I’ve just got back from the PICamp event in Belfast. For a first-time event in a relatively small polity, I think it went extremely well. Steve Lawson has posted a really good round-up of the day.
It highlighted the importance of ‘gamechanging’ as opposed to campagning, consensus-building and caucusing. Mick Fealty, the MC for the day put it well towards the end of the day (here’s the audio file) as he tried to pull the event away from identifying the problems and towards how positive action can come from informal gatherings such as this.
A number of people who came to PICamp were people who didn’t often go to political conferences.
Politics geeks and social media geeks come from quite a different background, and some of the people who had attended events like Barcamp, had seen the effectiveness of them as a way of addressing issues, saw PICamp as an opportunity to explore political issues.
The convening blog for the event, Slugger O’Toole, is a powerful player in Northern Ireland’s politics (Slugger’s PICamp round-up is here), and it attracts lots of comments on a regular basis. But many of the people in the room confessed that they regularly visited Slugger, but didn’t often comment because they either didn’t feel strongly enough to commit thoughts to paper, or they were worried about being attacked by the more fanatical trolls that inhabit all large comment blogs.
@alaninbelfast summed this up nicely here.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
