One of the most interesting and versatile online tools for public engagement presented at 2gether08 was Yoosk, which enables people to pose questions directly to politicians and other major figures. Participants can vote on the questions to indicate those they feel really deserve an answer, which makes it all that bit more democratic.

I’ve just heard from Yoosk founder Tim Hood that Yoosk is now being used by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell on a platform promoted by the Halifax Courier, as you can see here. More background on Yoosk here.

I talked to Yoosk founder Tim Hood before 2gether08, in the company of political blogger Mick Fealty. We had hoped to use Yoosk to pose questions to panelists in the debate that Mick organised.

As it turned out, we couldn’t manage that because of time pressures, but we did have an interesting discussion about the how Yoosk was being used by the Courier, and how it might be used more generally in at events to make sessions more interactive. Not only can the otherwise passive event audience help set the agenda by posting their questions in advance, others not able to attend can also join in. It’s a really neat way of blending online and offline.

Yoosk was shortlisted in the UK Catalyst awards and is pitching to the Ministry of Justice Building Democracy awards programme, that I wrote about the other day over here. That programme has attracted a wealth of ideas, and I hope MoJ manages to broker some collaborations as well as handing out £150,000 to ten of the projects.

Dear Lloyd, your post may have lacked a real resolution but it didn’t lack a real passion that touched me, resonated with mine, and called me to write down what follows. Just like you, I’ve been seeing too many times the rising of potential, then the lack of resolution and the fading of the experience of the event into memory, then out from it. Yes, we do make one-on-one connections at unconferences, sometimes collaborative projects emerge or get stronger by them, but the potential of the event for augmenting and mobilizing the collective intelligence of its participants for the good of the whole never gets realized.

What is missing to grow collective capabilities for sustaining the momentum generated by events like 2gether08? One of the conditions is what ClareWhite suggested: “increase online connectivity,” and not only because the fear that “people in places outside the hubs, where the cool kids hang out, are going to be left even further behind.” Increasing the connectivity in and among social innovation initiatives is the key to increase their collective intelligence and consciousness. The movement (as in “the awakening of the social body”) depends on the presence of those qualities.

To manifest them, we would need new type of online environments, where social and project networking is coupled with a vibrant and well-attended community knowledge ecosystem, all designed for sustainability and scalability. To realize the full potential of the nascent movement of social innovation, even that wouldn’t be enough. I think, we need to jump start a vortex of innovation.

Why to do that? Because we can. “We believe that the UK is a global hub for digital development, futures thinking and the promotion of social innovation. 2gether should become a community which brings the best, the brightest and the most passionately creative people of change together, both online and face-to-face at events across the UK, Europe and around the world.” (from 2gether’s Vision for the Future)

2gether can, indeed, become such community if we manage to discover/invent/co-create a simple and elegant structure of engagement, continuously optimized to boost self-organisation, and a framework for collaborative meaning making.

Thank you Lloyd, for sharing your thoughts on the potential. I hope others will contribute what they see.

One of the highlights of the first day of 2gether08 was a debated host by Matthew D’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, with guest panellists: political blogger Mick Fealty who writes as Brassneck and Slugger O’Toole; Sunny Hundal, Liberal Conspiracy; Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair Ogilvy Group; and Tom Steinberg, founder of MySociety.

There’s another 20 hours or so of video recorded at 2gether08, and we’ll bring you more soon.

Years ago I had a friend who was endlessly frustrated that the Guardian newspaper never published his letters. He took it as a personal slight and the media’s general allergy to small people crying in the wilderness.

In fact, it was more likely that my friend would never compromise the integrity of his arguments for the sake of fitting his work into the tiny space allotted to the editor’s letters page.

The emergence of the blogosphere has allowed people like my frustrated friend to give full vent to their views, be heard (by those who want, or need, to hear them), and ultimately connect to those big unhearing (as opposed to unlistening) media organisations.

Indeed the importance of independent voices is likely to grow, if only because the processes driving it are technological as much as social.

Charlie Beckett of the Polis think tank has recently published a book on the phenomenon of ‘networked journalism’ called Supermedia.

In an accompanying essay he notes:

Networked journalism is a process not a product. The journalist still reports, edits, packages the news. But the process is continually shared.

The networked journalist changes from being a gatekeeper who delivers to a facilitator who connects.

In this foreword, Jeff Jarvis expands on the idea:

By joining and creating networks of journalistic effort – helping with curation, editing, vetting, education, and, yes, revenue – these news organisations can, indeed, grow.

Newspapers can get hyperlocal or international. TV stations can have cameras everywhere.

Investigators can have many more hands helping them dig.

News sites can become more efficient by doing what they do best and linking to the rest.

Reporters can get help and corrections on their work before and after it is published.

On the Today Programme Dr Julian Baggini argued recently that the art of complaining (an art as old as humanity itself) should be re-examined in light of how to do it so that it effects change, rather than just making the complainer feel worse about the world.

Networked journalism, is one of the ways in which ordinary citizens are changing the world, albeit by infinitesimally modest measures.

Both Charlie Beckett and Julian Baggini will be speaking at 2gether08.

Gordon’s answer was unequivocal: ‘people power will become an explosive force in history’. Social networking and blogging would give the public the ‘power directly to influence change’. Even foreign policy, he suggested, would be affected: if Rwanda happened today, he said, the images and stories dispersed on the web would make it impossible for the international community not to intervene. Indeed, the challenge in this era of ‘direct people power’ was for global institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the UN to match this growth of a global demos on the web.

Powerful stuff from the most powerful politician in the UK. Yet as d’Ancona also notes, delivering the fruits of that visionary statement is likely to prove much more difficult. It is exactly those practical challenges that we hope Matthew and the Spectator magazine will help us flesh out at their high level cross party panel event on Wednesday lunch time, where we ask amongst other things: “is our politics big enough for the web?”

Definitely not to be missed!