Public Sphere 2 was a real eye opener for me. Never been to anything quite like it! My initial reaction to the Twitter and live blog streams was that it was a bit distracting, I found myself watching that too much and not taking in what the speaker was saying. But throughout the day I found it really valuable to have links to topics and articles that speakers were referring to, I came away with 3 pages of things to go and read up on (yeah I went “old school” with pen and paper). Had I had a laptop with me I could have looked things up on the fly and bookmarked them to come back to later. But being unfamiliar with the topic and style of presentation before the day it didn’t even occur to me to take my laptop. I’ll know better next time!

Some of the comments on the Twitter stream were inappropriate given that we’re trying to gain credibility and gain support for some pretty major changes. But it would be just about impossible to moderate comments before posting them. I guess you just have to have a certain level of trust in the participants to behave (hopefully they’ll heed Kerry’s comments and be a bit more careful in future). Personally, I liked having some hello’s in there, we had a giggle at Rae’s hello to Craig, it made us feel more included. I know a lot of the participants already know each other quite well and I appreciated the efforts they went to to make us newbies feel welcome.

In regards to the lack of questions, again I think it comes down to a lack of preparedness on the part of those less knowledgeable on the subject, a bit of shyness and a real sense of being overwhelmed by the number of speakers and the amount of information presented. A few times I found myself still mulling over one concept when the next speaker had already started. I’m also the sort of person who would prefer to go away and read up on the subject and then have an opportunity to ask more in-depth questions after I’ve got my head around the basics, so it’s great to have made contact with many people from the event via forums, blogs, facebook and twitter.

The only real gripe I had was the chairs. They were OK for half day but by the end of the day they were almost unbearable!

Otherwise, I really enjoyed the event, I came away with a lot to think about and it has generated some great discussions within my team at work. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this all goes!

Cheers,
Nikki

Yes I am still unemployed, I helped organise this event as a volunteer because I am passionate about several things which are customer engagement, service delivery completion and a collaborative & participative Government.

The idea of running the public sphere events is to encourage collaborative and participative interaction between Government and citizens, and of course G2B B2G etc.

The announcement of the Government 2 Taskforce at the event was in my opinion a huge step forward in facilitating the type of collaboration and change in Government which is required this century.

Stay tuned for the next Public Sphere event, you can monitor that here http://www.katelundy.com.au.

If you would like to follow me on twitter and keep abreast of announcements regarding this topic in Oz, my twitter handle is @rbuerckner

I agree we do need democratic engagement to enable customer engagement, and I will be working toward facilitating that to the best of my ability. Whether it be assisting in User Experience Design or advising on interaction with the public through Social Media.

Cheers,

Rae

Are you still out of a job ? It sounds maybe not if you are running these events.
Do you know of anywhere in your part of the world where citizens have been invited to design public services ? Our politicians seem to realise that what they have is fit for the 1970’s. not the 2010’s and that their own people are not likely to be the most innovative or entrepreneurial folks.
So they are asking the common person again. They need democratic engagement as well.

Alex

It’s fine for you to have your own opinion

Cheers,

Rae

What I’m trying to say is that I doubt that most people would find the stream “extremely valuable”, and to some it would be a real turn-off.

Whilst you may have found the social part of the stream not valuable, the rest of the stream was extremely valuable and will have a large influence on the submission paper which Pia Waugh is putting together. I am guessing you’re not on twitter?

Cheers,

Rae

Someone asked why the mainstream media ignored the event. I think you have the answers.