CivicoLive gigging at PdF Europe 2009! Great effort for interactive democracy

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of meeting the CivicoLive team while they were setting up their gear for PdF Europe 2009. @HadleyPaul (who ever so kindly lent me an adapter! TQ! ) introduced me to Daniel Cremin who is the main man behind the whole CivicoLive and I was greatly impressed with what they had to offer. Its funny how me and @johnpopham were talking about the same idea! Its just shows… if you have a good idea, you’ve got to act quick before someone else beats you to the punch! LOL

Anyways, you might be wondering what CivicoLive is all about. Well here’s a snipet of what they do from their website…

Civico uses live audio streamed via internet radio, seamlessly integrated with live blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, bringing democracy to PCs, PDAs and mobile phones everywhere.

Now everyone can engage in civic meetings, events and debates to participate as never before.

Civico has the potential to revolutionise democratic processes, providing councils and the public sector an opportunity to demonstrate new levels of access, understanding and trust.

Now I know what you’re thinking, isn’t video streaming better.. Well in some cases yes. But it does take up alot of bandwidth and sometimes not accessible to most people, especially those who are digitally excluded. Therefore this is a great way to access events coverage via your radio without needing to follow the twitter stream or video stream while at work! We know its a pain when you can’t attend an event that you know is great because of no budget or no invitation!

According to Daniel, you can also comment on the audio stream via text, twitter and all sorts of other way. Talk about accessible and interactive democracy..I think it ticks all the boxes doesn’t it?

I’ll be doing a special interview with Daniel later today and upload the video on Jadu’s Vimeo channel (who is also sponsoring my trip along with Google) and on my blog as well. So please look out for that! You’ll be amazed on what CivicoLive has to offer!

To follow CivicoLive’s coverage, follow this link http://civicolive.com/pdfeu

Hope this was useful!