Every so often the full membership of the BBC Trust meets in Belfast. This is one of the out of London meetings shared by Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In addition to meeting BBC staff, they meet with other stakeholders and interested parties to garner opinion and thoughts about the BBC and how it operates and the view from the Nation.

This morning I had breakfast with the Chair Sir Michael Lyons, the local chair Rotha Johnston Trustee for Northern Ireland plus others from UTV, News Letter, Screen NI, Ulster Museums and Invest NI. Yes, the discussion was wide ranging from commissioning to how Northern Ireland is presented on screen (factually and in entertainment and drama), is there sufficient balance between News and Business coverage, what is the role of BBC Online’s news Service?

When people sit in a room and discuss BBC commissioning, the focus always falls on television commissioning. Perhaps because it has the biggest budget, perhaps it’s because it has the most people working in it. My criticism – which was accepted – was that the BBC does not have a strategy for engagement with the digital content industry, not just BBC Northern Ireland, but in the BBC as a whole. Officially 25% of the BBC Future Media budget should go to external suppliers. In Belfast it did from the year that rule was introduced (I was managing the budget and worked with a bunch of suppliers). I expect that it still does. But there is a bigger challenge. The big budgets are found in what is called Network production in television and in radio. The big budgets are in London and we (the DC industry here) need to be engaging with the BBC to access those budgets, prove our creativity and compete with any other supplier in the UK.

But the BBC has a partnership responsibility here.

BBC in London believes that it is approachable and open to ideas. As a Nations producer and editor within the BBC, approaching London Central was difficult enough. From Belfast as an external supplier, it remains almost impossible. But I also think we restrict ourselves in what we are supplying and what we are expected to supply. Yes, it should be web sites and technology platforms. But it must also be content – what I (and they) call Editorial Content.

And it needs to be sustainable.

I know that Peter Johnston Director Northern Ireland and Rotha Johnston (no relation) the Northern Ireland Trustee are both keen on developing a business and supply modal here. I know Alistair Hamilton of Invest NI shares that intention.

But we need some leadership, a road map and a sustainable conversation. Digital Circle will engage, and engage constructively.

This week's Belfast Telegraph article

It's called “Slacktivism”: a mix of Activism and Slacker describing how some people support a cause by doing no more than signing an online petition, or joining a Facebook group or taking part in a Twitter-storm.

Slacktivism is a pejorative term, but the motivation behind a person’s engagement in an issue can be positive. Most of us are not in a position to change public perception or opinion even if we had the time and resources, even the inclination to put our boots on and take to the streets. Following the Iranian elections in June supporters of the Iranian opposition did take to the streets in protest. Some Twitter users outside Iran added a green tinge to their profile photo to show support to the protesters. Some even changed their profile location to Tehran believing that this would hinder the Iranian authorities. We were told Iranians were using Twitter to arrange protests, the government was trying to monitor them and it was though that the more people on the platform with a false Tehran location the harder it would be to track the real organisers. Who knows whether it did or not.

In October newsrooms were prevented from reporting information about Trafigura by threat of severe legal action. It was a Twitter-storm that brought the story into the public domain showing the “super-injunction” to be impotent. While some registered outrage others became online detectives digging up the information that the public was being prevented from knowing. This was not slacktivism, this was mass collaboration that confounded the legal status quo. But every hash-tag helped.

Signing up to a Facebook page in protest or support doesn’t take much effort. People have been hoodwinked. As a part of a psychological experiment, Anders Colding-Jørgensen created a Facebook protest group that went from 125 to 27,500 members in two weeks. The cause, “Save the Stork Fountain” was a totally fictitious protest against the demolition of a famous Danish fountain. He wanted to understand if political campaigns like that could work. His conclusion was that they don’t. People sign-up to the headline not the issue.

Some Twitter and Facebook campaigns might be superficial and transient but Slactivism is surely better than apathy. It is us Slackers 40th birthday present to the Internet.