What happens to open stuff when the places we share things die? I was in a session at Govcamp this weekend talking about the way that open government things have been going over the past few years and was struck by this. So much of the open government space relies on twitter.

I read this piece [https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/internet-time-is-slowing-down-political] about “internet time slowing down” and its description of the massive difference between 2002 and 2012 versus 2012 and today made me think about a few main problems

• How do you discover open things happening without twitter
• How do you talk to people openly without twitter
• How do you do things like sharing jobs and communities of practice beyond siloes without twitter
• What comes next

I joined twitter in 2010 because it seemed like a laugh through that election cycle and for the first couple of years all I used it for was talking to friends around Westminster and organising drinks in my bubble of skint lefties in North London. But that’s perhaps because it was a young person’s site. Over the last decade it became uncool. In some ways Twitter is like linkedin with shitposting.

I’m there because my work friends are, but why on earth would anyone else come to our dive bar?

All of this is some level of a discussion of network effects. You’ve got to go where the network is. So, no pretending that “a new members Forum for sharing open projects” will do it, or Mastodon or lamenting Google Reader. We are where we are.

Think about the knockon effects of losing privatised infrastructure with no public service incentive. Where would Jukesie find the roles for his jobs newsletter? Where would you get the Director of GDS crowdsourcing community concerns about digital government from beyond the department Slack?

This links back to the thoughts about the openness or not of the processes of government. Early digital government had a lot of interaction with people outside. That seems more and more threatening inside government these days. So, you can’t necessarily expect the political climate and a significantly bigger, angrier twitter that is better at finding government/organisation chat and taking it out of original context to allow for nice open chats any more. But, I think that was a good thing to have. Practitioners chatting with peers about the practical difficulties of some technology problems.

More importantly is the part about reaching people early in careers with job opportunities, knowledge, whatever. Do other spaces offer something that would help government openness, support a community and not just be an old farts club?