foomandoonian

These are my notes from the first meeting of the Cross Party Digital Group. Check out my earlier post for what this was all about, and you can also check the Twitter hashtag #digitalwales for some other backchannel chatter. Turnout was rather good, filling the medium-sized conference room with suits. Rory Cellan Jones kept everything on target, with only a few sidelines into the news of Rupert Murdoch’s plans to remove his content from search engines, and another chap who for a moment I honestly thought was going to ask the Google lady why his site wasn’t ranking well.

The key nuggets to take away were:

1. Everyone on the web is equal. The voice of one blogger can be as loud as yours. You’re going to have to come to terms with that. Resisting or denying it will get you nowhere.
   
2. Release your data so others can use it. (I was disappointed there wasn’t more said about this - hopefully it will be a bigger theme for the next group meeting)
   
3. Go where people already are. The platforms are there. People are already using them. Join them.

Some other points I especially liked, and a few thoughts of my own:

• Karina Brisby suggested that the Assembly should “Embrace the crazy”. She said that you can always defer issues, promise to give answers later, but that you should be prepared to take anything on board. (I wonder if she knows how crazy some locals are).
  
• Run regular blogger briefings. Bloggers are not as high-impact as the mainstream media, but what they write often has much greater value to a smaller audience. They are serving an important long tail.
  
• According to Jag Singh “Wales has the lowest takeup of social networks”. He was the most pessimistic/realistic of the panel in this regard.
• Work with people with what interests them. Give people a hook, something to get them using the technology. Great example: Pigeon fanciers who needed to use the internet to share their stats.
• What is really so important about new media and technology, and how can you convey that?
• The need to tell a story to make it relevant.
  

There was one rather strange question from Dave Jones who asked how all this digital technology could help end poverty, like if it couldn’t accomplish that, then why even bother? Maybe he was driving at something I’m missing. Anyway, I don’t draw any particular conclusions from this evening. I turned up with no real questions and no particular expectations. Hopefully future sessions will focus on the importance of making data avaliable for all to access and use however they like.

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Interesting footnote: There was no real information on the web about this Digital Group evening, so when Rory mentioned it on Twitter beforehand, he linked to my blog post. Go figure!

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