You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2009.
(Flickr image courtesy of michlyons)
… we didn’t do a presentation. But we did a lot of listening and chatting, and meeting all those interesting people we usually just see online. We’ve already followed up with some of the individuals and companies we saw at Barcamp, with a view to further improving www.parliament.uk’s output. As always, when we’ve got something to show you, we’ll put it on the blog.
Personally, I felt that Barcamp could have benefited from having more of the people who need convincing of the use of social media, open source, sharing information and so on at the event. And the people who don’t need convincing, but aren’t actively engaged in this community. Sometimes it felt like rooms of people agreeing with each other, which is no bad thing, but if we’re then all saying ‘… and now I need to go and tell management about this…’ there’s a gap.
So, if there’s another Barcamp, and Parliament are invited, I’ll definitely be trying to get Parliament staff outside of our immediate team to come along. If I don’t get confused with the ticket registering process again…
Jackie: What I really got out of Barcamp was an appreciation of the hard work and enthusiasm everyone has for this area of their work. It was clear that Government, and Parliament’s use of social media was all about opening the up channels of communication, joining in conversations or just sharing fantastic nuggets of information. As a team focused on engagement there was so many ideas and tools out there for us to explore/steal. Thanks for letting us in on it, much appreciated.
PS: There are good round-ups of Barcamp elsewhere on the web, from Steph ‘DIUS’ Gray, Neil ‘A. N. Other Govt Dept’ Williams and Simon ‘Puffbox’ Dickson. And you can search for content around the Barcamp on Twitter, Flickr, and on this Ning page.
Our growing collection of Big Ben films gets another addition with this video explaining how Big Ben keeps the right time.
This video was filmed by the Web Centre team, up in Big Ben’s Clock Mechanism room and the belfry. My favourite moment is when the mechanic, Ian, makes the casual aside about the log sheet used to record any corrections made to the pendulum: “We enter it into a log, which has been going for about the last 100 years…”
We are working on more Big Ben videos that will come out over the year, to tie-in with its 150th anniversary, and they’ll be added to the YouTube group as they go live.
