It was interesting to see so many bloggers f2f though it wasn’t exactly a random sample either of the population or even (I suspect) of bloggers. The “gathering”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04 was about 90% male and mostly in the Internet/IT industries.

One of the interesting things about blogging that I was aware of but this brought into focus is the existence of an important group of blog enablers – people who aren’t prominent bloggers themselves but who develop the services or support others’ services without payment because they can. Public-spirited people like “Bruce”:http://www.growf.org/ who helps out the “NTK”:http://ntk.net/ gang and Tom who set up and runs “bbCity”:http://www.bbcity.co.uk/. I also met “Anders”:http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/ (who will have more pictures from the event on his “photo blog”:http://www.extrospection.com/) and Annie who runs a weblog (and a site) all about “London Underground”:http://london-underground.blogspot.com/ but not from a trainspottery perspective.

See “here”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjoi.ito.com%2Fjoiwiki%2FLoicLondonMay04&sub=Go%21 for more postings from other London bloggers about the gathering as they happen.

I have a few (very poor quality) pix “here”:http://community.webshots.com/album/142686002dtOLws.

It’s in the planning stages (see “this wiki”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04) but seems to be settling around the evening of May 12th. It looks as if there’ll be at least 50 people coming, including quite a few of the people on “my blogroll”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/. I’ll be there – especially if it’s at a Japanese restaurant…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

(If you like this you may also want to check out “Notcon”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_net_politics.html#001081)

“NotCon”:http://www.notcon04.com/ on 6th June in London is a conference covering some, none or all of the following:

* Geolocation services
* Social software
* Hardware hacking
* Actual impacts of blogging
* Alternative media
* Politics on the net
* Politics *of* the net

It is being organized by a large proportion of the UK’s Internet policy wonk community…

Thanks to Tom Steinberg for the link and for helping to arrange the conference

According to E-government Bulletin (which unfortunately doesn’t have an archived version of this newsletter yet), the “Department for Transport”:http://www.dft.gov.uk/ will be launching an integrated transport guide (at “transport.info”:http://www.transport.info/ – not live yet) that would, “include car routefinders; bus, tram and rail timetables; and a range of maps, updated regularly by external partners such as bus companies”.

Here in London something like this already exists – “JourneyPlanner”:http://www.journeyplanner.org/ and while inevitably it doesn’t always come up with the best possible route it will still be a great advance when it launches this Spring. I hope that at some point either JourneyPlanner or transport.info starts to offer a direct connection between the Internet and the counters that tell you when the next bus is coming at bus stops….

Here’s a topic that continues to run and run. Will Davies compares Internet-mediated ‘democracy’ to the ‘democratic’ governance of, for example, foundation hospitals and warns that the quality of the results depends on wide participation. He also says, ‘any democratic society rests partially on an undemocratic element, such as the US Supreme Court’, suggesting that moderators may keep things running in a similar way in online discussions. While apathy is indeed a barrier to widespread political participation online I think Will understates the importance of the digital divide here as well.

His musings were prompted by Clay Shirky’s oddly upbeat musings implying that the occasions where online polls come up with results that are unrepresentative (as with the Radio 4 “let us shoot burglars” poll) are part of the ‘glory of this medium’.

For the gloomier side of this picture, check out this depressing posting from Dan (ex Up My Street) about how vociferous local racists are taking over that brave experiment in giving local communities a voice. He blames a lack of moderators and the fact no system of user-managed moderation is possible.

Two recent stories about attempts by doctors and MPs to make us all a little healthier (this sort of stuff sticks in my mind because my wife is doing a degree in public health). Doctors recently urged a public smoking ban – something I have supported on this weblog more than once – in “2003”:https://blog.org/archives/000920.html and “2002”:https://blog.org/archives/000474.html. Not only does passive smoking kill 1,000 people a year in the UK but it’s extremely anti-social. And today a select committee “suggested”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3242674.stm an easy-to-interpret code to be put on all food that would tell people how much exercise it would take to burn off the calories contained in it.

Posted on behalf of Dorothea Kleine – please respond to her not to me!

Dear All,
we are PhD students interested in the potential the Internet holds for Development (capacity building, social capital, NGO networks, participation, e-governance, e-commerce, e-learning etc.). We realize this topic is very complex and that therefore from whatever angle you look at it, it helps to exchange ideas with colleagues who are looking at the same thing, but from a different perspective.

We would therefore like to initiate an interdisciplinary and intercollegiate working group on “Internet and Development”.

We are inviting graduate students (and possibly more senior researchers) from subjects as diverse as Development Studies, Media and Communications, Geography, Information Technology, Anthropology and Economics etc. from across colleges and universities in the London area to join.

One idea of a format would be to form a wider virtual network while meeting as a working group at the “Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research”:http://www.stanhopecentre.org/ in London every two weeks or monthly. The Centre is located at Marble Arch, just across the street from Hyde Park. There would be office space available and we can also book meeting rooms and a conference room free of charge.

Our first meeting for all that are interested will be held on *Thursday, December 4th* at the Stanhope Drinks Party, which starts at 6:30 p.m. at Stanhope Centre (Stanhope Place, nearest tube: Marble Arch). There we can get to know each other and discuss the format of our network, possible themes for conferences and ideas for research projects.

If you are planning to come, or interested in joining but not able to come that day, please email. We are very much looking forward to hearing from you!

An article by “Dr Adam Swift”:http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/stafflist.asp?action=show&person=92 in the “Telegraph”:http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/11/12/tefswift12.xml&sSheet=/education/2003/11/12/ixtetop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=181438 (registration required) suggesting private schooling in the UK should be banned has inspired an interesting debate on the always-interesting “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/ weblog. As so often is the case it seems clear to me that the left and right wings of the case arguing in the comments to the original posting will never agree because they have fundamentally different ethical premises. For me, Spock (and most of the left-wing commentators) ‘the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one’. For the right wingers, parents have an absolute right to do what they can to better the lives of their children, whatever the harmful effects might be for society at large.
(more…)

The “London Health Commission”:http://www.londonshealth.gov.uk/ has launched a website survey on where people should be allowed to smoke in London. It seems someone has started a “campaign about this”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/Club146 over at the BBC’s new iCan site. Personally I would be delighted if smoking could be banned in pubs, though doubtless it would annoy many of my fellow Londoners.

Many is the time I have wanted to go out with friends but I have cried off when it emerges they want to go to a pub. If I do go I end up returning home with my clothes reeking of smoke and I dread to think of what it does to my lungs. Moreover sometimes I need to eat in pubs and having to eat with people smoking around me is just diabolical.

Here’s a recent magazine profile of my local area (I have helped to encourage some of the changes in my role as press officer of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/). Just today a pizzeria is opening around the corner from us and when a nearby street is closed at one end (part of the council’s urban regeneration plans) patrons will be able to sit out in the sun (when there is some).

Also in the same magazine, a profile of local heroine “Mary Wollstonecraft”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue19/p18i19.htm and news of “plans for a multiplex cinema”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue19/p11i19.htm in Dalston, close enough for us to walk to.