Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling,
spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. [...]

This morning Terence Eden was walking through Waterloo Station when he was stopped and searched by the proactive anti terrorism unit. Part of a random search pattern. This film may be ten minutes long but it is worth watching.

Tom Watson , William Perrin and the Power of Information taskforce shows off some mock ups for crime mapping by neighbourhood and the whole social media story makes it onto the Telegraph’s front page with a couple of subsidiary articles – including one mentioning West Midlands Police mapping site.  Practical and political! Crime mapping [...]

Empowered people tend to be good at conversation, understand their place in networks, have experience of how networks help get things done.

So it is very good news that the new Government Empowerment White Paper acknowledges that social media (the conversational web) will play a part in the emergence of more active citizens and stronger communities. [...]

A simple summary from Steven L Clift about key ingredients for government websites if they are to help strengthen democracy:

The typical e-government experience is like walking into a barren room
with a small glass window, a singular experience to the exclusion of
other community members. There is no human face, just a one-way process
of paying your taxes, [...]

I do like the idea behind this new web service from the Department of Communities and Local Government which tells you about your Local Area Agreement.
Local Area Agreements (LAA) are negotiated between a local council (plus the local strategic partnership, like BeBirmingham) and central government. Together they create a list of key improvements [...]

When I speak to council officers and civil servants about community engagement the conversation often conjures up mental images of docking space stations.

The officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then back into their own orbiters, [...]

After the suspension of a civil servant for blogging Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson has finally got some guidelines up to help civil servants join the online conversation. They are based on the civil service code and a big conversation which was encouraged by Tom on his blog and evolved into Richard Allan’s task [...]