As an observer 400 miles away who shamelessly “copied” Dave’s idea, the issue for me is how we turn the talk into action.

It has only been when we have gone away, and built the applications, and opened them to the “market” that people have seen the chat become reality.

I think that at barcamps, one is in listening mode. After, you sift and focus. Then you act and design a solution if you find a good idea and people you can work with.

With money now a real issue, only those ideas with a business case will make it through. Everyone else in the public sector over the next 5 years is going to be extremely worried about their post.

One thought that stuck me on the participation debate however is that the strength of barcamps, and the reason they work, is the dynamism of the digital community that attend them. But this strength of community is also a barrier to broadening participation.

In my experience, most policy people and government strategists are not digital natives. They are not active on twitter, and they wouldn’t join an open online network. By the time they hear about something like govcamp via their existing networks, the twitter buzz has already happened and the tickets have gone. The digital community are the first to hear about the event and the first to sign up and, as the participants define the barcamp agenda, the event becomes primarily a digital one. Which is not something most policy people are going to give up a Saturday for.

If we want to broaden participation, the promotion of the event and ticketing needs to target people through a range of offline and online channels and networks that are relevant to the people we are seeking to engage. This is obviously trickier, but certainly not impossible – in central government at least there are plenty of existing networks we could tap into, depending on the topic.

I know I’m prattling on a bit, but a final point is that highly participatory nature of the barcamp format holds massive possibilities for driving forward action on a huge range of issues – whether they have a digital element or not – and everyone I’ve ever spoken about them in central govt has been really intrigued and positive about the concept. With the right branding, promotion and attendance, barcamps could really move things forward.

I suspect i’ll be shot down for this but i think the engagement of wider business/policy people will take some time and therefore it maybe a wise move if we encouraged more “topic specific” type conferences. One example of this is the internal comms event. That might if promoted correctly reach an audience not previously engaged.

What we loose in this model is the cross fertilisation of ideas, but if it is done right you could allow space for others from outside the subject matter to get involved.

I also think from a Local Government perspective that more regional based events might also help this approach.

What i think we need to do is keep this conversation going and develop our thought over the coming months.

But we then are left with the challenge of moving beyond social media into the mainstream policy development and delivery space. We also need to engage with my CIO colleagues as well, given that we have the capacity to be the biggest blockers of all.

Though, interestingly enough we have been having very similar conversations in the CIO space about how we get that nebulous and unfortunate concept of “the business” to understand and engage with a changing world.

I too have no immediate answers but I think it would be interesting to think about the questions

I dare say that webbishness would always prevail, not least because of the way the event was promoted. But half in my mind was what is going on in the States, where they seem to have been able to convene a large group of people around the Government 2.0 meme, which has failed to take off in the UK to the same extent – probably rightly – but the lack of an umbrella label, however meaningless, means it’s harder to drive the conversation forward collectively.

Part of the issue I think comes down to what we were talking about in the session that wasn’t really about blogging. We need an ideas ecosystem in government, one where those with thoughts and ideas can express them without fear, and where a constructive conversation can happen around them. That might be online, it might be at future unconferences, it certainly ought to be happening inside departments and organisations – but I suspect it isn’t.

One final point as I know I’m blathering on. It’s important not to load these events with too much significance. For the last two years when organising Govcamp, people have agonised over the invitation list, and desperately tried to think of ways to get policy-types (for want of a better term) to come along. Nobody has really even had a good idea for this, let alone put something into action. In the end, it turns into an opportunity for a group of people, most of whom already know and like each other, to get together and have a chat. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but no revolution will ever come of it. People looking for one will be disappointed.