As my regular readers will know, I'm a cybernat living furth of Scotland for the next year or two. While indubitably tenanted in the imagined space of the Scottish blogosphere and certainly intending to return to Scotland once my stint "daan Saaf" is completed, I don't manage to plant myself north of the Tweed terribly often at the moment. For that reason, I read a recent e-mail from Mick Fealty of Northern Ireland's Slugger O'Toole blog with interest and a little squirm of regret. Along with his sprites and helpers, Fealty has organised a free event - Political Innovation - to be held in University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum on 10 Crichton Street on Saturday the 13th of November. With two exclamation marks, the organisers are keen to emphasise that "lunch and drinks will be laid on." While I have an interest in free lunches nigh unparalleled outside of the Palace of Westminster, unfortunately I won't be able to attend myself but I thought a few of you might be more proximate and interested. According to the literature puff, the event is minded with three primary objectives:
- To discuss some of the ideas that we’ve turned up so far on Political Innovation.
- To introduce people who work around politics (either politicians, campaigners, civil servants etc)to some of the people and ideas that are floating around the blogosphere.
- To get bloggers together to discuss political blogging – it’s impact and where it’s going in Scotland.
On the event website, I note that one of the purposes of the meeting is a "local political bloggers meetup". I don't know if any familiar characters from the Scots blogosphere will be in attendance, but in my experience it is often interesting to put a face to a prose-style...
"Elevator pitch to attendees: show us what you've got?"
ReplyDeleteWill we need to "bond" or paintball?
I'm always a bit wary of these type of 'meet ups'.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I doubt very much if anyone would talk to me!
I'm going, I expect, despite the essays being boring tripe that Jeff agreed to xpost on Better Nation until the tripeyness became clear to us all. Hope to see some other keyboard warriors there.
ReplyDeleteAs a lifelong cynic, I certainly sympathise with the healthy skepticism you've variously expressed. Not least with the sort of vacuous pseudo-managerialist language Conan prods. I'm sure people would be happy to chatter to you, Rab, so long as you allow your rant to slowly build up rather than floweth as a torrent from the get go!
ReplyDeleteI shan't be there as I said and shouldn't pre-judge the issue either - but in my experience most events have many facets and interesting unofficial undersides which are often redeeming. In any case, better I thought for folk to make up their own minds about attending or not.