The second Brighton Future of News meetup will focus on the general election. It's a prompt 7.30pm start at the Skiff, and it should go on till about 9pm - after which we'll head to the pub across the road.
We're keeping it to one speaker so there's plenty of time for group activity and questions, which proved quite popular last time (do let me know if you think differently!)
Richard Pope, web designer and developer is coming to talk to us about online activity surrounding the upcoming election. He's going to tell us about Democracy Club and the Straight Choice, new online transparency projects set-up for monitoring the election.
Richard is involved in MySociety, the fantastic non-profit democracy organisation, and also behind a new tool for opening up data, ScraperWiki, soon to launch. Scraperwiki recently ran a successful 'hacks and hackers' day, so he's got some ideas about how developers and journalists can work together.
As before we'll take questions, perhaps have a little bit of a debate, and then break out into groups to brainstorm our own election-themed, or political, projects. So if you've thought of something nifty you'd like to do online to coincide with the election, bring the idea with you!
Oh, and there's a Facebook group now! http://www.facebook.c...
Hope to see you on the 22nd!
Go for it Paula. It should be easy to do by clicking on the "change your mind" part.
Do you have any opinion about doughnuts?
Thanks to Sarah, the session was very well run and the venue was fine. Richard presented an interesting topic though its relevance to journalism is questionable. The system is far too open to abuse and would risk the rep of any journo that used it. Given the name of this group I had hoped for something on the lines of www.tattlerapp.com (which is not a plug as it is opensource).
Really enjoyed this MeetUp. Think the Democracy Club and the Straight Choice can both become really useful tools this May if journalists encourage readers to take part.
I agree with Az that the straight choice could be open to abuse but that doesn't mean it can't be used by journos as long as they get their hands on a hard copy of any election pamphlet and verify where it has come from.
I've pasted this quick round-up on the Future of News site: http://futureofnews.journallocal.co.uk/2010/03/30/brighto...![]()
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Any biscuit/snack items requests?