As FutureGov passes its 18 month anniversary, I’ve recently been spending my quieter moments contemplating where next for FutureGov … Outwardly we talk about being focused on “Digital Democracy” and “Public service transformation”, which in both our hearts and the hearts of the wider FutureGov family means a passion for better government, rebalancing the role and power of the state to one that better empowers individuals to self-organise and work with government as just one partner in making the world better for them.

As the keen followers of this blog will know, we like to organise (and attend) the odd event or two here at FutureGov. From FutureGov Network meet ups, to Gov2Gov events, to online film premieres, to lending a hand at bigger events like Gov20 Camp, Reboot Britain and Social Innovation Camp, we love getting out and about listening, learning and sharing. At all of these events and more besides, there has been a rapid growth in real time reporting on the goings on during the sessions due in no small part to the explosive adoption of tools like Twitter.

So we have just 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.

Things are rather hectic on the events front for FutureGov at the moment, so as much for our benefit as yours here’s where you’ll be able to find us during March. If anything particularly grabs you and you’d like more information or to get involved even, leave a comment below or drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you.

Having recently brought Justin Kerr-Stevens and Michelle Lyons into the FutureGov fold, I thought why stop there so this week we’ve added one more to our number this week (the last for now at least!). Carrie Bishop has joined us to help out on developing FutureGov Networks and lots of other exciting projects. She’ll also be making an appearance on this here blog from time to time so look out for that.

Here at FutureGov, we’re all about bringing together diverse ideas and groups of people that wouldn’t necesarily find each other without a little helping hand. Whether cross-organisational, cross-sectoral or even cross-country (as our current competition to send a UK public servant to the Politics Online conference in Washington testifies), we really enjoy helping to make interesting conversations happen. To help us with this we have now set up FutureGov Networks…