Wowzers.  It’s been a busy year for FutureGov and we’re only just catching our breath.  Not only have we done loads, but we’ve had a few changes as a company and learnt a load along the way, with the chance to work with some brilliant people too.  Dominic and I thought we’d share some of our highlights like the fantastic projects we’ve been lucky enough to be involved in, the events we’ve hosted and the thinking we’ve done.

Warning:  This might read a bit like one of those cheesy family news letters :s

Projects

At the start of the year I got to hang out with some young first time mums and their adorable (and eerily well-behaved) kids at the Family Nurse Partnership.  We were working with Lars from Headshift to write a functional specification for an intranet and learned the following:

• Nurses like texting
• Young mums are uber-aware of their privacy and safety online
• Small children like crisps and lego

Over the summer I made the acquaintance of @darenbbc, who introduced me to the boffins at the Confederation of British Industry.  They were figuring out what they want out of a new website and walking the line between giving value to their members and making everything available to everyone.

While I was hobnobbing with the brains of British business, Dom achieved what science can only dream of by expanding time and thus making the working week 9 days, spending some of them working with Kalv at the RSA developing their web strategy.

In the autumn we got a bit giddy over Swindon (yes, really) whose senior officers are completely up for using the web for all sorts of cool stuff.  To be honest, it freaked us out a bit as we don’t often get clients quoting We Think at you in meetings, but we love how up for it they are.  Dom’s working with them as part of the 21st Century Councillor programme to help councillors and the council as a whole use the web to actually listen to residents (try to contain your excitement at this radical suggestion).

Make a social network for the top 200 public sector managers in London local government?  Sure, we’d love to…  Four months later and we’re almost ready to launch Network London – a place where local government bigwigs can talk about the Future and how they’re going to stop London going to Hell in a handcart.  I’ll tell you more about this when it’s live.

Dom’s continued his involvement with Enabled by Design and the project has had some great coverage this year, with a front page feature on co-founder Denise Stephens in Society Guardian.  There’s more about EbD’s amazing year on the EbD blog.

We like blogging and all (as you can tell from this ridiculously long post) and there’s nothing you can teach Dom about Twitter (I go for quality over quantity myself ;)) but sometimes you need something in between the two.  That’s why we built FutureGov Network, which is sort of like a group Tumblr where we post cool stuff we find on the web and you can do the same, plus people can comment on it and things.  Membership has grown steadily throughout the year but we haven’t reached the peaks we’d hoped for so if you’re remotely interested then get your hiney over there and join - and share some of the interesting stuff you come across during your day.  If you’re not interested tell us why please, we’d love to make it better.

Events

Transparency, authenticity, right attitude, blah blah yada yada.  Sometimes it’s all about the TOOLS.  We’ve hosted a few events this year which are all about breaking the stranglehold of Micro$oft and $AP on local government and introducing people who work in and with councils to some of the tools that keep it real.

We had a session with the 6 Consulting gang about Learning to Listen to what people are talking about out there on that internet thing; we got together with Huddle to talk about how to use web tools internally for collaboration magic (which seemed to be a success despite some (FutureGov!) #techfail issues); and most recently we did a kind of science fair type session for tools you can use to ‘crowdsource’ policy ideas, featuring UserVoice, Audioboo, Yoosk, Quiet Riots, GovDelivery, Consultwise , Uncle Tom, Cobbly and All.

We were also rather chuffed to work with film maker Ivo Gormley to host the ‘launch to web’ screening of Us Now, a film about democracy and the web, at the Curzon Cinema in Soho.  The screening was followed by a panel session chaired by Charles Leadbeater.  There was a full house and the film got a great response – it’s since been screened around the world.

We were truly humbled that we managed to get a bunch of people together for a Safeguarding 2.0 Roundtable, which we organised with the Local Government Information Unit.  At the session we talked about how web tools might help safeguarding professionals in their work to keep children and young people safe, and how we can put children at the centre of their own networks.  Through the contributions of youth workers and other people who were just there out of a passion for the subject we started to see how we could shape a project to test some of our ideas.  More on that at the end of this post.

Writings

Despite being an actual tornado of activity, Dom has found time to do a fair bit of thinking and writing over the year (I’m calling this post my contribution to FutureGov’s library…) check out some of his best bits, so to speak:

As a guest blogger for Personal Democracy Forum EU

For NESTA’s Social by Social book

A three-part write-up of the Gov Web Wishlist session (ok so that session was at the end of 2008, but technically the write-up was in 2009!)

On the cards for 2010

We’ve done plenty of other stuff – mainly giving our tuppence at various events and meetings, giving talks and making mischief – but that’s been 2009 in a nutshell. We bid it a fond farewell as it wanders off with a ‘kick me’ sign on its back.

I’ve closed bets as to whether Dom will stay off Twitter over Christmas as he recently threatened, as he is obviously beyond hope, but we’ll both be taking it easy over the festive season so we can launch into another great year.

We hope you’ll come along to our next event, which we’re planning for mid-February.  We’re plotting a ‘FutureGov meets Measurement Camp’ session, where you can bring along social media measurement conundrums (conundra?) and talk about how on earth you’re supposed to measure stuff like ‘community’, or if you should even bother.  Watch this blog for more info…

Finally, we’re keeping our fingers firmly crossed that we’re close to announcing some exciting news about a project we care passionately about – Safeguarding 2.0 – which is bound to keep us busy for at least the first part of 2010.  We’ll also be continuing our work with Swindon and we’re at the start of some projects with NHS London and NHS Scotland, so it looks like next year will be just as action-packed.

We wish you all a fantastic festive break and we’ll see you on the flipside.