I’m sure the unknown author of “the Insider” in the Oxford Mail is sharpening their pencil to feature the return fixture of Blogger Bance’s junket to Budapest (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here); I hasten to point out that this trip was entirely under my own steam, powered by my own cash, and accounts for another lengthy absence from posting.

As might be expected from a trip the driving force behind which was Cllr Turner, there were trains and provincial cities galore. From touchdown at Budapest Ferihegy, we caught a bus and a train to Szeged, a university city in the far south of Hungary. The palatial Hotel Izabella was home for two nights while we explored, ate ice cream, got an unseasonal tan and sampled the Hungarian national poleaxer, Unicum. The highlight of Szeged was undoubtedly the wonderful synagogue, decorated in gold and blue with a huge dome, though the boys may argue for JATEKLUB, a Szegedi Purple Turtle with a licence til 4am…

From Szeged, a four-hour trip across the great plains (very flat; occasional deer) took us to the north-eastern city of Debrecen, and the austere Soviet-era Hotel Debrecen. The highlight of our first night was a resturant entered through a huge jar, where Colin sampled the renowned local delicacy of bread spread with lard. After a visit to the thermal baths on Friday, the team was bolstered by the arrival of the iron-lived Dr Joe. We just about made the train to Budapest after celebrating his arrival.

In Budapest itself, we stayed in two flats near another beautiful synagogue. Our arrival was enlivened by the letting agent’s insistence on demonstrating how to use door keys, taps, windows and blinds, and by her warning to my male companions to beware of beautiful girls wishing to part them from their cash in disreputable bars. Four days in Budapest was ample time to visit the Statue Park, site of forty Communist memorials brought together after the restoration of democracy in the early 90s; sample a range of Hungarian wines; visit another thermal bath; be seneraded by a gypsy band in a tourist restaurant. Time also allowed a return visit to the Great Market Hall, where Russian dolls in the likeness of world leaders may still be purchased as I noted last July. Unfortunately closer inspection revealed the artist to have unpleasant and unsavoury politics: Osama Bin Laden opens to reveal Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat (!) and Hitler in ever decreasing sizes - obviously a set of “great murderers the world has known”! - and Bill Clinton contains Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers and Hillary Clinton, with the tiniest doll being not a doll at all, but a cigar…

After having completely misjudged the weather, I arrived home on Tuesday night with a tan and an unworn overcoat. Unfortunately I’d failed to book Wednesday off work, which is how I come to be writing this from a hotel in Glasgow after a second aeroplane trip in less than 24 hours. Oh well. I may see my home tomorrow.

It’s been a bit quiet round here recently, hasn’t it? Call me naive, but I wasn’t expecting to attract the attention I have after my posts about the international participation and local e-democracy conference. I know I haven’t done anything wrong, but as has been gently pointed out to me by friends, I have a way with words that rather catches the eye and perhaps got myself into trouble. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to see in the Oxford Mail, eh? I’ve not been following my own rules.

However, even if I should have toned it down, I’m still sure that it was the right thing to do to attend, learn as much as I could and publish my thoughts and comments on the trip, positive and negative, as not all people with an interest got to attend.

It’s not a co-incidence, though, that the newspapers only picked up the story when a couple of Tory bloggers started to get interested in me attending - not the Tories or Liberals who attended, but little old Labour me.

It’s not been a nice few days; I was particularly mortified when the guy I buy the newspapers from every morning asked me about the article. So this space may be about to become a bit more considered, a bit more thought-through, and a bit less off-the-cuff. I hope it doesn’t become less interesting as a result, and I shall try to resist the really-quite-currently-tempting possibility of retreating into identikit-politico safe mode. Cheers.

Apparently I’m in today’s Londoner’s Diary in the Evening Standard. Terrible website, so here’s the screenshot.

And up close:

I love the logic - “David Milliband is a blogger. David Milliband is Labour. Antonia Bance is a blogger. Antonia Bance is Labour. There must be a crony angle here somewhere…” As if bloggers formed a secret society! I’ve never met David Milliband, though I think I once heard him speak at a party conference fringe meeting. Oh, and I’m not a Londoner - Oxford city councillor, anyone?

Of course, you’ve already spotted it cos you know how to use your Vacher’s or even Google, but of course, David Milliband’s been at DEFRA for three months and DCLG was called ODPM when he was there. Glad to see OxStu fact-checking has carried over into the real world.

The workshop that I enjoyed most at the Budapest conference was the masterclass on blogging/vlogging/podcasting, hosted by Griff Wigley. Griff was the “blogging coach” for a project to get UK councillors blogging called ReadMyDay.

Griff’s full presentation is available here (downloads as a powerpoint file), but I thought I’d give some edited highlights…

Griff’s tips for running a successful councillor-blog include:
- take photos to liven up the posts
- link and get linked
- answer your email with the blog (obviously not sensitive casework, but regularly-asked questions can be answered publicly)

He reckoned that the advantage of blogging as a councillor is that you can use your blog to “leverage” your activities and interactions (Google tells me that the verb “to leverage” is variously, an Americanism for gearing where companies will use a limited asset base to generate substantial borrowings for speculative or business purposes, or, more prosaically, that leverage is using given resources in such a way that the potential positive or negative outcome is magnified) - in other words, make the most impact with what you’re doing by making sure that you tell people about it, record it, and it’s on the internet forever more.

Griff also talked about how blogging adds believeability and makes the officeholder appear a real person, and how the discipline of recording what you are doing helps clarify your thinking, and allows you to chronicle how you form your opinions on issues. Both of these are real to me - putting my thoughts out there regularly and trying to remain consistent not across one conversation but across months and years of blog archives is the greatest spur to thinking through before pressing publish, and one of the reasons that I started doing this was to show that normal (ish) and young people can be and are parliamentary candidates, members of the Labour party, and councillors.

Of course, he also acknowledges the pitfalls - that you should only post what you’d want to read in the Oxford Mail; that you should be wary of conflicts of interest and be clear about alerting your readers to them; that blogging can take over your life.

Anyway, it looks like ReadMyDay was/is a great project, and there’s some useful-looking resources available here.

As I said earlier, the thing that I really enjoyed about the Budapest conference was getting to meet people with similar and complimentary interests to mine. There’s something quite nerve-racking about getting on a plane to another country to attend a three-day conference on your own, especially if you’re not very keen on flying. But I was lucky to spot Martin Whelton, from Blogging4Merton at the airport, to check in at the same time as Paul Evans from Never Trust a Hippy, and to sit down at the opening session near Ellie from UKvillages, so I got over the away from home nerves pretty quickly.

Later on, at the traditional Hungarian dinner, with very loud jazz, I got talking to Tom Steinberg from MySociety, Catherine Howe from public-i, Michael Cross from the Guardian and Shane McCracken from Gallomanor.

Here we are enjoying the hospitality of the sponsors…

I think this was one of those conferences where the conversations you have in the bar and at the dinner table are more illuminating than the formal conference. Certainly, everyone seemed to be trying to connect people who didn’t know one another but ought to - I lost track of the times that I was grabbed with the words “Antonia, you’ve just got to meet…” And I’m glad, as despite being a pretty confident sort, not being so connected with this world it would have been pretty easy to stay quiet and not get as as much out of it as I did.

My heart sinks when I hear this phrase at the start of a speech, usually spoken by a concerned worthy, often as a prelude for excuses for not doing something or ignoring the views young people have expressed. Unfortunately, it was a phrase I heard rather too much at the conference in Budapest. Not only does it undervalue young people now, seeing them only in terms of their future role as adults, workers, parents and consumers and not in terms of their current abilities, it is also shortsighted, as although the particular young person in front of you will grow up, young people are a constant - there will always be young people.

If there was ever a hard-to-reach group that should be ripe for engagement through e-democracy and for whom lack of skills or intimidation by the method should not be a problem, it is young people. And e-democracy advocates seem to take the engagement of young people for granted just because they are using e rather than traditional means.

The lineup for the session on Engaging Young People was as follows:
Chairman: Peter Lauritzen, Head of Youth Department, Council of Europe
Kate Parish, Founder of UK Youth Parliament
Shane McCracken, Gallomanor, UK
Laura McVeigh, UK Youth
Tom Gaskin, Youth Worker for Norfolk Blurb Website Project

Notice the omission - no young people on the panel, and some dreadful worthy chairing. There were about ten young people in the front row, but at no point were they more than participants. We heard from four enthusiastic and engaged adults about how to engage young people, as the experts - already engaged young people - looked on. Most of the young people present are MYPs (members of the youth parliament) and those of you who are regular readers will know that I’ve in the past expressed concern about the inclusiveness of the UKYP concept. After meeting the young people - all of whom were without exception interested, articulate and great fun to be around, don’t mistake me on that point - I still have a concern about how representative the organisation is in terms of class and background. In the words of Shane McCracken, who gave by far the best presentation on the Gallomanor projects “I’m a councillor, get me out of here” and “lifeswap“, the young people in the room were “shinys” - already engaged young people.

Where were the groups of young people up at the front, presenting to the audience through drama, dance and art? Where were the carefully-prepared hard-to-reach young people, supported by their youth workers to bring their points of view to the table? I’ve taken teenage mums to meet ministers and speak at party conference, supported by the excellent work of YWCA’s youth workers - it’s hard, but it’s not that hard, and it’s not like cash was a problem at this conference. Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed this session a lot, and it was one of the ones circled in my agenda to attend from the start. It was just a shame that the presenters talked about the importance of young people taking control of the agenda and having thechance to meaningfully participate in the design, delivery and evaluation of projects aimed at engaging them, but there was precious little of it going on.

UPDATE: judge the session for yourself - audio of the main speakers is available here.

I’m going to post in more detail on some of the aspects of the conference I attended in Budapest last week, but first I thought an overview might be useful.

The conference was three days long, held at the Hotel Intercontinental in Budapest, and organised by the UK’s department for communities and local government (DCLG), formerly ODPM. I was invited to go on a bursary paid for by DCLG; I will try to give an honest assessment of the conference, but bear in mind that the fluffy pillows on which I slept and the wine I drunk at the evening reception was paid for by the great British taxpayer, helped out by a variety of corporate sponsors, so I may fail in speaking truth to power.

Before I went to the conference, I mentioned that the agenda seemed to consist of many of the great and the good, and was embarassingly corrected on one particular attendee by the symposium director. And whilst I enjoyed the symposium immensely, I’m not sure that much of it wasn’t as I had predicted. The great and the good - you know, those people from collection-of-initials organisations, most of which have EU, UN or Council of Europe in the title - predominated in many of the sessions and plenaries, overtaking the make-it-happens. Maybe it’s to do with my lack of formal engagement with the subject - after all, I’m pretty much a blogger by accident - but I couldn’t get straight in my head the various instruments, directives, initiatives and funding streams in this immensely active but complicated world of e, so appreciated most the speakers with direct experience of delivering projects that worked - whether that be Norfolk county council’s youth website, Gllomanor’s I’m a councillor get me out of here (any other Oxford councillors fancy having a go at that this autumn?), Public-i’s live and playback streaming of council meetings and Bob Kerslake and Paul Bettison telling us how e-democracy improves local services in Sheffield and Bracknell Forest.

Unfortunately, this was one of those conferences where most of the speakers delivered powerpoints with far too many words onscreen in a monotone, oblivious to the positive effects of engaging one’s audience, or the successful tactic of considering in advance, “now, what do this audience want to hear about, rather than what am I desperate to tell them about?” So, we ended up listening to presentations of research containing 25 slides of data and methodology and one of conclusions. I don’t know why this surprised me; I guess I thought these technologically-switched-on people, so committed to e-participation, would be great at designing participatory workshops. I guess seeing the people in front of them rather than hearing the ping of new email or updated blogs must have foxed them rather.

/tangent When I rule the world, there will be mandatory powerpoint training. It will start off something like this: if you must type out your speech, why not read from a word document, rather than playing the slightly odd game where the audience read the words from your powerpoint as you say them and the whole thing resembles a collection of teenagers singing along to a new album by reading the lyrics off the sleeve? Excellent. Now, you may have a maximum of seven words on this slide. Which ones convey the most important concepts that you want your audience to remember? Come on now, you really don’t need the words “the”, “on” and “to”, do you? No. That’s better. Even the most boring research project has a photo illustrating something, somewhere. Oh, and resist the temptation to use tables or word art. For advanced students only, try looking up at the audience occasionally (you can put your thumb on the sentence you’ve just read to keep your place if you like); attempt the odd feeble joke; grin widely and inanely; consider having a prop such as a silly hat. Didn’t that go well?! /end of tangent

So, the quality of sessions was patchy, and the love of e-people for acronyms and obfuscation apparent. What to make of this aim for the conference?

Provide a framework for the follow on to the UN Global e-Government Readiness Report 2005: From e-Government to e-Inclusion

No, I don’t know either, but then as an elected member in frontline politics I was a rarity. Most of the attendees were managers from British local authorities, and the idea that party politics could - and probably should, given the extent to which it is political parties that keep local democracy alive in many areas - be part of the e-democracy and e-participation agenda was anathema. All this local engagement and taking part is great, but as soon as anyone assumes a party label, then suddenly it’s sullied.

There were some fantastic seminars, and I’ll report in more detail on some of them presently. But what I really loved about the conference was the chance to meet some really great people and have the type of conversations that make you want to stay up til 3am chatting even when the bar has closed. And there were some impressive keynote speakers, who’ve done things I couldn’t even begin to imagine in the world of e-engagement. There are more posts to follow, specifically on the people I met; the youth and hard-to-reach seminars; and the blogging masterclass and its implications for this site, and the conference weblog, with podcasts of many of the speakers, is available here.

Last week I was at the international e-participation and local democracy symposium, held at the Hotel Intercontinental in Budapest. After an early start to make it to Heathrow for the 7.15am Malev flight direct to Budapest Ferihegy, I had two hours to sightsee before the conference began, and another five hours after the conference ended on Friday. I hope you’ll agree that I made the most of this time…

I’d never been as far east as Budapest before, and I suppose that I hadn’t expected the heat to be as intense as it was. While I was there, the mercury was stuck at 36-40 degrees, and at night it barely cooled. So all my sightseeing was done in a fug, with a water bottle clutched at my side, darting from one patch of shade to another. With my trusty Rough Guide to Budapest (20% off from Borders), I was determined to march around as much of the city as I could, despite the heat, but finally gave in and paid just over 7000 HUF for one of those open-top bus tours. The commentary was in English, and in two hours the bus took me further than I could have walked and pointed out the bits that I wanted to explore further on foot, so I guess it was worth it.

Coming from a tourist city myself, I suppose the thing that surprised me about Budapest was how scruffy it was. I was taken aback by the amount of graffiti everywhere, even in the smartest streets and at the most photogenic tourist traps, looping and curling across the front of smart shops doing steady trade.

Here are some photos of the highlights of Budapest:

This is the view from the top of the Gellert Hill to the Danube. Don’t want to make you jealous, but my hotel was on the Pest side (the right of this photo), on the banks for the river, and is just immediately out of shot.

Budapest is a city of statues and memorials, with a sense of its history on every street corner. Here are memorials commemorating two of the more recent episodes - the liberation of the city by the Red Army in 1945, and the reformist Communist prime minister, Imre Nagy, who was killed following the failed 1956 revolution. Without making a comment on the politics, I loved the Nagy memorial. A real man, ordinary, dressed for a Hungarian winter, not a heroic pose. While I was there, ordinary-looking Hungarian women tied flowers to the bridge in between the constant stream of toruists running up for their photo to be taken next to him. I took this photo in a rare moment of quiet.

The Hungarian parliament building was next on my list. Here it is, in its full glory. Remind you of anywhere?

My route march also took me through the former Jewish ghetto, where over 50,000 women, elderly and children were crammed into accommodation for 15,000 during world war two. I wandered past the rebuilt central synagogue and briefly stopped to pay my respects at the Holocaust memorial, a willow tree with the names of those victims recorded inscribed on the leaves.

Finally, I took the chance to do some people-watching on the main shopping street, Vaci Utca, and in the Great Market Hall.

Curiously enough, many of the souvenir stalls on the first floor were selling Communist memorabilia - KGB badges and the like - which I thought in pretty terrible taste. This display of Russian dolls, though, was I thought, a pretty equal opportunity offender. Yes, for just 3000 HUF, you too can own seven dolls of Osama Bin Laden in varying sizes, complete with handy internal stacking mechanism! Or if Osama’s not your cup of tea, how about Lenin, Stalin or Saddam Hussain? And if you prefer your world leaders to be of the elected or not-quite-elected variety, choose from a wide selection of US, British and Italian leaders or would-be-leaders (yes, that is John Kerry at the back there!)

So, Budapest, my friends. No photos of the Castle or Varhegy, as didn’t get the chance to spend much time there, sadly. I fully intend to revisit and do all the things the guidebook tells me I should - visiting the Szechenyi baths and the House of Terror, the statue park where old Communist statues go to die and taking in that river cruise of the Danube. Someday.

Hello all - I see you’re keeping busy in my absence!

I’m posting this from a hotel room overlooking the Danube and the Var. It’s about 40 degrees, but this hotel is beautifully air-conditioned, thank goodness! The seminar I’m attending is full of people whose blogs you read or whose projects are discussed at length on the internet, and I’m getting to spend three days with these bright people, picking their brains for improvements to this site. I don’t think I’d previously had a handle on the scale of the ambitions for e-participation and e-democracy, nor how pivotal to the agenda are councillors’ blogs. The full report will follow on my return…

It’s true of course - young people are our future, in the sense that today’s young people are tomorrow’s adults, workers, voters and parents. But they are also our present - young people have the right to be seen as complete people now, not just in terms of their potential in years to come, and the adults they will be. There’s also of course, the point that young people are always with us - the one in front of you may grow up, but there are always young people. When I hear the phrase “young people are our future”, it makes me cringe. It’s the sort of cliche that starts well-intentioned worthy speeches, often as a prelude for excuses for not doing something or ignoring the views young people have expressed.

So, my heart sank when I looked at the panel for the presentation on Engaging Young People at the e-democracy conference:

Chairman: Peter Lauritzen, Head of Youth Department, Council of Europe
Kate Parish, Founder of UK Youth Parliament
Shane McCracken, Gallomanor, UK - I’m a Councillor get me out of here!
Laura McVeigh, UK Youth
Tom Gaskin, Youth Work for Norfolk Blurb Website Project

For a start, there were no young people on it. So often, the internet is hailed as a means to engage those young people for whom democracy is voting for reality TV personalities, but they weren’t there to tell us about it. There were about ten members of the UK youth parliament sat at the front throughout the session, but they were there to listen to the well-intentioned adults talking to us about the projects that had run which had engaged young people so effectively. As regular readers will know, I have some concerns about how representative the UKYP is, and despite a few powerpoint slides on ethnicity and gender, for me the crucial questions about the type of schools and which areas the young people come from were still unanswered. In short, to borrow a term from Shane McCracken’s presentation (easily the best of the session), are our MYPs all “shinys” - kids who are already enthusiastic and engaged? I didn’t see anything to convince me otherwise - which shouldn’t be taken as disparagement towards the young people who had made the trek. There is some great work going on out there to re-engage young people in democracy and civic engagement through the internet and multimedia - from I’m a Councillor, get me out of here! and Lifeswap to the UK Youth Film for Youth competition and the Norfolk blurb website. I was just sad that the young people weren’t able to tell us about it themselves…