Digitally Engaged

There is something oddly comforting about the Minister for Digital Engagement sending a formal invitation through the post.  Tom Watson MP is on warm and friendly form as he welcomes a group of us into Admiralty House this evening.  I have been in the main room for less than thirty seconds when one of his team takes me by the arm, asking if I’ve ever met Peter Mandelson.  We move across the floor towards the new Secretary of State for Business.

Lord Mandelson wonders in what way I am digitally pioneering (A good question, and a reference to the event’s title, ‘In Honour of Digital Pioneers’), so I mention WebMission, causing him to reflect on a trip to Silicon Valley in the nineties.   More recently, I confess, I’ve been helping his department to connect with each other in a less high-tech manner, at a recent Speednetworking event at his department, BERR!  I sense he may feel that he had a lucky escape…

Sam Michel talks through some of the successes of Digital Mission and invites Untld World’s Alberto Nardelli to share his own reflections on the recent trip to New York.  Favourites including Ben Hammersley (newly installed as Deputy Editor of Wired magazine) and Matt Locke of Channel Four make up part of an excellent crowd and I cross paths with the Beeb’s own Rory Cellan-Jones.   Finally, Mark Prigg,  the Evening Standard’s technology correspondent is in the house, and though I mention that I’ve just read his colleague Nick Curtis’s article about Twitter, I am too polite too offer my fuller opinion of his conclusions.   Perhaps I will write him a letter.