I’m speaking at a couple of conferences in Vancouver this week, discussing how public service broadcasters can sustaining citizenship and civil society in an internet age. In particular, I will be looking at the rise and fall of the BBC’s Action Network and propose new ways of moving forward as the BBC prepares its digital democracy project. Friday May 2: When Citizens Decide: The Challenge of Large Scale Public Engagement

In a few days’ time, on April 30, the BBC will close down its experiment in grassroots democracy, the Action Network. The project started life five years ago as BBC iCan. According to the people involved at the time, iCan was a significant change for public service broadcasting because it was about encouraging people to get involved rather than sitting back and watching politics happen. In a farewell note, the