Mary Reid

The Stop the Traffik campaign has introduced the topic of people traffiking into everyday conversation - this is the current global form of slavery, still with us 200 years after the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the UK.

The campaign has an excellent website, full of information and lively educational materials, so I was really pleased that it won the Advocacy Award at the New Statesman New Media Awards this evening.

Barry Sheerman MP presents the award for Stop the Traffik

My Society deservedly won two awards for their highly focussed and apparently simple sites that support civic society. One was for the No 10 Petitions website, which I wrote about here and here on the Headstar blog.  The other was for FixMyStreet, which allows anyone to report problems to their local Council by pointing to them on a map - this is a very effective idea, and works anywhere in the country.

The other winners were all terrific - Create-a-scape (one of the most imaginative educational sites I've seen), Intelligent Giving (lowdown on UK charities), LiveBus (realtime bus timetables, but only in three counties so far).

The awards event was held in Westminster Abbey College Gardens, a hidden delight right under the shadow of the Palace of Westminster. I've been invited every year since Edward Davey and I won the Elected Representative award, back in 2002 (and was also later shortlisted for Steve Webb's website and for my own blog), so I was keen to see who would win in that category this year. Could it really be the first year that it would go to local government? - Cllr Andrew Burns was a finalist. But no, David Cameron won for his admittedly groundbreaking use of webcasts - often parodied but still not matched.