A few questions – what does this mean?

Wasn’t the majority view among e-Democracy practitioners that ICELE itself was part of the problem, not the solution?

What exactly did misguided misadventures like VOICE achieve apart from squandering nearly a quarter of a million of public funds and making it more difficult for sustainable existing initiatives like Oncom and UK Villages to operate?

I’d be very interested to see the findings of what ICELE exactly DID achieve. Sorry for the mini-rant!

I encourage you to be part of the solution, not the problem and am pleased that folks are already taking the lead on salvaging the ICELE archive. I hope people will eventually see through the top layers of the programme and recognise where the core activities have been focused, such as the enormous wealth of best practice at http://www.iceleguides.org

@ Dave – There’s some great community creativity which will happen with or without a centre of excellence – and I applaud both your activism and tools, such as LGSearch. (I note the BarCamp logo and that ICELE was represented and kindly sponsored lunch for the event).

In the wake of two new eParticipation grants from the European Commission I hope momentum can also be built around knowledge sharing in this domain (http://www.pep-net.eu/)

@ Fraser – I’ll ignore the implied criticism of “posting on blogs and forums all day” but will point out that actually, I and other people (including some of the ‘same old voices’) are doing stuff. Like building free and useful services like LGSearch and championing Councils who are doing exciting stuff, such Stratford, Medway and Barnet, for example.

When it comes to encouraging a wider democratic conversation the words are the action. Otherwise why did you establish blogging tools?

In the conversation taking place about ICELE no one was saying you were not acting, just arguing that it was misdirected action. I think the the energy would have been better spent on nurturing wider digital media literacy and encouraging people to use existing tools.

Having said that some of your users will probably move onto other blogging platforms having got a taste for it and benefit from the freedom that comes with that. That means that in just that sense alone your work is having an impact. It will also have other benefits. We are all experimenting.

We knew from post no.1 from our faithful Google Alerts (and responded if you care to look at the thread) but it was clear that the debate was purposely tainted, involved the same old voices and was open to spoofing – probably not the conditions necessary for starting any sort of meaningful dialogue.

It’s all good and well posting on blogs and forums all day but it’s actions, not words which ICELE had as its priority. I’d say it was a sensibe approach to channel the limited resources that the centre had into debating important issues in the spaces that our target audiences also choose to occupy.