So the time has come to reveal the name of the lucky winner of our competition to win a trip over to the Politics Online Conference in Washington DC at the end of April.

Right. Sorry to be awkward everyone, but here’s the thing: we had a load of entries to the big FutureGov competition and as the newbie around here I was tasked with making one person’s lucky day and announcing them the winner right here. But the winner I lovingly selected couldn’t make the date of the Politics Online conference and no other entries grabbed me in the same ingenious way.

You didn’t really believe me when I said it was only two parts did you? All good things come in threes after all and having covered the content from the event itself in parts one and two, I wanted to take the chance to share some of my learning from putting on the event itself:

Of all the sessions I’ve facilitated in my time, this one was undoubtedly the liveliest keeping me on my toes throughout with people eager to jump in and an unusual degrees of ‘honesty in front of an adult’ as one attendee put it. And for once looking back back at the conversations that were had on Twitter during the session, the face to face discussion won hands down at an event for once!

It’s amazing what can happen when you bring a bunch of interesting people together in a room around a subject they are all personally and passionately committed to. Well that’s just what I tried a couple of Mondays ago with the generous support of Rohan Gunatillake and the people at NESTA Connect – and it certainly didn’t disappoint! The premise of the session was a chance meeting I’d had with Derek Wyatt MP back in October…