In a recent post over on Techpresident, Micah unpacked the three branches of We.Gov. The first is the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. While I agree strongly with Micah on all 3 points, for me what none of these quite get to is perhaps one of the most powerful uses of the web within the realm of We.Gov – the ability for people to use the Internet to come together and reimagine public value, not (just) public services per se.

A bit of a delayed post this one, but a couple of Wednesdays ago I was lucky enough to go along to a screening of Ivo Gormley’s new film Us Now. Pitched as “a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”, Us Now focuses on the changing relationship between citizens and the state enabled by developments in technology and the expansion of the Internet.

I’ve come across a bunch of fantastic videos over the course of this US election campaign, but realise just by favouriting them on my YouTube channel I’m not necessarily sharing them.

Even I have been impressed by my colleages at Barnet Council recently and the extent to which they have embraced an open and transparent approach to government, throwing open the doors to previously unseen internal meetings.

We’ve been out about on the streets of Barnet doing some vox pops, talking to local people about what they think of where they live - what they love, what they hate and what they would change about the place. Its all part of a bigger community engagement project we are running, trying to rethink (read: improve) the way we connect with the good people of Barnet (watch this space in late September for a fuller update on the project).

As a quick follow up to my last post on the future of London government, I thought I would share a video made available today by the London Borough of Barnet on YouTube (quite an innovation in itself I say!).