Just a quick reminder that all the main documents relating to Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth – now less than fortnight away – are now available directly from the party’s website.

These include the main hall agenda, the policy papers to be debated and fringe and training guides.

Find them all at this handy link.

It’s also worth noting and commending that the information is available in a variety of formats, from the printed books, the PDFs of those, and also simply as plain text – which is good and accessible for those with disabilities and also very handy for PDAs, phones and quick searching when you need to find something fast.

LDV at conference

LDV have four conference events, and I will bringing you the full details tomorrow along with our finalised speaker list. We’ll also have a questionnaire for members of our forum on behalf of think-tank IPPR – the answers you give will serve as the fifth panelist at their fringe on Tuesday lunchtime.

We are always very keen to attract guest writers for Lib Dem Voice, but never more so than at Conference and in the run up to it.

Before conference

We’re keen to get the debate started long before delegates take their seats in the conference hall, so if you have a view about the policy we’ll be debating, write us an article. If you need support for an amendment – or are drafting a speech – why not reuse and rehearse your material in the form of article here?

One paper in particular, the party’s Real Women policy paper, has already been subject to a deal of debate in an article – followed by your comments – from Jo Swinson MP; and fifty comments following this introductory piece from Helen Duffett.

At conference

At least five of the regular LDV staff are signed up for all or part of conference, and we will be providing audio, video and text coverage of the events as they happen, as we have done now for a number of years. But we are still interested in hearing a variety of voices and opening our platform out to other writers.

Five of us can’t get to every fringe event so if you would like to review those for us we are particularly keen to hear from you. We are usually in the position of being able to trade a half hour’s worth of internet access for your copy, if you find that tempting! It helps our planning if you can let us know in advance if you would like to write for us, but we do understand it doesn’t always work like that, so feel free to speak to us at conference.

A few years ago, a group of us decided to organise a Liberal Drinks at federal conference in Brighton. We were building on James Graham’s simple but successful model: nominate a pub, decide a date, publicise it; then have convivial chats with whoever turns up. In Brighton, we followed the same model, deciding on that nice-but-tiny real-ale place near the station. We arrived, a small but respectable number of people turned up, chatted the night away, and at some point moved on to a Chinese restaurant in the vicinity before winding up back at the conference bar. A good time was had by all.

At the end of the night, a general view was expressed that it might be nice to do something similar outwith conference time, and maybe outwith London.

Wind forward a few years, and Jonathan Calder asks as part of a blog post

[is there] scope for a different event at Conference? One idea that attracts me is a blogging clinic where people can come along and ask advice or share ideas in person.

It is obviously too late to do anything for this year, but perhaps another year?

One final thing to throw into the pot before starting to ask the questions is the idea of an “unconference“: a sort of anarchic conference where what happens is decided by the participants. I went to one of these in Nottingham recently, which looked at the Digital Britain report. They provided a venue with a number of rooms, and people planning to come volunteered to run sessions on their areas of expertise. One of the rooms was designated a “blogger’s creche” – and the venue supplied the wifi, the participants brought a variety of their own gadgets. Indeed, by the time you read this I will be up in Bradford at Photocamp 09 – a very similar idea, it seems.

Munge all three of these ideas together, and I think you have the nub of a good idea that we as Lib Dem bloggers and netty people could do. We could meet, for a day, exchange ideas, share our skills with each other, end up in the pub or other hostelry.

So far, so good. But there are a lot of questions to answer first, so I thought I would throw it open for discussion.

Where should we hold it? London or {not-London}? There are lots of people in London, and it’s easy to get to from everywhere, but us provincial types resent da capital a bit. If we had it out in the sticks somewhere, would people come? Would people come, anyway?

What venue? Ideally we need the use of a place with several large rooms, all with free wifi. A coffee urn never goes amiss. LDV could probably spring for a couple of hundred pounds, but that doesn’t usually buy a nice place or one with an internet connection, or one in London – at least not the easily accessible bits. Is there maybe an MP’s office somewhere that might fit the bill? Perhaps we could combine it with a meatspace activity day quid pro quo?

When? Initial suggestions seem to be – have an informal chat at conference, and try to arrange something for October or November. Is a Saturday OK? Anything we should avoid?

What content? Is there something you want to discuss, or a session you want to lead? (I’ve half a mind on a session called The Birth of Lib Dem Radio)

Further details, my friends, are up to you. What do you think?

Today I went to Wikipedia to see what happened today in history, and saw that it’s the birthday of the composer Edvard Grieg. Quick as a flash, the Kit and the Widow song “hundreds of Norwegians on the London Underground” to the tune of the Hall of the Mountain King rises unbidden in my mind – and with it, memories of the Brent East by-election, and Ed Fordham’s uncanny rendition of “Can you tell me please – where can Dollis Hill be found?” For many of you, this will mean nothing, but I’m hoping a significant number of you will be humming the Hall of the Mountain King all day in sympathy.

Two big stories

There’s only one big story today; it broke on the blogs last night and dominates the headlines this morning. Aide quits. Blow to Brown. Afghanistan policy in tatters. Humiliated defence secretary. Read all about it in the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph.

Read, too, Eric Joyce’s tweet about the whole thing – 140 characters allow him to say “In lounge at Euston, waiting for train after speech to UKNDA. Big ugly mug on giant screens. Everything seems pretty shit, actually.”

My second pick of the stories is the glum news that Britain will be the last to leave the recession behind:

The UK economy will shrink in the third quarter and register zero growth in the fourth quarter, while America’s economy will grow by 2.4 per cent in the fourth quarter and the euro Area’s will increase by 2 per cent.

The forecast will come as a blow to Alistair Darling, who in an newspaper interview on Thursday reiterated that he believed the economy would return to growth by the end of the year with Britain experiencing a V-shaped recession.

Two must-read blog posts

Mark Reckons meets A Man with a Plan. It’s a good interview, and eminently readable even for those of us who aren’t familiar with Tory MP Dougless Carswell or his work. It does just leave me a little champing at the bit for questions unasked. How will he pay for open primaries? How does he avoid the tyranny of the majority amongst all the sheriffs, recalls and referendums?

Costigan Quist talks… erm… spherical barcharts.

Take your opinion polls and draw a graph. But instead of making it a bar chart, use the height of each line as the diameter of a circle. Looking at a circle, we see the area of course. Think back to your GCSE maths. The Conservatives have about 2.5 times the support of the Lib Dems, but the Tory circle is six times bigger that the yellow one.

Coming up on Lib Dem Voice later today: Is Mandelson losing the battle with the pirates? And just how do councillors spend their time? Mark Pack reports.

So runs the rather foolish quote from the Taxpayers’ Alliance in a story from the Daily Express expressing outrage at a job ad for a Director of Digital Engagement.

The Government should have better things to spend money on than a pointless deputy Twittercrat. The public sector as a whole should be tightening its belt during times of economic hardship, and this job would be a scandalous waste even during good economic times.

Taxpayers don’t want more Web2.0. They want an end to wasteful spending.

Neither the TPA nor the Conservative Party can see the point, instead frothing at the mouth and making the dim conflation that Web 2.0 is the same as Twitter. But both need to realise failing to understand something is not a reason to condemn it out of hand. If you too are not clear on Web 2.0 – try Wikipedia. It really refers to cumulative changes that have happened slowly on the internet over the last five years or so. Many web users may not be aware that things have changed. But almost everything you do on the internet these days includes Web 2.0 technology. If you’ve bought books from Amazon, watched something on Youtube, written a blog post or used web-based email you’ll almost certainly have used the technology.

Web 2.0 is vital to the future of meaningful use of the internet, and it’s important that Government plays ball. Government and local government both process a huge amount of data and have poor records in making that available for other people to use – one of the key things that Web 2.0 is about. Like it or not, communication on the internet is a big part of life for many people now, in business and in personal lives, and it behooves government to catch up and use the internet in the best way possible.

Here are two examples of Web 2.0 demands from tax payers. The first is My Society’s “Free our Bills” campaign – intended to get Parliament to reform how they make information about the lawmaking process available so that the layperson can better understand what’s proposed. Not a waste of anyone’s money, surely?

The second is from taxpayer David Cameron. His part has a policy of “Google Government” as reported in his speech to the Local Government Association earlier this year. They want councils to make available details of all their transactions, so that opposition councillors and members of the public can scrutinise their accounts and make suggestions on savings. But that too can be made much easier and more meaningful with the application of Web 2.0 technology. Clearly that wasn’t in Francis Maude’s mind when he was condemning it.

If the person appointed in the job ad can get both of those things done, there is real possibility of value for money engagement with real people. And that’s worth at least some of the salary this person will be paid.

On the whole, it’s been a stupid few days for the Taxpayers’ Alliance – see also yesterday’s shock revelation of Portsmouth Council’s employees’ 11 seconds per day on Facebook.