UKGovCamp

Cheap? Not that I know of…
http://en.parkopedia.co.uk/parking/birmingham/
To get below £10 I would usually go out of the centre to somewhere like the NIA car park. You’d have a bit of a walk from there to the venue though – I’d allow myself 25-30 minutes. Not really the right side of the city for this venue to be honest, I just happen to know the west side better.
If you have the option of train to New Street it’s worth considering instead.

I think of the 29th as more like a day off sick. Thanks though. I’m obviously monitoring the wrong channels because I didn’t get an alert about the first batch of tickets. C’est la guerre.

Hi Dave – I reckon it’s after the Bank Holiday already – do you mean after the BigRoyalWeddingCamp shindig?

”so many people dont get it… why dont they?”

Perhaps because the govcamp movement has emerged from a convergence of a fairly narrow range of professional interests? Look at the profiles of people who are active now (here and places like the Communities of Practice site). You’ll see mainly colleagues from corporate Web development, public-facing communications, information management, etc. Others from across the organisation are likely to be individuals who are naturally social media early adopters, tech geeks, etc. Surprisingly few in my experience from corporate IT teams!

The result I think is that although govcamps ostensibly have no agendas, at the present state of evolution you can expect the same kinds of interrelated subjects to be proposed each time. In theory an open govcamp can accommodate a session on Housing Benefit Statutory Instruments if there’s a demand for it, but in practice I’ve not yet seen a compelling reason why an unconference should be a better approach to operational topics than any other kind of old-fashioned professional forum, online or in the flesh. So people whose primary interest is the Housing Benefits service are relatively unlikely to engage in the first place. I can see that colleagues working on take-up might be interested, but that’s them fitting into the existing agenda rather than them creating a new one.

Put it another way, maybe unconferences are best suited to emerging issues rather than business as usual. I see them as essentially large-scale brain-storming sessions with some dissemination afterwards.