' which calls on his Chief Technology Officer to develop an 'Open Government Directive' to implement the principles set forth in this Memorandum:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Collabforge senior consultant Darren Sharp recently returned from a trip to Canberra as an invited speaker to the National Library of Australia's Innovative Ideas Forum 2009 (IIF).

The topic for this year's IIF was 'The value and significance of social networking for cultural institutions' with a particular emphasis on social networking innovations through which online services engage with their users in the development of their content. The line up included Marcus Gillezeau (Firelight Productions); Anne Summers (author & journalist); Mark Scott (Managing Director of the ABC); Rose Holley (ANDP); Darren Sharp (Collabforge); Jillian Dellit (The Le@rning Federation); and Jo Kay (Second Life Designer).

Darren's presentation "Library 2.0: citizens co-creating culture" explored the modes and means of community engagement through social media and how to leverage stakeholders to co-create services through user-led innovation. It also explored the concept of Library 2.0 which Casey & Savastinuk essentially define as a re-orientation towards "user-centered change":

It is a model for library service that encourages constant and purposeful change, inviting user participation in the creation of both the physical and the virtual services they want, supported by consistently evaluating services. It also attempts to reach new users and better serve current ones through improved customer-driven offerings.

Darren's presentation can be viewed here in its entirety:

Darren was also interviewed by the Canberra Times for a story about Twitter following his IIF2009 presentation which can be read here.

The Future Melbourne Community Plan has won the Planning Institute of Australia's prestigious President's Award!

From the press release:

“Future Melbourne has been the most ambitious community consultation project ever undertaken by the City of Melbourne and, indeed, by a local government organisation. The plan outlines the key goals and challenges for the city’s future. The extensive community engagement undertaken in the development process has ensured that it is a rich and robust plan that really represents the community’s vision for our city. The Presidents Award recognises the achievements of both cities in developing long-term plans for the future direction of all aspects of city life.”

Collabforge worked very closely with the City of Melbourne to reengineer it's city planning process towards a collaborative outcome. The result was Collabforge's development of the Future Melbourne wiki - an online environment for both internal collaboration and public consultation. You can read more about our role in this project here (and here's a little more background).

Prior to winning the President's Award, Future Melbourne was also the winner of a Planning Institute, Award for Excellence, Local Government.

We're very proud of our involvement in this project and are excited to see it being recognised for the innovation, dedication and excellence contributed on part of the Future Melbourne and Collabforge teams.

government2.0

Collabforge started consulting on the Carbon Down program in September last year (2008) and has forged (no pun intended :-) a close working relationship with its team. Our input is aimed at helping develop and refine the program's Web strategy, which is designed to achieve a reduction in carbon emissions on part of SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises).

Carbon Down is three year, $10m collaboration between the Victorian Employers' Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI) and Sustainability Victoria. From the website (CarbonDown.com.au),

Carbon Down is a partnership between business and government dedicated to reducing Victoria's carbon footprint through innovative, practical solutions.

I feel this program's objectives are of great importance to our local and global community. While big business is increasingly recognising the importance and opportunities of addressing resource efficiency and sustainability, small and medium sized business (as I know all too personally) rarely have the time to take a strong stance in this area, even when the intention to reduce carbon is genuine.

An additional challenge in engaging this sector is the fact that it is very large (est. 500,000 in Victoria alone), diverse, fragmented and difficult to communicate with due to the high demands placed upon those running their businesses - and the current economic climate doesn't help matters.

Yet another challenge (there are many) is the lack of political leadership in this area. Many SMEs we speak with mention the importance of government taking a strong stance in this area, and while there is the soon to be introduced carbon emissions trading scheme, at this point it doesn't look likely to deliver the outcomes that we need - it focuses on big business (rewards heavy polluting industries) and does little if nothing to address SMEs.

In coming months, the Carbon Down program will be launching its online program - we'll blog here when this happens. If you are reading this as an SME and are interested in getting involved, please contact me (Mark.Elliott ~At~ collabforge.com) or post a comment below.

I'd also love to hear from you regarding anything relating to the intersection of sustainability/carbon reduction and SMEs - thoughts, opinions, solutions, opportunities, initiatives, websites, etc...