Mary Reid

I was down in Bristol today for the launch of Campaign Creator. This is a brand new tool which lets community groups develop campaigning websites for free.

The bold thing about this initiative is that Bristol Council is actually encouraging groups to oppose it. This led to a lot of discussion about how community activists could interact with councils without losing their independence

Stephen Hilton,, who leads the project, said that having acquired government funding to get it started he now wants to hand the ownership to community groups themselves.

It was good to hear Cllr Barbara Janke, Leader of the Council, and an old Lib Dem colleague, full of enthusiasm for Bristol's e-democracy projects.  She announced that she is about to start a blog, so I look forward to adding her to my blog roll.

I bumped into many of the movers and shakers in the e-democracy world who were all pretty impressed by this. Prof Stephen Coleman, whose seminal 'Bowling Together' inspired many of us to get into this field, chaired the event, and Steven Clift of Democracies Online was over from Minnesota to speak about projects around the world.

I also chatted with Tom Steinberg of My Society (responsible for PledgeBank, TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem etc), David Wilcox of Partnerships Online, Jill Sanders from Oncom in Richmond upon Thames (one of the best online community sites that I have seen) and people from BBC Action Network, plus several suppliers and consultants who have breathed life into other e-democracy projects. 

But it was the local community activists who brought the conference alive, relating their good and bad experiences of getting councils to listen to their views.  Paul Slatter of Birmingham Community Empowerment Network, backed this up from the platform with some real stories.  He made one strong point - authorities can't give power to people, however much they might like to; people have to grasp power for themselves.

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