by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
New site launched - Power to the People!
We have now launched the new improved "Connected Republic". We loved the content created in the old site, but felt that the separate elements -- blog, forum, bookmarks, videos -- made it more complicated to contribute to the site. So we've unified everything together in postings. Blog posts and comments from the old site have been moved across. Please now use the Postings area for articles, link/video sharing and starting discussions. Everyone can do this.
You can also tag any posting with an existing or new tag. We've tagged this post with the tag "The Connected Republic", so please use this tag for any feedback or discussions you want to start about the site itself.
If you registered as a user on the old site (ie. before October 6th), then your account has been moved across. The passwords have had to change, so click here to get your username and your new password send to you. Once you've logged in, you can change your password and your login name, if you like.
It would be great if you add a short Bio, if you haven't already, and upload an image. Once you've added a bio and an image, your name will go to the top of the people page, whenever you make a posting.
And once you've had a chance to try out the site, please let us know what you think.
Comments
Love the new site, Paul. Sleek and simple to use. Excellent!
Out of interest, what has happened to some of the old content, like the wiki stuff?
posted over 3 years ago
I've got all the wiki stuff on Government 2.0 and plan to do some further work on it and then share it again on this site. Just finding it hard to get the time to do it. (Also frankly the wiki did not work very well - writing a whitepaper on such a broad topic is not very modular and so it was hard for people to engage with the project. Next time what I would like to do is have a draft version of a document and then let people write their comments in its margins. That might work better.)
posted over 3 years ago
Paul, I think the re-worked site looks great. Simplicity has its advantages.
I will be curious to see how you decide to roll the wiki content back in. I'm working on a software platform (specifically, collaboration in policy development) which is constantly trying to strike a similar balance of simplicity and functionality. I don't believe anyone has yet cracked the nut of a simple, intuitive platform for deliberative co-creation.
posted over 3 years ago
Mitch - you're spot on with that observation. Collaboration online is so hard to do, even when you have a bunch of online enthusiasts involved.
Here's what I reckon: make the barriers to entry in terms of submitting content as low as possible. This is what I have tried to do at Digital Mentor. People can email, comment on blog posts, use their own blog, add to a wiki, bookmark in delicious... and I'm doing the curating job, bringing it all together, making sure everyone knows what is going on and can collaborate in the way they are comfortable with.
It can be labour intensive and you need someone with their eyes on the ball the whole time. But at the moment, I don't see any tools that can replicate what a human can do!
posted over 3 years ago
Unless there is member demand I am not sure how quickly we are going to add back true wiki capabilities. I certainly think I was wrong to think that we could write a whitepaper on Government 2.0 via a wiki. One reason I think this is that a whitepaper is not modular. So it would have been better to have tried to do a wiki of public sector transformation where people could add material on any aspects or examples that appeal to them. So the approach would have been - lets put together all the interesting things we see going on in the public sector. Then people could have added an entry on anything that struck them and if enough people had got excited, something quite interesting and useful might have been created. (is this worth trying? If someone wants to steal the idea, that's fine by me as long as they send me a link to the site!). So my current view is that the best thing to do in the whitepaper area is to let me comment on a document rather than invite them to help write it. But I could be wrong and if someone suggests a promising wiki project that they want to do on this site, I would be very happy to consider it.
posted over 3 years ago
I think most people prefer to write short, general comments on stuff rather than changing the actual text, which is why wiki white papers often don't work so great - unless a team of committed individuals is working on it.
As you say, wikis are quite good for listing resources, good practice, etc. I started one for UK local gov here.
posted over 3 years ago