Late DigitalLunch: What would OpenGovernment in Northern Ireland look like?

A date for your diary.  On Wednesday 14th January we’re hosting what we hope will be a vigorous and enlightening online discussion on some of the newly launched Northern Ireland Open Government Network. We’ll also be joined by Peter Osborne and, I hope, other members of the independent #OpenGov Network. Guest speakers will include John Barry of Queens University Belfast, Tim Hughes of Involve, and Matilda Murday of Democratic Society, each of whom will make very short presentations on what can be done …

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#DigitalLunch returns to consider the merits and otherwise of abolishing Seanad Eireann

Live from 1pm… We are looking for your questions?? Tomorrow our DigitalLunch series returns after a long break from the Autumn. You can pick up the detail and live feed here from 1pm. In a Seanad Referendum special, we hope to have two people each from the Yes and No camps. To be honest I am as interested in the process as the result. Either way there will be more to do if we want to improve the quality of …

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Launch Event: Youthbank International Network

At 11am this morning you can watch our digitallunch event organised for and on behalf of Youthbank, a great organisation centred and driven by Vernon Ringland in Belfast (at the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland) and now operating in a wide range of countries overseas.. Those of you familiar with #DigitalLunch will know the format. It’s a short LIVE event to launch a new network promoting youth-led grant-making. Some young grant-makers will help us launch YB International on a live …

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DigitalLunch: History, Storytelling or Propaganda?

Starting in five, we have a late lunch (to enable those in the US to join us, if they’re so inclined), we take another look at the past through the prism of history. I’m jointed by by Hiram Morgan of UCC From the Tudors who stand accused of being the first great propagandists of history, to the present day History remains a contentious arena for human ideas. Between purists who want to discover the truth about the past, and those …

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#DigitalLunch: Why do Politicians Lie?

Starting 1pm join us for #DigitalLunch on why Politicians lie… Plenty of links and stories at the event page on Google Plus, here. If you want to make a point in person, you can jump in but you will need to register with Google Plus first (easier than it sounds). See you soon… Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular …

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#DigitalLunch: Why do politicians lie?

So, partly because of the huge success of Grillo in Italy on an anti politics ticket, and partly because its well passed the time when we ought to be asking such questions again this week’s #DigitalLunch will rather pointedly ask: Why do politicians lie? A couple of answers to that question so far: @mickfealty Voters don’t like the truth — Ryan R (@borntochoose) February 26, 2013   @mickfealty re: #DigitalLunch: political language is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder …

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#Belfast2020: How can Belfast meet the new demands of the future? (LIVE from 1PM)

It is odd how life goes on even though there’s turmoil in the streets, and the most senior politicians ‘big vision’ does not stretch to agreement on putting a job advert in the paper.. Ho hum… It’s in this context however we want to talk about the future of Belfast today at what will the of a new series of Digital Lunch hangouts… So today we want to talk about Belfast in 2020… or rather not so much that (as …

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#DigitalLunch: Imaging creative solutions for Belfast’s future needs?

However smart we get, it is impossible to absolutely tell what the future will bring. And no, I’m NOT talking about a border poll, but the future of Belfast in just seven years time. But we can be sure of several things. One of them is that Stormont cannot turn the tide of austerity sweeping through civil society. The other is that the city’s infrastructure cannot in the foreseeable future count on large amounts of capital investment. Today’s digital lunch …

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#Belfast2020: How can Belfast meet the new demands of the future?

Now, this is an online ‘event’ that was originally scheduled to take place in December. In fact when I look back at the first one we did on the subject of #Belfast2020, it looks somewhat quaint given what was to follow under the flags dispute. We already have some concrete themes for tomorrow’s debate. I’ve sketched some of the main themes out here on this debategraph (You can contribute your own insights if you register at: http://debategraph.org/belfast2020): We’ve picked 2020 …

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#DigitalLunch: Have the last ten days left Northern Ireland shaken or stirred?

Today’s #DigitalLunch will look at the events of the last fortnight and ask what if anything has changed? – The British PM apologises to Pat Finucane’s family in Parliament, and then politely tells them that’s it. You’re not getting any more. That is unless Ed Milliband makes good on a promise to do something his party’s last government wouldn’t, and hold a public inquiry. – Census tells Protestants they are no longer in a majority in Northern Ireland, but it …

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#DigitalLunch: Song For Lily Mae, Generation Z and why we don’t have to go to war any more…

If you want to join us in whatever is we get to talk about, so long as you have gmail, Google Plus or even a YouTube account (and have downloaded this app), you can jump in here… We’re live from 1pm, or whenever after that we have quorum.. No agenda this week, you get to set it for us? You can pick it up here or on YouTube… Stuff we talked about… – Andrew Gallagher joined us who was involved …

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#Belfast2020: Welcome to today’s #DigitalLunch…

I had a phone call earlier asking me what a digilunch was… Before I could answer the reply was, a colleague asked me and I told her it sounded like a bunch of people sitting at their computers banging on and eating sandwiches… To which my response was, yep that’s pretty much it!! Going live now… Today’s starts at 1pm and is the first in a two lunchtime session which will consider the future of Belfast over a relative medium …

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#Belfast2020: What horses should Belfast hitch its future to?

Katheryn Torney’s excellent interviews in the Irish Times today asks some searching questions about the past. Daniel Jewesbury’s remarks are particularly revealing where he notes that over the last ten years “we have spent a lot of time hitching ourselves to the wrong horses.” In part, I suspect this is an inevitable downside to the post conflict society where there is little agreement over the longer term destination of the local population. And not least, though not exclusively, the political …

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Next #DigitalLunch: Sustaining social innovation?

So, we’re rolling the next SocialInnovation #DigitalLunch for the Building Change Trust through to Thursday. It follows three other lively and insightful panels: – 1, was an initial discussion of what innovating for social change might look like? – 2, was a great conversational case study of a whole range of projects some originating the public purse and others private sector initiated: – 3, focused on locating barriers to social change, with some great international contributions: On Thursday we are …

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#DigitalLunch: Barriers to Social Innovation…

Today’s #DigitalLunch asks what are the barriers to innovation? Not just in Northern Ireland, but generically. We go live at 1pm, with a rolling panel to discuss not just what the barriers but also how they may be got around. As ever, we’re looking for your questions for the panel to chew over. We already have a couple over at the associated Google Moderator page: “How can the personal risk that social entrepreneurs take be reduced? We need to eat …

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#DigitalLunch: A Leap into Space(s)…

Today’s #DigitalLunch was one of the best so far… We started off with Baumgartner’s jump off from a great height into science, society, newspapers and their increased vulnerability to some good old fashioned marketing of some , the age of the engineer and science geek… And end up at the inevitable leap of political faith into the dark and the variable policies on Badger culling throughout various jurisdictions in Britain and Ireland… Many thanks to Edward Sykes of the Science …

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Ever had a #DigitalLunch: Why not take a leap into a new space?

This week’s #DigitalLunch ‘jumps off’ from where on Herr Baumgartner’s sensational (in more ‘senses’ than one) leap into space lands… If you want to come along or just watch from your desktop (we don’t quite expect the 8 million Felix got, a few dozen would do us at this stage), you’ll be very welcome. I guess some of you are still scratching your head as to what this digital lunch thing is all about. It’s pretty straightforward. It is interactive …

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#DigitalLunch today: Crashing systems…

We’ll have the live feed here up and running just before 1pm… to get an idea of what we mean by crashing systems, have a look at the event page over on Google Plus… All across the world, systems are crashing. In banking we’ve seen debt slicing and long haul internal systems like that of RBS/NatWest/Ulster Bank literally falling apart. In Europe post war notions of solidarity are being stretched to bursting as sovereign nations argue over the degree to …

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Was 9/11 Television’s last great exclusive on a truly global event?

Last Friday’s #DigitalLunch was ostensibly about 9/11, and the effects it has had on society, or at least how society has changed in the meantime. Whether those changes were consequential or not is a moot point. Certainly in the realm of human communication technology and culture have never been more closely entwined. Blogs in 2001 did exist, but they had yet to find a broad cultural or political purpose. The traumatic events of that morning and afternoon in the US …

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#DigitalLunch: How has 9/11 changed your world?

That is the title of today’s digital lunch… we’ve a great panel lined up for today at 1pm, including Gabrielle Laine-Peters, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, James Moffat and others… I’ll put the live feed up here closer to broadcast time. You can see Monday’s thread here… In the meantime what we’d really like is your questions… Put them below, on the YouTube stream, or best on my own Google Plus stream where it is easiest for us to pick up inside the …

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