Parliament at the UKGovWeb Barcamp

A few members of the Parliament Web Centre team are lucky enough – and I mean lucky after a Glastonbury-style scramble for tickets – to be going along to the UKGovWeb Barcamp 09 this Saturday.

What is it? To quote from the wiki page, this Barcamp is ‘for those working in and around, or simply interested in, UK government online’ and ‘an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment’. Or a great opportunity to meet lots of like-minded people working in or around government – and Parliament (!) – who want to make all that useful information we collectively produce, easier to access/more interesting/more open/more shared… just, more.

These words are in bold on the wiki page ‘be prepared to lead a session on something‘, which throws down the gauntlet.

We could talk about what we’ve done with social media, like our use of Twitter, Flickr etc… but that feels like it was a topic for the barcamp last year. But we’re happy to share our experience of how we started using these tools in Parliament, how we convinced people, successes and failures.

We could also talk about our use of WordPress for our news area – using Open Source was a new one for our team and Parliament (In the back of my head I just hear ‘Number 10 beat you to it…’ – but I have a caveat on that story I’m willing to share if you grab me).

Personally, I’d be interested in having a discussion on how you engage a massive internal audience and a public audience without having two versions of all your content, and striking the right tone for all…

Hopefully, my colleagues will chime in with what else they think we could offer – and please let us know in the comments what you’d like to hear from us. If you’re going, look forward to meeting you. If you’re not, we’ll report back here on how the day went.

Parliament Podcasts

Yesterday the Web Centre hosted a half day workshop on how we could take the Podcast Pilot and turn it into a more established service. The workshop focused on these areas:

• developing production values for Parliament Podcasts
• thinking about the processes around commissioning, editing and releasing recordings
• what kind of products we want to develop

If you have any suggestions on the above subjects please get in touch.

Tour Parliament on YouTube

Update: Unfortunately we’ve had to take down these videos while we resolve some issues with their content. Apologies for anyone looking for them. We’ll try to get these videos back up as soon as possible. In the meantime, there’s more information on how you can visit Parliament on the website.

150 years of Big Ben

2009 is the 150th anniversary of the Clock Tower – or Big Ben – swinging into action. To mark this momentous occasion we’ve launched a dedicated Big Ben area on our website packed full of factual goodness on the world’s most famous clock tower. This area uses or links through to our Big Ben content on YouTube, Flickr and our virtual tour – with more content coming through the year. Let us know what you think in the comments below or by emailing webmaster@parliament.uk.