Having had a relatively quiet time of it recently on the event front (well for me anyway!), I thought it worth a short post to let you all know where I will be over the next 3 weeks as things are getting rather hectic again.

This week I will be donning my Enabled by Design hat and heading up to Manchester for the b.tween conference. Now in its fourth year, b.tween is a cross-media event aimed at bringing the best of the media and business world together linking talent with big corporations and scouts.

Why are we there I hear you ask? Well this year will see a new slot called ‘Enterprising Ideas‘ which gives delegates a change to work collaboratively to develop a number of interesting and socially responsible projects over the course of the conference.

Enabled by Design will be hoping to draw on the skills and enthusiasm of the impressive collection of creatives and media types.

Next Thursday (26th June) sees the launch of the London Leadership Network at an event at the Emirates Stadium, ‘Working Together to Shape London’s Future’.

According to the people themselves:

The London Collaborative is a new programme aimed at increasing the capacity of London’s public sector to respond to the key strategic challenges facing the capital. It was initiated in 2007 by all of London’s public sector agencies through Capital Ambition (the regional improvement partnership). The London Collaborative will work across London boroughs, the GLA, police and health services and other sectors.

I will be there representing Barnet Council as their Social Media Manager feeding in my thoughts on the Collaborative’s four workstreams: behaviour change, climate change, understanding population flows and worklessness and social housing.

Although not confirmed just yet, it looks like I will be nipping down to Bournemouth to the first day of the Local Government Association’s Annual Conference on July 1st.

As you may know, I am currently managing a public policy project looking at England’s Coastal Towns, researching how they are faring economically, socially and environmentally and how they can be given a boost through greater government leadership and intervention.

With many of the people I have been talking to and getting involved in the project will be at the event, we hope to hold our first project board at the conference as a fringe session - fingers crossed!

Last but not least by any means and keeping up the pattern of only attending day 1 of events that week, 2gether08 will be taking place in the Rochelle School venue in Shoreditch on 2nd-3rd July.

A little like b.tween in its focus on digital media although more definitely focused on the endless possible social benefits digital technologies bring, 2gether is billed as a ‘festival of ideas’. 2gether will bring into contact “an eclectic mix of technologists, policy makers, campaigners, TV producers, software and games developers, designers, politicians, digital innovators, writers, bloggers, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, leaders from charities, NGOs and leading players in the marketing, PR, cultural and creative fields as well as anyone else who believes that creative use of emerging digital technologies can generate solutions to society’s most pressing problems.”

In what is quite a daring twist on the traditional conference (and unconference) format in the vein of Shine, all delegates are encouraged to both attend sessions but also lead/contribute to sessions.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with others (Steve Moore, Mitch Sava, Mick Fealty, Dave Briggs and Alice Casey among others) to put together a couple of interesting sessions that will focus on the use of these technologies in the public sector. While not quite finalised yet, the two working titles for these sessions are:

1. “From e-gov to we-gov - an Ideagora for government”
2. “Public service start ups”

If you are coming along, why not drop in, say hi and take part!