As Lucas and Greg already pointed out before we all spent some quality time here in Berlin at the re:publica conference. But besides interesting panels, discussions, sessions and workshops re:publica'08 for me was mainly one thing:

testing, re-testing, trying to break stuff, managing bugs and tickets, and -- testing.

For the moment I am very confident that we will deliver a quite cool release to all of our current alpha members on Monday. AND: we will send out more invitations to all of you still waiting. Promise. So please do not hesitate and run over to the current alpha site now and leave your email address.

Some things you will find on Monday:

• more collaboration tools to manage your goals and projects
• improved invitation process to get your friends involved
• an awesome and fully customizable project magazine

Since this is a major update to the codebase we will have to take the site offline for a couple of hours -- but do not worry -- we will be back.

after three days, two nights and lots of impressions at berlin’s re:publica there would be tons of posts to write. being a lazy nature like luci (see previous post) i’ll keep things short and meditatively focus on one thing only: tom steinberg’s super interesting presentation on two of the social collaboration services that mysociety.org provides.

theyworkforyou.com: a platform that provides the UK with the profiles of their political representatives (political profiles, voting record, visits abroad, most recent appearances in parliament, the amount of times they spoke up, voted etc.). no day-to-day scandals... just statistical facts – ready for interpretation. that’s the start. you can then go on to contact your councillors: hack in your zip code, then the MP you want to contact and you’re ready to raise your voice! write and then wait for the response. should the addressee not respond – his problem – responsiveness listed on lead tables (who is good, who is bad).

fixmystreet.com: a great platform to report, view, mark and discuss local problems. once you marked the location of the problem the system checks which council is responsible. Everyone can come along and leave an update. The probability that your council will respond is increased - because it is public. You can also subscribe to email alerts when other people post problems in your area. so, it’s all about fixing your problem and at the same time hooking into the public.

So both services are about helping people to fix their problems bottom-up and at the same time embed users in a deeper process: Check your MP, report an issue today, start a campaign tomorrow, and become a MP yourself the day after tomorrow... knowing that you’ll be watched!

es wurde schon viel geschrieben über die re:publica, ich lass es, zumindest vorläufig, mal sein und poste auf kosten geistreicher vortragsrezensionen lieber ein bildchen unserer it-meister beim testen des wirklich soon to come nächsten grösseren releases auf www.amazee.net. eine ganze menge neuer features wird die werte testerschaft erwarten, mehr dazu sehr bald auf diesem kanal.

und natürlich auch noch mehr zur re:publica (wenn sich noch was previously ungebloggtes findet...).

malte: herzlich willkommen bei uns im team schon mal im voraus! und vergiss NIE: der grosse bruder schaut dir auf den screen...