Last weekend I tidied up my garden shed. It was so full of the debris and detritus of life that the door struggled against the bolt and bowed at top and bottom. Upon clearing out four broken floor fans, an acoustic guitar with no head (thanks to my 2 year old son), a barely used [...]
Not a week goes by in the Bang the Table office where we don’t have heated discussions on the pros and cons of web anonymity when it comes to the world of online community engagement. So when this infographic from Namesake.com (via Visual.ly) popped into my Facebook feed discussing the very topic, I thought it [...]
Like many others I was pretty perplexed by the shameless attempt by Kenneth Cole to promote his shoes using the #Cairo hashtag on Twitter. I thought it ill judged and crass. But the reaction was also a touch disproportionate and perhaps played into the offenders hands. There were so many tweets, he gained so many [...]
This morning I read a blog post by Mark Drapeau that neatly said in a very eloquent way lots of things I have been thinking but failing to express very well for a long time. Please go and read the orignial article entitled Government Social Media: Five Questions for 2011. I couldn’t resist reproducing a [...]
Around the world, hundreds of governments are opting to open up their budgetary conversation to the community, inviting them to have their say on how money should be prioritised for new investments choices, services and projects. Participatory budgeting (or PB as it’s known in casual circles) is a democratic process where community members get the [...]
I have been getting increasingly alarmed at reports of central purchasing initiatives for Gov 2.0 where contracts are signed at a whole of government level. Central purchasing seems like ever such a good idea to drive down costs. If the Government buys all its pens from one source then the pens are cheaper – is [...]
My thanks to Lisa Schiff of Narracoorte Lucindale Council in South Australia for bringing this article (below) from the Adelaide Advertiser’s Adelaide Now Website to my attention. This is about the beautiful Barossa Valley region rejecting an application to open a McDonalds in the area. Astonished as I am that anyone could reject the healthy [...]
This morning while cruising Twitter, as I often do before breakfast, I came across a blog post by David Armano of Endelman Digital, a Chicago agency. In this post David talks about viewing online engagement outposts in non owned platforms as embassies and treating staff responsible for the platform as your envoys. The post also [...]
Bang the Table Director, Dr Crispin Butteriss, caught up with Peter Ghin one of the founders of Melbourne based firm Cultural Value. Cultural Value specialises in deep engagement and dialogue for organisations working in the cultural development and arts sectors. Peter has a background in the performing arts, strategic planning, organisational change and counselling. Crispin [...]
I am sometimes confronted by a prejudice in my travels; that the relationships developed through online community engagement are less real than those created via face-to-face engagement processes. Like most prejudices I believe it is based on fear and misunderstanding. Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be asked to chair a mini-conference in [...]