My talk at @BCIT on Social Media, Politics and Public Policy

A few weeks ago, my friend Tris Hussey (who is teaching at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, BCIT) invited me to speak to his class on the topic of “Social Media, Politics and Public Policy”. I have previously given similar talks (if you look at my SlideShare space, you can see a few of the Power Point slide decks of recent talks I’ve given).

I spoke to Tris’ class this past March 3rd, 2010. It’s kind of coincidental, because I have previously sought to teach at BCIT (this was before I started teaching at UBC) and I never got any positive feedback/responses. So, for me it was a bit of an irony that I ended up, indeed, teaching at BCIT (guest lecturing, of course, and it’s Tris whom I have to thank for the opportunity).

I’ve given a similar version of this talk previously, but this time it felt more fun as the students were already well engaged in the social networking space. The perspective I took then was more on the political analysis/policy analysis side (which suits me rather well, as those are the topics I teach at UBC). I centered my analysis on issues of publicness vs. privacy, seeking the audience where it is (for example, the Facebook page for Kelowna, British Columbia, is very active). The government of BC is seeking public input for the new water laws through a blog. There’s a broad variety of things already happening in the space, and it’s very exciting.

And, on that note, I submitted a panel to the conference Northern Voice 2010 precisely on this topic. I would copy and paste the abstract, but I prefer to surprise you with the excellent panel I have assembled. I am hoping (fingers crossed) that my panel will be accepted, because it has an excellent group of speakers.

Thanks to everyone who sent me tweets about examples of use of social media in politics and public policy, and to Hans Peter Meyer for sharing a report he created. An earlier post of mine where I asked these questions can be found here.

Be Sociable, Share!