Voluntary Planning

Following the post I did on the topic Twitter last week, I checked out some more videos by Common Craft. They have some really great content.

Blogging has come a long way in recent years. We live in a world where blogs influence international news agendas. They often break stories before mainstream media do, and they hold together communities of interest. As an organization, Voluntary Planning is pretty new to the blog game. We've played with blogs in-house for years, but until the recent re-launch of our website, we had never had a publicly accessible blog.

For those visitors who are new to blogs and blogging, I think Common Craft has a good video on the topic. Check it out.

 

Some interesting news, the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale [wikipedia], stepped down from the role of CEO and will become Chairman of the Board at Lindin Labs.

Philip Rosedale (Photo by JD Lasica)

Second Life is a virtual world where people interact, chat, and create. It's not generally considered a game. As there's no specific goal and no dragons to fight, it's really just a place to explore and meet people. The Second Life website has an article describing what it is. You may also find this video helpful in describing SL.

Here at Voluntary Planning we've been keeping an eye on Second Life. We've considered using it to host an online virtual meeting. We always strive to reach as many citizens as we can when we're working on a project. Hosting a meeting in Second Life may help us tap into an audience that we might not otherwise see in real world meetings. SL continues to be an interesting place and with a change in CEO it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Twitter is something I struggle to describe. It's often been referred to as a micro-blogging tool.

I discovered a short video that does a pretty decent job of describing twitter:


I'm a Twitter user. I use it to follow a number of people whom I've never met and never spoken to. These people have proven to be a tremendous source for information and interesting links.

Twitter is being used quite a bit at SXSW (the conference mentioned in the last post). People are sharing information on talks they're watching, upcoming events, places to eat while in Austin. It's become a tool for increased participation and social networking. Because Twitter users can get updates direct to their phone things like "Ron's giving a talk on Video Blogging in 5 minutes in Suite B" can lead you to find things you might otherwise have missed.

I'm not sure if there's a way for Voluntary Planning to employ such a tool, or even if it would make sense for us to. Part of the challenge with newer technologies like Twitter are identifying best practices as there aren't a whole lot of examples of how to best employ such a thing.

Throughout this week, one of the more interesting conferences is happening down in Austin, TX. It's the SXSW (South by Southwest) conference and festival. The event goes from March 9 to March 16 and includes a variety of events, including films and live music.

As much as I love films and music thery're not the reasons SXSW is making the VP blog. SXSW is relevant to VP and citizen engagement for a very different reason, the event celebrates new media, social networking, online video, podcasting and other modern day tools for bringing people together. They do this through SXSW Interactive.

I haven't come across much content from the weekend's talks and presentations. Though Mashable did an interesting post on keynote speaker Mark Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook). Apparently his interviewers approach didn't go over well with the audience and resulted in some crowd frustration.

Mark Zuckerberg (image by: deneyterrio)

I'll keep my eyes open for more interesting material coming out of SXSW. Those interested might want to check out BlogTalkRadio's most recent episode which includes a quasi-report on the conference by Video Blog pioneer Steve Garfield (Garfield joins the show at the 24 minute mark).

I've been watching some of the media response and reaction to the Heritage Strategy. The Strategy itself was created by the department, using stakeholder and citizen generated input that Voluntary Planning prepared in our report.

Generally, Voluntary Planning projects elicit some degree of controversy as opposing viewpoints try and find some degree of middle ground. The Heritage task force obviously dealt with those types of scenarios. On the whole, Voluntary Planning's final report on Heritage was very well recieved by the industry, by government and by the public.

It's great to see both Voluntary Planning's work, and the work of the department in creating the strategy, be so successful. Nova Scotia's heritage is of immense importance, and it would be entirely safe to say that we are now in a much better position when it comes to preserving our Heritage than we were just a few years ago.