It's not often that Brighton gets to host interesting net-related talks, so I excitedly wandered up to CommunityBase late yesterday afternoon to attend the VoxPolitics event on e-democracy being held there.

It was interesting: a more civil event than some similar things I've been to, and a wealth of experience in the room: a labour MP, a self-confessed policy wonk (with matching satchel), local community guys, a network bod, an iTV expert, a girl who works for the BBC iCan project, the local papers, and lots of others...

The overwhelming message seemed to be that the Internet has its place, particularly for allowing vocal minorities (such as those based around specific single issues like petrol prices) to self-organise and have an influence disproportionate to their numbers, particularly across geographic boundaries... but that its influence is dwarfed by that of traditional broadcast media, as the Dean campaign found out. It all sounded terribly asymmetric, in the modern sense of the word...

I particularly like Dave's point of "what happens if all this works": if the public do start engaging directly with politicians in large numbers using electronic media, how can they possibly cope? The whole system of representative democracy seems based on the assumption that "I can't decide everything, so I'll nominate someone who I trust to make decisions for me"... but what happens when this assumption ceases to be valid, and representation becomes an inferior way of expressing your wishes for society?

Looking forward to seeing notes from the event, I noticed a few people scribbling down interesting URLs, projects, etc. Update: here are Dave's.

Cheers to Mark @ SCIP and the Vox Politics crowd for organising it - hopefully it won't be the last such event we'll see down here...

It seems to be the season for office moves - and we're heading into our new gaff on October 10th. Still sharing with the lovely Redhead Design and Neujuice, but we're taking on a large space that'll give us room to expand (err and better fit in the folks we have now), plus a proper area to sit down and do the meeting thang with clients - not something we need a great deal as most of our meetings take place in London, but it can't hurt.

FP has had 5 offices in the 4 years the company's been about, if you count the spare room where we started it all up and the 2 weeks we spent working out of my living room when we were badly let down over a promised space. Where we are now is easily the nicest place we've been in: the environment is great (thanks in part to sharing with folks who have an instinct for interior design), the location is fab (you can't beat the North Laine for access to both station and entertainment) and the commercials are more favourable than some places we've inhabited. The new office is directly upstairs from the current one, so we should get to keep all our current advantages and still gain space. Wahey :)

And oh, did I mention we turned 4 on the 25th September? I can't believe it's been that long - it only feels like yesterday that I left GT... and this also means that it's 5 years exactly since I started doing the mobile thang, when we launched GT Unwired, the wireless bit of GoodTech which google has long forgotten...