We have now gone live with the FutureGov Nework social networking site.

We have developed this site as a really straight forward, open and easy to use place to start to capture those things that we all do to improve public services - share stuff we’re all working on wherever we are, look at what other people are doing and, most importantly, talk.

We decided to develop a network for a few reasons, the main one being that we are either running or involved in running an increasing number of events and we wanted to give people the opportunity to connect before, during or after the event and share their experiences. But we’re not just focused on events, we see massive value for wide range of purposes, sharing best practice and experiences across a wide range of areas in government and social innovation.

The kinds of things you currently able to do on the site include:

• sharing links to other sites, photos, videos and presentations
• finding out who else is on here by looking at people’s profiles
• making your own profile interesting
• talking to each other by posting views, ideas, comments and whatever comes to mind

This site has been built in record time (one week, to be exact) and with one (expert) developer, which just goes to show what you can do quickly and inexpensively with this new fangled web technology.

You’ll notice we have decided to take a pretty unique approach to developing the network, developing it from the bottom up, starting simply and getting ideas from you the users on what we should focus on building next.

So let us know what you think of what we’ve got so far and tell us what else would be useful.  We’ll try and make it happen - and quick! - or if we can’t then we’ll tell you why not.

We aren’t shouting about the site too widely just yet as we want to let the people in the know get to play with it and help us test it first of all, so please get involved and have a play.

First things first, tell us about yourself by setting up a profile. Stick up a picture of yourself, plus a description of who you are, what you do, and what you’re working on.  Then choose some key words (tags) to describe yourself and add in stuff from other accounts you might have (Twitter, LinkedIn etc).  Once you’ve got a profile check out other people’s and some of the stuff we’ve already posted up here.  When you’re ready, post some of your own stuff up there, ask questions, do a brain dump, whatever.

And most of all - enjoy!