Here’s the email which has gone out to party members today:

Seasoned conference-goers might have been expecting the Preliminary Agenda for the autumn conference in Bournemouth to have arrived by now. Well, it hasn’t – because conference last year agreed a set of sweeping changes to the timetable for submitting motions for debate. They’re designed to make it easier for local parties and conference reps to submit motions and amendments, and to increase your chance of having a say in party policy.

The old series of three deadlines for submitting motions has been replaced by two, and we’ve scrapped the Preliminary Agenda.

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LDV will be represented tomorrow at ALDC’s Local Solutions 2009 conference in Sheffield. It’ll be a first outing for the exciting new Lib Dem Voice banner.

We’ll be there to help raise the profile of the site, and to ask Lib Dem councillors to write their stories up for us. We’re always on the look out to beef up our local government coverage with stories the Lib Dems at the coalface who are actually running things. Could you write a piece about an exciting Lib Dem …

English local election results will be pouring in throughout the day. Lib Dem Voice will try and keep you abreast of what’s happening across the country, as we did throughout Thursday night with our open thread – many thanks in particular to those commenting who were able to break the good news that the Lib Dems had taken majority control of Bristol City Council amid disastrous results for Labour. Please do keep the news coming in from wherever you live.

As at 9.50 am, the BBC results scoreboard is telling me that the Lib Dems are the only party showing …

At our autumn conference last year, this blog introduced a reluctant world to the concept of hashtags. We coined a cumbersome phrase, “hashtag taxonomy” which has dogged us around the political and technical worlds ever since.

By the end of the conference week, I was regretting the phrase utterly. We’d made a simple technology sound complicated, and in doing so had hidden its value from many people who could benefit.

That bad taste in the mouth was extant up until the start of our Spring conference – and brought home to me once more in the words of our founding editor:

A little jealous of #labour20 – if LibDems attempted similar one-day conf the whole day would be spent giggling about “hashtag taxonomies”

From my dimly remembered German degree, Heideggerian terminology has two terms for tools: Zuhanden and Vorhanden. Vorhanden is when something is strange and new. You can see it, but you’re not sure how it works or what it does. It’s that strange feeling when you are learning to drive of a number of controls in front of you, and no sense of how to use them. But once you have been driving for a while, the car becomes Zuhanden: a tool so familiar that you use it without a second thought. It fits your hand comfortably and has become a part of you, not a separate, strange tool.

And that’s exactly what happened with hashtags and twitter at Spring conference.

Helen Duffett announced before Spring conference began that there would be one hashtag for all future Lib Dem conferences:

#ldconf is the hashtag we’ve adopted for this, and all Liberal Democrat Federal conferences. All tweets with this tag can be viewed together at sites like Twitter Search. It’s handy to bookmark the address and refer back to it to see the story developing, through the contributions of many people.

That last sentence of advice proved truer than I guessed. For when conference got underway, we were staggered at the extent to which people were availing themselves of the service. A brief calculation while I write this suggests that there very nearly 1,000 individual messages.

There has been a big increase in the use of Twitter in recent months, fuelled mostly by newspaper reports of celebrities such as Stephen Fry using the service to keep in touch with their fans. One of the clearest indications of just how many people are joining in is related to Fry: at the start of 2009, he launched a competition to celebrate 50,000 followers. Before the competition concluded just days later, he had over 100,000. Although not on that scale, this week both I and @libdemvoice breached the 200 followers mark.

As a result, there’s a wider community of people to talk to each other on twitter, and this weekend, using the hashtag, that’s precisely what they did. The previously strange technology is now so zuhanden that dozens of people used the hashtag during the conference, generating hundreds and hundreds of short messages. The hashtag even “trended” – that is to say it became so popular that it was amongst the most widely used tags in the world.

Some decent coverage is floating around, most of it surprisingly kind and/or noncommital about Clegg’s hair (the cut is fine, but Glorious Leader, step away from the Brylcreem).

The BBC emphasises the outreach aspect of the leader’s speech under the headline Turn to us in crisis, says Clegg. And despite the foregrounding in that article of his quote “Liberal values must prevail” they still manages to slip that puzzling old canard “What are the Lib Dems for?” into an accompanying piece (don’t tempt us, Auntie, you know what the standard comeback is). More interestingly, they

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A brief window of opportunity arises in between arriving home and quality time spent with the family before a day spent on the budget at Council tomorrow and another conference (Are you going to the LGA Fire Conference in Bristol? See you there!). The window of opportunity is apparently called Larkrise to Candleford.

So, if you were terribly busy during conference, (because, eg, you were at conference) here’s what you missed.

12 second videos
Kudos to Helen Duffett this weekend. She not only trained hundreds of delegates, organised formal and informal meetups of bloggers, tweeted, twitpicked and worked like a dervish …

Now that we are home, and have access to slightly more reliably computers than our trusty laptops using the over-subscribed conference centre network, we can poke around a bit more and find out what was stopping us bringing your the recording of our highly successful fringe meeting last night.

If you were following our twitter feed, you may already have seen a series of short messages giving the outline, but we are now very pleased to bring our the full recording.

As our twitter readers will know, we booked a woefully inadequate room for the fringe: all but alone in our …

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:15 — 88.2MB)

Edit: Link to text of speech

12.20 Standing ovation welcome. Nick begins with a few words about yesterday’s attack in Northern Ireland.

12.21 Talks frankly about the need to update our policies – he doesn have a perfect answer for everything. But our liberal values must win through.

12.22 Over his paternity leave, he has had time to reflect. And he has never been so certain that liberalism is what people want. This is a recurring theme from Clegg this weekend. And he refers again to the “dismal” choice offered in the last recession by
a Thatcherite right and a, well, Thatcherite left.

12.24 …

Morning, campers, and apologies for the hiatus in updating, owing to (a) the nervous illness of your correspondent after a thrillingly successful Lib Dem Voice inaugural fringe meeting last night and (b) the apparent inability of the rest of the team to put up a post saying “this is happening this morning, and here’s how it went.” Tcoh.

Fortunately, in the LDV cupboard with me are George Crozier and Rupert Dewey, who have been, well, doing what we’ve been doing for the last two days on the official website but, er, better, and with fewer made-up words. Heavens, we might …

If the exclusive Voice audio version of Howard Dean’s speech is not pressing enough of your buttons already, the party has now made a full, professional video of the speech here

We’re doing our education papers in timewarped reverse this weekend, opening with the Adult, Further and Higher Education papers this morning, continuing with age 5-19 Education this afternoon and finishing with under-5s childcare tomorrow.

This paper has had a record number of amendments offered – 16, of which four have gone forward, three of which concern faith schools. The first calls for one critical provision to be removed from the policy paper, the provision which prevents the establishment of new schools which select on faith. Jonathan Davies speaking in support of the motion, stresses that he does not impose his faith …

The Beeb has already trailed this speech, and Vince is welcomed to the stand with an even longer opening ovation than Howard got.

14.44 He starts on, let us say, a dark note. The economic situation is dire, we are going to have nothing but bad news for some time. There has never been a more important time for politicians to be honest. But what do we have? A pantomime between Labour and the Tories.

14.47 He identfies the Tories’ motivation: for them, the worse the recession is the better. That way they can strengthen their own anyone-but-Labour vote and they …

The party has excellent comprehensive coverage on a vote-by-vote basis on the main party website.

You can find it here.

There is a rather more irreverent live coverage coming from a small army of party twitterers using the hashtag #ldconf. They are telling us about fringes as they happen. They are giving key phrases from set piece speeches. And they are reviewing restaurants almost chew by chew.

You can read these comments from individuals by following this link.

We are very pleased to bring you in haste a rather bootleg version of Howard Dean’s speech to Lib Dem conference in full, recorded by sitting in the audience with a tape recorder.

As these things often go, the effect of recording it in this way means sometimes the audience members are easier to pick out of the recording than the principle speaker. And I’m bringing this recording to you so quickly that I have not been able to listen all the way through yet.

Twitter came alive during the speech, with many people picking out key phrases and retweeting them. …

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:45 — 39.5MB)

Ed Davey is currently introducing Howard Dean and doing his level best to hitch the Lib Dems to the Obama wagon. You have to feel sympathy for the man. I was lucky enough to be one of the bloggers interviewing him this morning (full write up coming soon), and we did our best to prod the same sort of indiscretion out of him. As a broadly left-wing sympathiser in terms of British politics, could he detect differences between us and Labour? No dice.

And indeed Howard Dean begins with a disclaimer “to put off the international incident” by saying that …

Breaking news! The Lib Dem Voice cupboard has a WINDOW! Yes, it’s a slightly unnerving black smoked glass internal window which reflects us as well as revealing the outside world, but it’s a window!

I missed Simon Hughes’ speech this morning, which is a shame as I am extremely hopeful about his capacity to advance the environmental agenda – we’ll bring you that video as soon as we’ve established that it exists.

Listening now to the motion on the Investing in Talent, Building the Economy paper (Adult, Further and Higher Education policy paper).

I’ve missed the movement from Stephen Williams, and come …

Continuing our exciting use of new technology, Helen Duffett brings Howard Dean to the 12seconds.tv platform

Video: Governor Howard Dean talks to @libdemvoice. #ldconf on 12seconds.tv

It’s nice to know he’s enjoying his time here. I’ve heard many positive reports from his private meetings with party staff, and we’re waiting with bated breath for the reports of his meeting with bloggers.

And of course in just over 30 minutes, he’ll be speaking from the main platform. I’m planning to be sitting in the auditorium with my mic so that we can podcast …