… two booja-booja truffles, a Café Aida soya latte and 2 tins of diet Irn Bru. My face is melting…

Yesterday was great. During the day, I was at the Democratic Sector Day, a day ‘for participation practitioners to share ideas, projects and ambitions, and hopefully develop a better understanding of this ‘community of practice’ in Scotland. The objectives were:

1. Improve our understanding of the Democratic Sector in Scotland: Who is doing what and how?
2. Discover opportunities for collaboration regarding research and practice.

Both of these happened for me – I learnt of a lot of projects and products that hadn’t previously come anywhere near my consciousness. I made a couple of new connections and received some very welcome news about one of my practical ambitions. (More anon when I can talk about it.) I also had an idea for another research topic. I’ll blog a bit more about this tomorrow – I’ll be using that blogging session to sort out what I want to do and when I should do it.)

Back to the plot – in the afternoon, we were asked if we wanted to run any mini-workshops within the even. My main topic is how digital can be used to support democracy, so I volunteered to do that. The next volunteer was Christian Storstein, of the Scottish Government’s Digital Engagement team, who wanted to do the same. So we joined forces – here’s Christian’s blog about the day.

A huge thank you to Oliver Escobar and his colleagues for organising the day. I’m massively looking forward to the report from this event, and to taking more action to make participatory democracy big and real and happening!

Oh, the other good thing about yesterday was that I reached a square number of years – and was spoiled by my lovely partner.

I’ve just tried two online/social concept-mapping apps.

• bubbl.us is seriously limited – horrible, Flash-based UI. It tries to guess at box colours, but these always revert to pus-yellow if you break links – and you have to to replace the standard links with arrowed versions. Here’s my effort.
• Gliffy is much better – decent control over a fair set of things. Here’s my effort.

I’d still much sooner draw in Adobe Illustrator and have full control over everything but the speed of creating connections, the availability of many pre-drawn shapes and themes and easy online sharing of drawings makes Gliffy a clear winner.

Update – while bubbl.us can print to PDF (at least on MacOS), Gliffy can’t. But it can export as SVG – and those are easily changed to PDFs and any other graphics format you like!

… after long time with my head up my backsidetoo devoted to work. I cycled to spinning in the daylight for the first time in ages, with my GoPro on my handlebars. I hope I caught the potholes, double-parking in bus lanes and nonsense driving.

Anyway here’s two little beauties from today’s Saturday Shake-up:

• mash-up of Wonderwall, Back In Black and Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites

• mash-up ofRoadhouse Blues, Personal Jesus and Shout

We break an overwork, underpay-induced silence to bring you news of the merchandise of the century: Edinburgh trams

This piece by my Principal Investigator, mentor and colleague explains all, at least as far as work is concerned.

See this post in my research blog.

Oh, and I have a new, much faster box under my desk. (The previous machine took 7 minutes from pressing the power button to being able to send an email. This one takes under 3.)

Shame it’s a Windows box.

So, according to the official results for the short course,

• I was 159th to finish.
• I was 108th male to finish.
• I took 4 hours 23 minutes to finish, hence averaging 12·8mph.
• The fastest finisher took 2 hours 56 minutes, hence averaging 19·1mph
• The slowest finisher took 6 hours 33 minutes, hence averaging 8·5mph.
• 253 entrants finished
• 4 entrants did not finish.

For the long course (77 miles)

• The fastest finisher took 3 hours 5 minutes, hence averaging 25mph.
• The slowest finisher took 7 hours 3 minutes, hence averaging 10·9 mph.
• 1254 entrants finished.
• 11 entrants did not finish.