I’ve been playing around with ideas for a follow up to Gov:West for quite a while now without ever really settling on something that interested me enough to really commit to. I wanted to try something different and a bit ‘bigger’ but it never really came together.

Doing Ignite last week and chatting to Dan Roddy about his plans for a themed Ignite sparked some thoughts though.

For those that don’t know what this is about here is a handy definition;

Ignite is a geek event in over 100 cities worldwide. At the events Ignite presenters share their personal and professional passions, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of just five minutes.

In 2010 at GOSCON in Washington, DC there was a successful IgniteGov evening described on the site as;

..a civic-themed version of the fun and fantastic Ignite events. Civic and Community Engagement, Open Data, Open Source, and Citizen/Government projects are popular topics.

So my thinking is to organise an IgniteGov evening following the same sort of theme here in Bristol. I think there should be enough relevant speakers and interest locally for this sort of thing and hopefully it would attract some folks from further afield.

There seems to be a possibility of a venue presenting itself and there has already been some interest from people on Twitter but I’d like to really get a feel for whether it is a goer before I invest too much time in it.

Based on the experiences at IgniteBristol I figured we’d need at least 12 speakers and an audience of 50ish to make it worthwhile. That might not be the most straightforward for something a little more niche.

Thoughts?