Month: August 2008

Building democracy with a bug tracker

Tim Davies is a busy boy right now. As well as organising the upcoming UKYouthOnline unconference, he is also flinging his ideas into Building Democracy, the new competition to fund exciting ideas to revitalise people’ interest in participating in UK democracy.

Tim’s idea is for keeping ‘Engagement on Track‘:

Drawing on ideas from bug tracking software and open source software projects this project would look to work with a local authority or public institution to help track the progress of ideas and input from the public through the policy process.

Input from consultations and direct from the public would be logged on the system, with every time ideas are discussed, aggregated, discarded or turned into policy proposals and actions logged – so that the people who provided the input in the first place can come back at any time (or get e-mail updates) to let them know how their input has fed into policy making and change making at the local level.

Great idea! As Tim says, bug tracking works just fine on open source software development projects, so why not with local service related issues?

One point I would make is that just using a current open source bug tracker won’t be much use without a lot of work being done on usability, as they can be really complicated things!

Posting links

Since delicious upgraded itself, the automatic posting of stuff I have bookmarked has stragely stopped on DavePress. Not at all sure why.

Anyway, to improve things, I have installed the Postalicious plugin for WordPress, which will handle all this for me, on the recommendation of the social media John Virgo, Jon Bounds. There are quite a lot of options and configuration to be done, so I might have to tweak it a bit over the next few days, but hopefully normal service will now be resumed.

What do people want to know?

I am planning a series of posts on this blog that will go right back to basics on a number of social web topics, partially just to be helpful but also to help develop the documentation for some workshops I am planning.

What I would like to know is what sort of topics people would like covered in terms of social media tools and services. Which services could be of most use in your organisation, but are really hard to explain?

Some ideas I had were for simple stuff like RSS, tagging and social bookmarking.

What would you like to see me write about here?

I’ve Gotta Knol

Knol is a reasonably new service from Google, which has been described as their attempt to kill, or at elast steal some traffic from, Wikipedia. It’s basically a way for people to publish information about what they know in the form of ‘knols’ – Google’s term for a single unit of knowledge. These are tied to your Google account, so you are pretty much responsible for your own content on there and which kind of answers the problem of Wikipedia, where you might have no idea who has produced the content. I’m thinking that it is kind of a mixture of Wikipedia and Squidoo.

I’ve been having a bit of a go myself, adding knols on collaborating with wikis and getting started blogging – effectively just copy and paste jobs from some of the bigger posts on this blog. A few thoughts on my experiences doing this:

  • The URLs for the knols themselves aren’t very friendly, which is a shame
  • The editor is reasonably friendly to use but the Knol site seems to have a problem remembering whether or not I am signed in, which can be a pain
  • I don’t think you can embed flash stuff like video or presentations, which is a pain
  • Some kind soul has given the wiki knol a five star rating! But who? It would be nice to know
  • There has been quite a bit of discussion about where knol entries will appear in Google searches – so far neither of my entries are appearing anywhere near the first page of results, but I am going to monitor this
  • It would be nice for groups of authors to be able to form, and to group entries together as well, making it easy to find entries by authors that know each other, and for knol-writing projects to be kept together

I have set both my knols – and any future ones I write – to be editable by anyone with a Google account, so if you fancy having a go at improving them, or just having a play with Knol, go ahead. I think I am going to continue to cross-post relevant things to there. Whether I will ever go searching on Knol to find something out for myself, I’m not so sure.

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